By Ben Joravsky
It’s sort of hard to picture the Blue Line unless you’ve read it. Think of it as a combination of the Sporting News and Spy–a 16-page tabloid filled with statistics and sports gossip as well as wickedly crude portraits of powerful politicians, team owners, and stars.
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Their favorite target is Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz, routinely depicted as an oafish, Scotch-abusing, mean-spirited robber baron who “fucks over fans and players alike, laughing all the way to the bank, which he also owns.” In one issue they ran a mock obituary headlined “Wirtz Not Dead Yet: A City Mourns.” In another they made up a letter from Wirtz that reads “Rest assured, dear fans, that I go to sleep each night with a big, self-satisfied grin on my unnaturally-tanned face, secure in the knowledge that pathetic swine like you will keep coming back to the United Center even if I were to put huge piles of shit on the ice and charge you $50 to use the god-damned toilets, which I plan to do next year.”
Weinberg, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school, has different motivations, some of which are personal. He’s been arrested selling programs twice by off-duty law-enforcement officials moonlighting as United Center security guards. In each case he was carted off to jail. As Weinberg sees it, Wirtz was trying to drive him out of business. “It’s not enough that he controls parking, concessions, and tickets, but he apparently wants to control our little publication by running us out of business,” he says. (A Blackhawks publicist refused to discuss the Blue Line, saying only “We have no opinion of the Blue Line. We have no comment whatsoever.”)
A satirical publication about basketball must expect to have to deal with matters of race, a subject that’s rarely discussed in hockey since almost all of the players and fans are white. But the Blue Line did manage to brush on a few touchy subjects. “We did a piece on the great Jewish hockey players of all time,” says Weinberg. “We listed four players. We got a letter from a Jewish organization saying we were promoting racial stereotypes.” They also ran a mock ad for the NBA and the NHL. It showed a picture of a white tennis shoe and a black puck captioned “The NBA: where only the shoes are white. The NHL: where only the puck is black.”
So far the Bulls have made no comment about the Foul Line (team spokesman Tim Hallam didn’t return a call on the subject). But if recent history is any judge, the publishers can expect a fight that may force Weinberg to resort to his legal skills.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Randy Tunnell.
