The words \u201cthe pride and joy of Illinois\u201d are right there \u2014 or \u201cdere,\u201d if you will \u2014 in the official fight song. I was born in Chicago and raised at the corner of Ashland and Wellington, and so I could not help but balk when the Chicago Bears announced an intention to move across the state line to Hammond, Indiana, in early June.\n<\/p>\n
And yet.<\/p>\n
This summer, as I\u2019ve made countless drives between the Land of Lincoln and my adoptive home in the Hoosier State, I\u2019ve had time to reconsider my Illinois chauvinist\u2019s response to the prospect of the Bears building a new stadium in Hammond.<\/p>\n
With each of those drives past the Whiting oil refinery, Wolf Lake and the Gary steel mill, what\u2019s struck me more and more is this: You can actually feel the the spirit of Chicago, the city that works, a whole lot more vividly in Hammond (and northwest Indiana) than the leafy suburbia of Arlington Heights. Heck, Hammond probably expresses the spirit of Chicago more faithfully than much of Chicago these days. (Think Wrigleyville, post-Nashville-ification.)<\/p>\n
If Bruce Springsteen had been born in Chicagoland, it surely would\u2019ve been the steel mills and oil refineries of Gary and Hammond that provided the tableaux for his working-man\u2019s rhapsodies and lunch-pail poetry. (Maybe, if the Bears were to host a Super Bowl in Hammond, Springsteen could play the halftime show.)<\/p>\n
When you look out over those mills and refineries \u2014 and when you smell them, too \u2014 you can\u2019t help but feel the ghosts of the Union Stock Yards, of the Pullman railcar factory, of South Works, of the men and women who made Chicago when it was at its Chicago-est. Sorry, Arlington Heights, but you just don\u2019t get that when you walk the grounds of the old Arlington Park \u2014 which might as well have been teleported in from Kentucky\u2019s genteel bluegrass country. And \u201cgenteel\u201d is simply not what we do here in Chicago. It\u2019s not who we are.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not just the aesthetics that make Hammond and the northwest corner of the Hoosier State so quintessentially Chicago. It\u2019s the people and the culture, too.<\/p>\n
Ann Marie Lipinski, an august former Tribune editor, once told me that perhaps the purest encapsulation of coastal cities\u2019 misunderstanding of Chicago was in how their media covered Dennis Rodman\u2019s role in the Bulls\u2019 second three-peat. The sports-and-culture pundits of Los Angeles and New York marveled with shock and puzzlement at how such a flamboyant character could be so embraced by the hardscrabble, blue-collar, industrial Midwestern fanbase of the Bulls. But they were totally missing the point, Lipinski said.<\/p>\n
The blue-collar aesthetic of our city, after all, is really just incidental to our blue-collar ethic. If you really know the spirit of Chicago and its people, you know there\u2019s actually nothing shocking about our embracing a player who had green hair, wore dresses and dated Madonna. What we loved about Rodman, what made him one of us, was that he worked his tail off to pull down rebounds with the precision of a veteran hog butcher, who protected star Michael Jordan from Rodman\u2019s former Pistons teammates with the ferociousness of a steelworker hammering together the beams of a LaSalle Street skyscraper.<\/p>\n
And he got the job done. Rodman\u2019s flashy aesthetics were entirely orthogonal to that; they simply didn\u2019t matter to us Chicagoans, one way or the other. (See also, Caleb Williams\u2019s fingernails versus his gutsy delivery of bulletlike throws to Rome Odunze while standing in the face of Packers linebackers.)\n<\/p>\n
Today, in a time of fever-pitched cultural polarization, that spirit is fraying \u2014 if not already vanished altogether \u2014 across much of our country. But I still see it among the Hoosiers I now call neighbors in northern Indiana. I see it in my neighborhood diner in South Bend, in the deep mutual respect between the camo- and NASCAR-gear-clad patrons (who sometimes wear MAGA hats) and the owner who\u2019s decorated her diner walls with Pride banners. Because she cooks a damn fine corned beef hash. They\u2019ve all got a job to do, and they all take pride in doing it well. They may be Hoosiers, but as a native son of Chicago, I can\u2019t help but think that they might have something to teach us about the highest values of our own city and state, the land of a president who preached \u201cmalice toward none and charity for all.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
That is to say, I can\u2019t help but think that some of the best of true Chicago actually lies on the far side of the red midcentury neon lights of the Skyway, in the steel mills and oil refineries and diner booths of northwest Indiana, in the Hoosiers who inhabit them.<\/p>\n
I look forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with those Hoosiers to cheer on the pride and joy of Illinois, in the shadow of the Indiana steel mills that built Chicago.<\/p>\n
Will Kamin is an associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. He was born and raised in Chicago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The words \u201cthe pride and joy of Illinois\u201d are right there \u2014 or \u201cdere,\u201d if you will \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1004056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2070],"tags":[374,692,391,2493,131508,7,92966,100087,932,6],"class_list":["post-1004055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago-bears","tag-bears","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-bears","tag-chicagobears","tag-dennis-rodman","tag-football","tag-hammond","tag-hoosier-state","tag-indiana","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117291594809877281","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1004056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}