Fourteen-year-old Kevin Mitchell has great respect for Chicago Bulls forward Scottie Pippen, but not as much as he has for his 8th-grade teacher, Judith Kandalec.
”Mrs. Kandalec, she cares about our future. Scottie Pippen doesn`t even know us,” Kevin said Monday.
”He doesn`t even know we`re alive,” added 13-year-old Ahmar Willis, Kevin`s classmate at Brown Elementary School, down the street from Chicago Stadium, the home of the Bulls.
That dowdy West Side stadium and its tumbledown neighborhood are the mecca this week of high rollers, movie stars and business-suited fans who have traveled from around the country to see the Bulls in their first-ever appearance in the National Basketball Association Finals.
For those fans, the series promises an entertaining distraction of basketball at its best. But for the residents of the poverty-stricken West Side, many of whom could not afford a ticket to a Bulls game, there is a complexity of feeling about their home team-their neighborhood team-that transcends entertainment and sport.
To be sure, West Siders have a strong identification with their world-famous neighbors.
”Whatever they do, we feel part of it. This is our team,” said Nancy Jefferson, a longtime community activist. ”The mere fact that they`re playing in the championship-that very fact-means the West Side has won a victory because we`ve had so few victories in 25 years.”
Yet the success of the Bulls this season is in stark contrast to conditions for neighbors of the Stadium, which has stood on West Madison Street for 62 years. There is a gap between the millionaire players and the people in the homes of the West Side-struggling to get by on poverty-level wages or welfare-that cannot be filled by a championship victory over the Los Angeles Lakers.
Like the people of the West Side, most of the Bulls players are African-American. But the players drive cars that cost more than the combined annual incomes of several West Side families. The Bulls may be neighbors, but they are neighbors that most West Siders know only through television and radio broadcasts.
”I`d like to go, but I can`t afford the ticket,” said 57-year-old Elois Crum.
”This is a depressed community,” Jefferson said. ”People have got to buy bread.”
There is much on the West Side about which to be depressed. The riots of the 1960s destroyed many local businesses and drove many others away from the once vibrant commercial strip of Madison Street. Left behind were vacant lots, perfect for turning into the parking lots that now ring the Stadium.
The lots provide a small economic benefit, creating small-change jobs for the teens and adults who direct the parking of visitors` cars. But gone are the stores where local people could shop and where they could find jobs promising meatier paychecks.
Today, more than half of the people on the West Side are on welfare. The unemployment rate has been at least twice that of the city, and the infant mortality rate has been as much as 43 percent higher than the citywide average.
One block north of the Stadium, about 3,000 people live in the Henry Horner Homes public housing development, which is so run-down that nearly half of the apartments are vacant. Last week, residents filed suit against the Chicago Housing Authority, charging the agency with failing to live up to its landlord obligations.
Another measure of the gap between the Bulls and the West Side is the attitude that some of the students in Kandalec`s class at Brown have toward Bulls superstar Michael Jordan, one of the best players ever to take the court and the darling of sportswriters and ad copywriters.
They don`t especially like him.
”He`s a showoff,” said Kevin, a stocky football player for Brown.
”He`s a good player, but he`s getting too much attention.”
If the 8th graders don`t see themselves as having much in common with the hugely talented Jordan, it is a measure of the distance they see between their lives and his. They said they can relate to the more workmanlike Pippen, who, like the teenagers themselves, has bad days and struggles mightily to succeed. Ahmar, president of Brown`s student council, equated his school and his neighborhood with Pippen. Jordan, who makes playing basketball and making money look easy, Ahmar said, was like the suburbs.
”A lot of my friends,” he said, ”live in the suburbs, and they say they get a lot of computers and stuff, and we have only one computer room in our school.”
Also, the 8th graders don`t appear to have a great emotional investment in whether the Bulls win the championship. ”It`s not like anybody dying,”
asserted Nakita Newsome, 15. ”The Bulls, they get paid, so we shouldn`t cry if they lose.”
”If they don`t win, they are still our champions,” said 33-year-old Felix Freeman.
Jefferson, founder of the Midwest Community Council and a West Side organizer for 47 years, said the Bulls already have been strong models of character, integrity and success for the children of the West Side. ”I tell them, `See when you do good, this is what happens,` ” Jefferson said.
But she also hopes to use the Bulls` success as a vehicle for improving the West Side. ”We`re going to turn this community around-with the Bulls. We`re going to use their style,” she said.
Jefferson and other community leaders have been negotiating with Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Bulls, and William Wirtz, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, to get them to invest in the community. Jefferson said she wants the partners to help rehabilitate and reconfigure the Horner Homes. Already, Reinsdorf and Wirtz have agreed to concessions to the immediate neighbors as part of the development of a proposed $160 million arena just south of the Stadium. Under an unusual contract, the Reinsdorf-Wirtz partnership will provide replacement housing for those displaced by the construction as well as 75 other new homes for low- and moderate-income families in the community.
Keith Jackson, founder of the Horner Association of Men, lives across the street from Horner and is in line to get replacement housing under the Reinsdorf-Wirtz agreement.
”We made them do the right thing,” he said.
Jackson said the neighborhood has more power than outsiders think, particularly in connection with such high-visibility projects as the new arena. ”We`re principals,” said Jackson, who once played trombone in Duke Ellington`s orchestra. ”This is our territory, our turf.”
When the Bulls-Lakers series is over, the high-rolling fans have moved off to other entertainments and the players have driven away in their fancy cars, the West Side will remain.
It is a territory with a scarred history and an often disheartening present. But it is also a territory of dreams, fed by the success of a group of dream athletes.
”Hope is what we need,” Jackson said. ”Hope is what we want to get from this thing.”
