Brian McIntyre could be excused for having a nice, ironic hoot during the start of the National Basketball Association finals at Chicago Stadium last week.
On a 1974 fall evening, McIntyre, a Northwest Side native, was a Loyola University grad pinched by cops outside a Blackhawks game and hauled to the Wood Street District station. His transgression: trying to sell his own four- page, 25-cent program with updated data on the team and its opponent.
Back then, McIntyre worked at a small publishing house. His academic record was less than imposing, but this sports fan who dreamed of being a columnist (the late Jack Griffin was a hero) had a modest idea with promise.
Spectators at Blackhawks and Bulls games could buy only the official, $1 game program, which was printed well in advance and rather dated. McIntyre took $400 that constituted much of his savings and produced 5,000 copies of a rival, and newsier, one to be offered fans as they entered that evening.
He`d gotten a City of Chicago peddler`s license, but the cops apparently sensed that the Wirtz clan, who owned the Stadium and the Blackhawks, might be like many successful capitalists: chagrined if a free market moved in on their domain.
In that the cops really had no good reason to nab him, McIntyre was quickly released but didn`t get back to the Stadium until moments before game time, meaning that most fans were inside and he had missed his chance. The 5,000 copies were useless.
”I was despondent and headed to O`Rourke`s (a North Avenue tavern),” he recalled Thursday.
But he persisted and, with help of a mention in the Tribune, made a success. He would sell as many as 4,000 copies before Blackhawks games and Bulls games, when he added the latter four years later. Even with a partner and a few colleagues to share in revenue, he came to earn more from the program than from his day job.
Jon Kovler, then the Bulls boss, on Friday recalled McIntyre`s ”doing a hell of a job with the program, better stuff than the local papers. A sharp guy.” In a nifty act of co-optation, Kovler hired McIntyre as the Bulls`
chief publicist in 1978.
The job meant that the rival program was dead, as was that nice chunk of extra income. Still, McIntyre had a new life, which took a bigger turn in 1981 when he split to New York as publicist for the NBA itself.
The association, which then had 30 full-time employees, took off in popularity during the decade and now has 400 employees. McIntyre, 43, is vice president for public relations, overseeing a 13-person staff and traveling as many as 150 days a year.
Reporters and editors give strong marks for efficiency and candor to the native of the Sauganash neighborhood, whose dad was an ad salesman for Hearst Corp. Although he lives with his wife and two children in a New York suburb, McIntyre`s a Chicago guy, speaking fondly of playing 16-inch softball against Mike Royko; looking around for a copy of the Reader; and blending in with non- yuppie habitues of the Billy Goat Tavern for a late lunch.
During the regular season, perhaps 15 journalists cover a home Bulls game. For the finals against Portland, there are more than 800 credentialed press people, including those from 11 foreign lands.
That, says McIntyre, not only means deciding who sits inside the arena but strict scheduling of team practices, player interviews and live TV reports by local stations. For example, local TV can report from the arena area up to 30 minutes before game time but can`t go back live until the game is over.
The real challenge involves seating logistics.
Normally, 48 seats are allocated to the press at one end of the Stadium on floor level, 19 behind the scorer`s table, and 29 in the upstairs press box. But there were 550 media personnel inside the building last week, with 300 in arena seats and the rest staring at TV in the basement.
McIntyre, aide Terry Lyons, and Bulls publicist Tim Hallam sought to accommodate the press but avoided using permanent seats that paying spectators could fill. They did the job mostly with portable seats, but 60 permanent ones were given to newsies.
The ”A” seating list is topped by ”beat” writers, ”the guys who do the grunt work and trudge through the snow” during the season, says McIntyre, and by NBC, which pays big bucks for the broadcast rights and had 150 people inside and outside the arena.
Thus, last week`s front-row lineup on the main floor`s east side was:
Chicago Tribune (three seats), Sun-Times (three), Daily Herald (two), Southtown Economist (two), The Associated Press (two), UPI (one), Vancouver Columbian (one; it covers the Trail Blazers), Sports Illustrated (two), Portland Oregonian (three), USA Today (two), New York Times (three) and Washington Post (two).
Upstairs and under the organ on the east side were Spanish, French, Italian and Australian sports papers. Under the west end`s hockey press box were the Chicago Defender, WSCR-AM (a new Chicago all-sports radio station), Todo Basket (Uruguay) and Gekkan Basket (Japan). A skybox in nosebleed territory included the Reader, the Des Moines Register and Chicago`s ”smooth jazz” WNUA-FM 95.5.
McIntyre plots like a good dinner host. Some reporters, perhaps from the same city or even the same paper, aren`t chums, so they`re seated apart. He always made sure to stick an elderly NBA reporter for a very famous paper on an aisle seat because so many colleagues couldn`t stand the guy.
A final, woefully obvious question beckoned: What happens if the White House wants two good ones for George and Barbara?
”I`d tell them Ross Perot`s already got them,” said McIntyre.
This maestro of media quickly amended the comment to acknowledge that, yes, somehow, two good ones would be found.
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The 3,000-member National Writers Union stages a ”National Writers Day” Tuesday to underscore problems faced by members. In Chicago, there will be leafletting at the Harold Washington Library Center, the Daley Center and bookstores.
The union is affiliated with the United Auto Workers, and the majority of the 120 Chicago members are free-lancers, some of whom benefited from their local`s collection in the last year of $16,000 overdue from publications, including the socialist In These Times.
Organizing free-lancers is hard and, concedes Chicago local head Judith Cooper, many of the generally self-employed lot who`ve joined recently were lured by group health insurance that came with UAW affiliation.
Some members were paying $4,000 to $5,000 a year for single-person coverage; one woman with a past medical complication was paying $9,000. The UAW group plan costs around $1,400.
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Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett on Thursday did as he has before, offering a whole column heralding an NAACP program called ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics). It aims to foster academic excellence among black high school students nationwide.
He urged readers to get tickets for an ACT-SO Chicago awards ceremony the next evening, giving all the requisite details.
As usual, the hard-edged newsman forgot to mention that he`s the ACT-SO national chairman.
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Wednesday brought another sign of these topsy-turvy, helter-skelter, synergistic times when executives hunger for new marketing and promotional opportunities.
After NBC-owned WMAQ-Ch. 5`s broadcast of Wednesday`s Bulls game, its newscast included an ad for ESPN, the cable sports channel. Not long ago, network stations, even at companies with cable interests (NBC owns CNBC and part of SportsChannel), would have stayed way clear of selling time to a competitor.
These days, says WMAQ chief Pat Wallace, ”We`d be putting our heads in the sand if we didn`t realize there are other media.”
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The Los Angeles Times last week concluded that 45 people died in riot-related incidents, not 60 as widely assumed.
The other 15 were victims of the vagaries of urban America unrelated to the riots, such as gang killings, smoking in bed and robberies.
The toll included a Cuban transient. He was beaten to death by several homeless people after allegedly stealing somewhere between $2 and $5 worth of cans and bottles from a recycling center.
Ain`t city life grand?
