T Dog’s Think Tank: No class fans ruin special night at United Center

Booing of Bulls GM Jerry Krause is yet another embarrassment to our city

What happened Friday night at the United Center during the Ring Of Honor ceremony honoring the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls season was as vile as anything I have seen in the nearly 52 years I’ve lived in Chicago.

And I’ve been through the racially-tinged Council Wars when our city was nicknamed “Beirut On The Lake”.

And instead of updating you on what’s been going on in the media world since I’ve been away, I’m sitting here writing yet another goddamn piece on another embarrassing moment for our city, of which there’s been many since I started this blog.

To quickly recap, the Bulls decided to honor the championship team at the United Center Friday night at halftime of the game against the Warriors, in the new “Ring Of Honor”, a hastily-arranged event paying homage to the team’s greats. The ceremony was rushed, as they didn’t even mention the names of the players. But they did mention the architect of the team’s six championships, the late GM Jerry Krause, who died in 2017.

Fans weren’t appreciative, booing Krause’s name as his name came up on the video board. What’s worse, they inadvertently wound up booing his widow Thelma as well, bringing her to tears – and that was truly the despicable part. This came as three key figures of the team were no-shows – Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen (who both are allegedly beefing with one another), and Dennis Rodman, who couldn’t make it due to bad weather.

The reaction on social media and elsewhere was swift and harsh. On the NBC Sports Chicago telecast, Bulls analyst Stacey King lashed out at fans who booed, saying Chicagoans aren’t like the fanbases of New York and Philadelphia, known for such behavior. Most local sports media figures also criticized the booing, from ESPN 1000’s David Kaplan to WGN-TV’s Jarrett Payton (via X/Twitter.)

Many are pointing the finger at the ten-part ESPN documentary The Last Dance, which did not portray Krause (or Pippen) in the best light. Jordan had complete creative control of the project – a huge mistake as the miniseries was completely slanted with his point of view given he wasn’t a fan of Krause. In 2020, I named The Last Dance the best program of the year pretty much by default thanks to slim pickings amid the pandemic. But now I view that choice with regret, as the fallout from the documentary fractured relationships and it points out how the power of television – which brought to light the allegations against R. Kelly and brought him to justice, can also be destructive.

The influence the documentary had should also bring up another elephant in the room – the World Wide Leader. Just before the Ring of Honor ceremony took place, reports surfaced that the NFL was looking to take a financial interest in ESPN – meaning the Disney-owned cable network could take control of the NFL Network and NFL RedZone in the future.

This would be the latest coup for Bristol, who decided to go all-in on its garbage daytime lineup, featuring loud East Coast personalities who pretend life doesn’t exist west of Pittsburgh while adding whiny-pitched douche Pat McAfee to the lineup, bringing on Aaron Rodgers every week to spew conspiracy theories. As we all know, this business, and ESPN in particular hasn’t evolved since 1994 as producers and hosts still think these shock-jock antics work as media consolidation continues unabated (McAfee’s recent feud with an ESPN executive seems straight out of Howard Stern’s playbook.) Maybe McAfee will invite Mancow Muller on his show next week for a farting contest – after all, Mancow practically pioneered poor taste in Chicago well before Bulls fans did Friday night.

As for Stacey King’s comments about New York, Philadelphia, and other East Coast cities, it’s funny how we Chicagoans seem to take them to task for everything wrong in society, while we can barely muster up enough hatred for even worse places like Florida and Texas, whose Governor continue to send migrants into our city with buses dumping them wherever to find their way into Chicago in the most inhumane way possible.

As for the latest embarrassing moment for our city, I talked enough about that over the years here, from our inane Olympic bid to Jussie Smollett and from the Blackhawks scandal to people running amok downtown. Of course, the people on X – where they never say anything nice about Chicago as the platform is now owned by a person who loves cruelty, use their hatred of our city to expose their racial prejudices saying Thelma’s night would get worse if she gets carjacked by a bunch of Black guys in the United Center parking lot. As for the Bulls and the rest of our “pro” sports teams, I’ll only say they’re being run just as efficiently as Mayor Brandon Johnson is running City Hall. Take that for what you will. 

But what bugs me is this incident comes a month after my father passed away, and a day after me and the rest of my family held funeral services for him. I’m still grieving over the loss of my Dad, and wouldn’t want anyone to go through what Thelma Krause did Friday night, no matter how you felt about her late husband. It angers the complete fuck out of me, and anyone who defended this action isn’t human – they’re ghouls and no better than Donald Trump. This is the latest stunning, ugly aspect that’s emerged about Chicago in the last few years. What’s happened to our city?

Way back in 2007, I wrote an article titled “Grow Up Chicago”. Seventeen years later, our city hasn’t even come close. Maybe Chicago deserves the horrible reputation it earned over the years to bring up an old talking point, our city is nothing more than a glorified freak show. What happened Friday night cemented that fact.