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Bullish on Image: Basketball and the Promotion of Postindustrial Chicago
In the middle of the 1990s, journalists started marveling at a curious phenomenon outside the United Center, the Bulls’ recently opened, state-of-the-art arena. According to their reports, visitors from across the globe were gathering around the statue of Michael Jordan erected outside the new facility. Writing in 1995, Richard Roeper of the Sun-Times noted that “tourists from as far away as Thailand . . . posed for pictures by the . . . icon, as fans tossed coins . . . near the base.” A couple of years later, the Tribune’s John Husar described a Mexican sightseer taking photos in front of the statue. The visitor told Husar that he wanted “a memento, something to show our son or grandchildren we were here.” By decade’s end, the statue was the terminus of a pilgrimage taken by thousands of domestic and international tourists alike.1
The popularity of the statue corroborated the claim made by the local, national, and international presses that Jordan and the Bulls had rehabilitated Chicago’s reputation. Indeed, it was a reputation in need of repair. When the Bulls started winning NBA titles in the early 1990s, the city was reeling from decades of economic decline and was dogged by a long history of vice, corruption, and segregation. Journalists and those they interviewed were nearly unanimous in the belief that the team, and especially Jordan, supplanted images of the Second City as the seamy haunt of world-famous criminals. In 1997, R. C. Longworth of the Chicago Tribune asserted that “the city’s symbol is no longer a syphilitic [Al Capone] and his henchmen but a stately athlete . . . and his talented teammates.” Capone’s syphilis had apparently become a fixation at the Tribune. The following year, the paper’s John Kass posited that Jordan “forced cabdrivers in almost every European country to stop mentioning the mass murderer and syphilitic psychopath Al Capone in their first reference to Chicago.”2
The Bulls’ alleged impact on Chicago’s standing in the eyes of outsiders was well timed, arriving amid intensifying competition between cities for investment—a process prompted by slowed growth and receding federal aid to municipalities. Before the Jordan era, Chicago stood poorly positioned to compete; by the 1980s deindustrialization, political corruption, and racial conflict had convinced many investors to look elsewhere. Under the leadership of Richard M. Daley, who became mayor in 1989, Chicago politicians and business leaders launched a decades-long collaboration to develop distinctive entertainment amenities in and around downtown. In theory, these amenities would repair the city’s global image and entice new visitors, residents, and employers. Working closely with the news media and local tourism industry, the Daley administration aggressively promoted the city as global tourist destination by publicizing assets like the redesigned Navy Pier and Millennium Park as well as the Taste of Chicago festival.3 At first, the Bulls did not figure prominently in these promotional efforts. But as the franchise’s dominance and global renown grew during the 1990s, the public and private sectors in Chicago incorporated the team more and more into their efforts to project a diverse, wholesome, and winning image of the city. By the new millennium, local newspapers, business associations, and government agencies had gone out of their way to stamp Chicago with the imprimatur of Jordan and his teammates.
Using the image of the Bulls to promote Chicago as a recreational paradise made sense. Jordan’s talent and the team’s unparalleled success during the 1990s offered a truly unique attraction for outsiders contemplating where to visit next. This proved an asset for local elites obsessed with ensuring that Chicago competed effectively in the mad dash for new spending and investment among cities that had been gutted by deindustrialization. While the team’s local economic impact eluded precise measurement, journalists offered numerous examples of the team changing peoples’ minds about the city and attracting tourists. One of the most stunning stories involved Japanese travelers who paid several thousands of dollars each for a “Michael Jordan Tour” of Chicago. In 1996, tour director Patrick Marume told USA Today’s Jerry Bonkowski that participants typically spent $300 each on Jordan souvenirs while in the city.4
Such examples indicate that it was Jordan’s star power and the sustained success of the Bulls on the court, rather than massive public subsidies for a new arena, that provided the appeal. In their quest for taxpayer-funded stadiums, team owners and their political allies often argued that a new facility, in and of itself, would accelerate growth by promoting increased tourism. The history of the Bulls during the late 1980s and 1990s shows that in terms of any sort of positive economic impact at the local level, team quality—a variable out of the control of policy makers—played a much more important role than the mere existence of a new venue.
This is not to say that the Bulls saved Chicago from economic ruin. Any direct impact the team had on local tourism and entertainment spending proved miniscule compared to the city’s overall economy. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the larger effort to reengineer Chicago as a new capital of leisure—an effort in which the promotion of the Bulls by local elites played a supporting role—helped return the city to a path of robust growth. This growth, however, was distributed very unevenly. During the 1990s, Chicago’s leadership funneled the overwhelming majority of new public and private investment into blocks in and around downtown, otherwise known as the Loop, which they desperately wanted to resurrect as the nerve center of an expanded entertainment infrastructure. Indeed, by 2000, the Loop had been reborn.
This rebirth did wonders for the profits of local real estate moguls, tourist industry executives, and business service firms active in the Loop, not to mention the lifestyles of urban professionals who coveted trendy downtown hangouts; but the same could not be said for Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods, especially the predominantly African American and Latino ones on the city’s South and West Sides. The investment poured into downtown rarely spilled over into these other areas, and the people who resided there found themselves largely excluded from the redevelopment overseen by Mayor Daley. At the start of the new millennium, economic inequality, racist policing, and segregated, underfunded schools remained deeply entrenched in Chicago. They remain so today.5 To be clear, this chapter is not about blaming the Chicago Bulls franchise for these problems. As subsequent chapters show, decisions by the team’s executives exacerbated many of those problems, but here the focus is on how politicians, the press, and other businesses in Chicago used the Bulls’ cachet to help implement a local version of exclusionary capitalism in the New Gilded Age.
Chicago’s elites justified their singular focus on investing in neighborhoods in and around the Loop by painting it as the only realistic option available to them. Other cities were aggressively marketing revamped downtowns in a bid for new tourist spending and business investment. The Second City had to compete by responding in kind, so the story goes.6 This argument, however, overlooks how the administration of Harold Washington, the mayor of Chicago from 1983 to 1987 and the first African American to hold the office, offered a real alternative to the one-sided, Loop-centric model of growth. Through creative budgeting, a relatively confrontational stance toward big business, and a genuine effort to expand democratic participation in local government, Washington and his allies challenged local elites by prioritizing balanced development across the city. Not all of Washington’s agenda came to fruition before his sudden death in 1987, but enough of it did to suggest that Richard M. Daley’s obsession with an entertainment and leisure renaissance in and around the Loop was driven more by the politics of class than by the politics of necessity.7
In this context, the press and other local elites highlighted the Bulls as a much-needed source of local “community.” As the Tribune’s Bob Greene put it in 1996, “People who may believe they have nothing in common with other people of different ethnic, racial, geographic or age-defined groups find community via the Bulls.”8 The decision by local newspapers and other media to argue aggressively that the team united disparate parts of a socially fractured city represented an attempt to resolve the tension between persistent inequality and local elites’ claims that the city had put its checkered past behind it. More than diverting attention from the impact of exclusionary capitalism in Chicago, these efforts supplanted definitions of community rooted in people working together for basic economic and social well-being with superficial definitions based on shared interest in a sports team.
Before the Stampede: Politics, Economics, and Reputation in Pre-Championship Chicago
By 1990, many people inside and outside Chicago viewed the city as a segregated dystopia with few prospects for growth. Decades of deindustrialization, paired with official economic development policy that favored certain areas of the city while ignoring others, made it difficult to argue otherwise. Like many other Rust Belt cities, Chicago lost staggering numbers of manufacturing jobs after World War II to nearby suburbs, Southern states, and foreign countries. Between 1950 and 1990, Chicago’s population plummeted by more than 837,000, and the number of residents working in manufacturing plunged by about 62 percent (table 1.1).
TABLE 1.1. Selected Employment and Population Statistics, City of Chicago, 1950–1990
| Total population | Employed persons | Employed in manufacturing (%) | Unemployed (%) |
| 1950 | 3,620,962 | 1,614,867 | 36.7 | n/a |
| 1960 | 3,550,404 | 1,501,731 | 33.5 | 5.2 |
| 1970 | 3,... |
