On September 26 Bill Wirtz–beer baron, Blackhawks owner, and real estate magnate–died of cancer, and the papers were filled with glowing tributes from his fellow millionaires and big shots. “He was a man of great principle and he could be firm in wanting you to live up to those principles,” Bulls owner and United Center co-owner Jerry Reinsdorf told the Tribune. “Illinois has lost a true sports and business icon,” said Governor Rod Blagojevich. “The legacy of Bill Wirtz will live on through the numerous businesses he built,” said former governor Jim Thompson. “He comes from a great family,” said Mayor Daley.
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What few mentioned was Wirtz’s considerable influence on the public sphere. For better or worse, Wirtz was one of the great plutocrats of his time, a master at using influence to curry favor with state and city leaders in order to expand and protect the fortune he inherited from his father, Arthur Wirtz.
Closer to home, he teamed up with Reinsdorf to drive a few dozen peanut vendors out of business. Back in the days of the Wirtz-family-owned Chicago Stadium, a group of west-siders, most of them black, used to stand outside hawking peanuts to people streaming in to watch the Bulls or Blackhawks. In 1994, when Wirtz and Reinsdorf opened the United Center on the site of the old stadium, they issued a new rule: no peanuts in the arena. If the guards saw you carrying a bag they confiscated it.
Weinberg himself wasn’t bullied so easily. In 2001, after he was arrested for violating the ban by standing outside the arena selling copies of his self-published biography, Career Misconduct: The Story of Bill Wirtz’ Greed, Corruption and the Betrayal of Blackhawks’ Fans, he filed a suit in federal court charging that the ordinance violated his First Amendment rights. The city won the first round, but in 2003 an appellate court overturned the decision. Insisting the ban was a “valuable tool” in policing sidewalk peddlers and rounding up supporting briefs from the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB, the city’s lawyers took the argument all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. All told, the city spent three years and several hundred thousand dollars on the suit, and it wound up having to pay Weinberg an additional $15,000 in damages and $360,000 in attorney fees.
I was there to watch two local powerhouses slug it out, but also to see the new football field the city and the Bears, who helped pay for it, have been bragging about. The new turf did look impressive. But the rest of the stadium is still a rickety dump. Worse, somehow or other no one’s figured out yet how drive an ambulance into it. That turned out to be a big deal when D.J. Purnell, Young’s sensational junior quarterback, took a hard hit in overtime. He lay on the field for about 20 minutes with a neck injury before paramedics strode through a side entrance and carted him off on a gurney. In the suburbs, almost every high school football team has an ambulance crew on the field from the start. (Purnell is OK.)
