Back In the Game

By Rich King and Lindsay Eanet

Rich King’s My Maggie was released a few years ago to widespread acclaim. Back in the Game is his follow up to that warmly received debut book.
It’s the story of a man’s fight to find a new life after the loss of his wife and soulmate of 32 years. Rich was mired in a deep depression when he finally followed a friend’s suggestion and called April. April helped him fight off the self-pity and darkness, and brought him back into the light.
Back in the Game is a memoir that combines the heartwarming love story that led to his second marriage, with some truly entertaining and memorable tales from his 40 plus years of sports broadcasting in Chicago. Some of Chicago’s most beloved sports figures also come to life in the pages of Back in the Game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990486848

Book preview

Copyright 2014 by Rich King and Lindsay Eanet

Publishing History

Trade paperback edition - September 2014

Published in the Unites States by

Eckhartz Press

Chicago, Illinois

All Rights Reserved

Cover and interior design by Vasil Nazar

All photos from April and Rich King’s personal collection

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

eISBN: 978-0-9904868-4-8

v1.0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Praise

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About Authors

Publisher Page

PRAISE FOR BACK IN THE GAME

I breezed through the pages not only engrossed in the phoenix of Rich’s second life with his new bride, but thoroughly enjoyed traversing with him through his memorable career. A truly good man who thankfully for all of us chose to tell another good story about his remarkable life.

-Mark Suppelsa

WGN-TV News

"If Rich King’s first book, My Maggie, tugged at your heart, Back in the Game will warm your spirit. What an uplifting book! It’s not just a story of renewed hope, Rich also manages to weave in stories about his 40-year Chicago broadcasting career. A must read for Chicagoans."

-Jerry Reinsdorf

Owner Chicago White Sox, Chicago Bulls

Kudos to veteran sportscaster Rich King for sharing his experience of love, loss, and learning to love again. Mr. King is admirably open in describing his journey from despair to hope, and he has much to teach about the importance of relationships in living a vigorous and fulfilling life. On top of that, he provides us with an enormously entertaining account of sports journalism that should delight any Chicago sports fan.

-Neal Spira, MD

Dean

Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis

Dedication

For April who gave me new hope and life

BACK IN THE GAME

Prologue

No one ever expects to sit on a couch talking to a psychotherapist. It’s an almost out-of-body experience. As a guy who was raised by a hard-nosed father who expected you to shoulder responsibility without complaint, I especially didn’t.

But there I sat, at the advice of my internist, in the office of Christine Jacobek. Poor Christine. She had to endure my endless rants about the unfairness of life. I unleashed the repressed anger that boiled inside in torrents in her office, a flurry of balled-up, shaking fists and red-faced frothing at the mouth. It all stemmed, of course, from the loss of my first wife, Maggie. The anger stage in the Kübler-Ross model for grief was, for me, quite extensive.

My relationship with Maggie thrived, evolving from childhood sweethearts to a thirty-two year marriage. I also became her chief caretaker for the final fifteen years of her life, a role I loved. She had battled past major obstacles to live the sweetest of lives. A rare progressive disease that was robbing her of sight and sound, three different cancers and an uphill battle out of a poor inner-city neighborhood did not stop her. She died at the age of fifty-three, and it made me angry, very angry. Christine caught the worst of it.

I detailed all of the feelings I had back then in the book I wrote, My Maggie, which was published in 2007. A brief explanation of that book may be necessary before beginning Back in the Game. I had written to preserve her memory and honor her, to help me grieve, and to help others who had lost a spouse to a devastating illness heal.

The process of writing and promoting that book nearly killed me—literally. Before the final stretch of the book tour, I found myself in the hospital on the verge of a massive heart attack. I let self-pity take over, which fed into a crippling depression. As I was trying to help others heal, I was living my life in direct opposition to what Maggie stood for and what I had outlined with great passion in the book. She would have despised my conduct in Christine’s office. She would have despised my way of life, resigning myself to this burned-out, lonely, self-pitying bachelor lifestyle.

Near the end of My Maggie, I explained what she meant to me:

Maggie and I were crazy in love. It was not just some romantic notion. It was the real thing that transcended the physical world. How else could I describe what happened? She was an awkward tomboy with hearing aid wires tangled in her dress at the play lot in that now distant innocence of our youth in the 1950s. I was there. She was a blossoming beauty in her teens with that gorgeous long flowing blonde hair. I was there. I was there in Wauconda seeing the breathtaking eternal love in her eyes. I was her soul mate for all the happiness that filled our lives as husband and wife. I was with her for all the hard work, the exotic vacations, the zany antics and the great friends. I was there throughout the bad times—the hearing loss, the blindness and the cancers. It was enormous adversity that we did not let break us, but instead used to bind us even tighter. I was there for all of it. Nobody else had as much of her. Yes, there should have been more- but I can hear her telling me softly now:

But, Richie, there wasn’t.

Our magical time was cut short, for sure. What Maggie gave me was so powerful, I could no longer feel cheated.

That last line I wrote turned out to be a complete lie. Look, you don’t understand, I told Christine. I am happy in the past. Maggie is there. I can be with her there. She is not here now. In the present, I’m alone. I scoffed at any meaningful future with another woman, laughed bitterly about the insanity of another marriage.

Some people told me that seeing a therapist was a waste of time. Most of this advice came from men, which I fully understood. But, in retrospect, seeing Christine was a huge help. Besides allowing me to vent, she offered some gentle guidance. When I said I would never get married again, we got involved in a battle of semantics. You can say never, I pointed out. I said I would never leave Maggie and never did. If you get bad food at a restaurant, you never go back. What I was really saying is that I would never recover from losing Maggie. Christine was trying to guide me out of my malaise. I realize now, I was running away from what I could not deal with. When Maggie was alive I had some degree of control over her well-being. When she died, I was left feeling weak and depleted. Intellectually, I wanted to move on. Emotionally, it was impossible at the time.

On the inside, I was one sorry, sad sack of a guy. On the outside, I was able to fake it, as countless others have done before, maybe even you. Comedians, priests, even psychiatrists can be depressed. Just days before this book went to press, Robin Williams tragically took his own life. Sportscasters can act as if they are enjoying every minute on the air. But when you are alone, the empty feeling returns and stays with you until you begin to fake it all over again.

Maggie died in 2002. My Maggie was written in 2004 and published in 2007. If you encounter this book having read its predecessor, you know she was my reason for living. Caring for her and giving her the best quality of life in those final years became a second-full time job; more than that, it became my livelihood, my purpose. And when she was gone, I had become something of a professional mourner. Grief must be endured, and the time of that pain depends on the individual. In my case, the deep pain lingered for six years and might have gone on but for one long shot date with one special woman that changed my life.

It was our friend and attorney, Anna Morrison-Ricordati, who recommended I write a book about my experiences after Maggie died. You may be able to help a great number of baby boomers who are experiencing that same loss, she said. I hated writing about myself but kept going, and thanks to the help of Lindsay Eanet, the book was completed.

When you reach the advanced years of life, you begin to think you have a handle on things. Not so. I was adamant I would never get married again. I did. I have threatened to retire from my job more times than Brett Favre. I am still working. I wrote a book about a courageous woman then acted cowardly. I now know I have a handle on nothing in life. The serious side of this book, the battle against depression, is simply my own story. It is not meant as any lesson or measuring stick on grief or how to fight depression. If anyone benefits from what happened to me, I would be extremely pleased. But if the book results in merely an exercise in empathy for others who have battled depression, that would also be enough for me. It does sometimes help to hear or read about others who are in a similar situation.

There is also a not-so-serious side of the book. After four decades in broadcasting, my career days are numbered. It has been an amazing ride. Wherever I go people seem to love inside stories about sports personalities. Rather than write a memoir, this provided me with a chance to just relate some stories about the great personalities I have met in forty-six years in the radio and television business, icons like Jack Brickhouse, Brent Musburger, Lou Boudreau, Walter Payton, Michael Jordan, Bill Veeck, Jerry Reinsdorf, Harry Caray, Johnny Morris, Mike Ditka, Brian Urlacher Brad Palmer, Doug Buffone, Tom Skilling and Dan Roan, among others. I have had the pleasure of dealing with a lot of sports and broadcast Hall-of-Famers. I could not resist spinning a few yarns.

Coming from a working-class neighborhood on the South Side, Pilsen, the odds against such a career were enormous. I am grateful to all those who listened to me and watched me over the years. I am Chicago’s very own, born at Holy Cross Hospital, schooled at St. Procopius, De La Salle, and UIC. I am one of you.

Chapter One

In the years after my first wife’s passing, I came close to dying twice. The first near-death incident happened one snowy night on a mountain in Pittsburgh.

I was covering a Bears game for WGN-TV. As the Steelers’ pile driver Jerome The Bus Bettis began to take over the second half, the sky grew greyer and more ominous. It snowed harder. The sky grew dark. Even a few diehard fans, no strangers to this weather but sensing both a blowout and an icy trip home, began to leave their seats. A trickle of black and gold began to flow through the stadium doors. The PA announcer came on, imploring everyone to drive safe. We were safe from the elements up in the booth, but we still had a long evening ahead of us.

My postgame objective was clear—Dan Leister, the station Operations Manager, had set up a postgame tape feed from a nearby TV station. We had to get the highlight footage and postgame sound bites to the station for the sportscast that evening. It’s only two miles from the park, he said. Two miles. No big deal.

What he forgot to mention was that it was two miles straight up a steep mountain.

The directions he gave us were two pages long. Every line represented a turn, the mountain curling and rising like a spiral staircase. Moments into the drive, my cameraman and road partner, Richard Ike Isaac, began having trouble behind the wheel. We tried not to think about the potential hazards of this journey. He kept a death stare on the road; I shuffled through the complicated directions. We felt the tires begin to skid and slip ever so slightly, but Ike would find a way to regain control. We would drive a few feet, slip again and then recover. Every time the car would slip, we both held our breath for a second. Ike, a normally funny and upbeat guy, was quiet, gripping the steering wheel, deep in focus. All we could hear was the car’s groaning motor and the splatter of snow on the windshield.

The road was an ice rink. A few of the locals came rushing out of their homes to warn us as we trudged forward. It was like something out of a horror film, the warnings of Don’t go up there! You’ll never make it!

We had no choice. The do or die feeling took over. We had to feed the tape for our viewers back in Chicago or we would be fired. About halfway up, I turned my head and saw Ike’s face for the first time. He was wide-eyed and white-knuckled, with a twinge of green in his face. This was a look of sheer, sickening panic. Then, I realized why. The car stalled and began to slide backwards down an icy street.

What the hell are you doing? I shouted. I have no control, he shouted back. The car was skidding straight down, heading for a small barrier. That thin piece of guardrail was the last thing between our car and a mile-long plunge into the icy abyss. If we crashed through it, we were done. The snow was still pounding down. This is it, I thought. We’re done. We are going to die up here. And there’s no chance of us getting the tape fed. I shut my eyes and prepared for the free-fall.

As we were sliding backwards, my life for the past several years began to flash before my eyes. Since losing Maggie in 2002, I had been locked in a perpetual state of self-pity and a sense of let’s-get-it-over-with. I didn’t want to give up on life completely, but my life didn’t feel like anything worth preserving. Maybe if we did go over the abyss, I would at least be reunited with Maggie. I would feel, maybe, somewhat complete again.

Luckily for us, we did not slide to an icy, violent demise. The car veered off to the left and plowed into the fence in front of a house. We breathed a sigh of relief on impact. Nobody was home, so we left a note with our phone numbers and took off again. This is not going to work, Ike said.

While shaking off the shock of our near-death experience, I got the idea to call the station at the top of the hill so they could send down a heavier truck to bring us up. They obliged, and down came two young kids in a station van.

The ordeal was far from over. At this point,