I’m not sure when I stopped being nervous and excited meeting famous athletes.

I know I used to think it was pretty cool interviewing Iowa football coach Hayden Fry and basketball coach Lute Olsen while still a student reporter for the Daily Iowan.

I remember being in awe of Sandy Koufax when I met him at the Dodgers’ spring training compound in Vero Beach, Fla., in my early years with Florida Today newspaper.

And I remember feeling extremely nervous the first time I ventured into the Bears visiting lockerroom at Tampa Stadium as the Tampa Bay Bucs beat reporter, also very early in my professional career.  Read more...

Rocky Wirtz wasn’t in the room when his mother died and he didn’t need to be there when it was his father’s time. That just wasn’t him and it wasn’t Bill Wirtz either.
 
But it was Rocky, the eldest of Bill and Joan’s five children, who, after Bill passed away at 12:15 in the morning, got the family together and made sure all the funeral arrangements were in place. And by 2:15 a.m., they were.
 
It was Sept. 26, 2007. And little more than a week later, at 55 years old, W. Rockwell Wirtz was the new chairman of the Chicago Blackhawks.
 
It came as something of a surprise to those outside the family and the organization. Despite being an officer of the Blackhawks, Rocky’s name was never even in the media guide. And it was his younger brother Peter, the team’s vice president, who worked more closely with their father on the hockey side of the family business, who seemed most closely aligned to him.
 
“For whatever reason, dad and Peter chose not to [involve me more], but it didn’t bother me,” Rocky said when I interviewed him shortly after he assumed his new position. “It was what it was. I had plenty to do. I was busy enough. I’d get involved with all the businesses. I was an officer of every company we had. We all worked together and that was Peter and dad’s deal and I didn’t bother treading on it.”
 
Rocky didn’t need to be threatened. For starters, as head of the family’s wholesale liquor empire, his side generated the majority of its billion dollar-plus annual revenue while the Hawks continued to lose money.
 
“What I was trying to do was to earn as much money on the other side of the organization as I could,” Rocky said. “If I could [earn] on a pre-tax basis  what the Hawks lost, that was my goal. Now I didn’t express that in great detail to dad, but that was my thinking. I was just hoping the Hawks wouldn’t get to the point where we couldn’t turn them around.”
 
It was weird to Rocky because in their other businesses, the wholesale side and their real estate holdings, Bill believed you had to spend money to make money, and then re-invest the money they made right back into the business, which in hockey meant players’ salaries.
 
“He just didn’t execute it and I don’t know why he didn’t follow through,” Rocky said.
 
There were other things father and son disagreed on, and Rocky was not shy in letting his father know about it.
 
“Dad and I would have our difference of opinion and it was always civil,” he said. “I always said, ‘Just because I’m on the same team doesn’t mean I have to always agree with you. You don’t pay me to agree with you. You can do that all by yourself.’ ”
 
The old man trusted him.
 
Rocky was the one who, as a child, went with his dad to the Hawks’ games and then out to the Pump Room after, where he would fall asleep in the booth while Bill had a few pops, then drive back home to Winnetka with him at 3 a.m.
 
“The school would call,” Rocky recalled with a laugh, “and they’d say, ‘We think there’s a problem with Rocky. He’s falling asleep in class. Do you think we need to have him tested?’ ”
 
He was nicknamed Rocky after his middle name Rockwell, the last name of his maternal grandmother. But Bill, who was involved in international boxing, told heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano that he named his first son after him. 
 
“My mom told the story of when I was born, getting flowers from Rocky Marciano, will little boxing gloves,” Wirtz laughed. “Depending on the audience, my dad changed the story.”
 
Rocky was in sixth grade when his grandfather Arthur began talking about the family succession plan, which would begin with Bill, followed by his younger brother Michael and eventually to Bill’s oldest son Rocky.
 
“Right or wrong, my grandfather didn’t have women in the business but everyone shared equally as far as what their percentage of ownership was,” Rocky said. “But as for running the operations, the corporations, it was going to be the male descendants.
 
“I always just assumed I’d eventually work for Michael and not directly for dad.”
 
After college, his grandfather officially asked him: “Do you want to sign onto this? And then, do you want to take responsibility for the family at the passing of either Michael or dad?” Rocky recalled. “So that was a question I had to ask myself. I’ve been groomed to take over for many, many years.”
 
His father taught him to trust his instincts and to never be intimidated by anyone or anything. And as Rocky grew older, Bill relied on him that much more.
 
The two spoke at least an hour a day every business day. Rocky could finish his sentences for him. In fact, in business meetings, the two spoke in a kind of code that would leave the others in the room completely confused.
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I am trying to embrace change. 
 

For example, the words above were the very first ones typed on my new non-Tribune laptop. For about an hour before that, I navigated the Internet for the first time on this foreign being, tried to locate all the cool new functions and yelled at my husband.
 

It then took me five minutes to craft this sentence because every time I typed a word, I inadvertently breathed on something that kept defining everything and then making it disappear. So I yelled at my husband some more.
 

Now I am exhausted.
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Television can be a scary thing for the uninitiated. The red light goes on, I play with my hair just a second too long. The camera hones in, I look at the wrong one.
 

I trace it back to the first time I ever appeared on TV. It was on WGN. The year was 1965. And OK, I was not the featured guest on Bozo’s Circus that day, but I had air time. And it was not pretty.
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When you say things like, “I don’t understand Facebook,” you risk sounding ancient, un-hip, dumb — none of which looks good on a resume.

That said, I don’t understand Facebook.
 

I signed up – well, ok, my daughter signed me up – for the same reason I do a lot of things, because someone told me I should.
 

I should point out that this rule of thumb has not always worked well for me in the past. Once I shopped at a boutique because someone told me I should, ended up spending $1,300 and getting sued for defamation. I would explain, but not sure I want to go down that road again.
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