With the Stanley Cup Finals between the Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers heating up and the series returning to Chicago tied at two games apiece, it’s only natural that as a reporter, my thoughts turn to one thing.
The pregame meal at the United Center.

A word first, about pressroom food. It’s usually bad. Of course, sportswriters seldom if ever care about this because A.We’re not paying for it and B. Most of us have no discernible taste as evidenced by the wardrobes of the male of our species, which consists primarily of ill-fitting polo shirts given away at golf tournaments circa 1987.
I’ve seen sportswriters, without the slightest concern for personal safety, ingest the lunch leftovers as they’re leaving the press box at 1 a.m. I’m guessing even Rick Bayless wouldn’t touch his own concoctions unrefrigerated and congealed some 12 hours later, but not us!
I will say that for the most part, the food has gotten better over the years. When I covered a certain Southern NFL football team in the early 80s, we had two choices for lunch each game – hot dogs and cheese soup.
Now I personally won’t eat a hot dog that has not been boiled or grilled within the boundaries of the Greater Chicagoland area for the simple fact that all other hot dogs look and smell funny to me, and anyone that serves a hot dog with a choice of ketchup or brown mustard clearly doesn’t get it.
The hot dogs in that NFL press box were grayish and I’m not sure any mustard was offered. The other choice, the cheese soup, was, well, just that, I believe – some Kraft singles melted in a vat and called soup.
It was a scary scene.

When I covered the Bulls, we would all watch with great interest before games as assistant coach Tex Winter would go through the food line first because Tex absolutely loved press food (and no doubt, hospital food) and it was fun watching Phil Jackson and his assistant Johnny Bach make fun of him.
“Go ahead Tex,” they’d say pointing, “try that green stuff,” and then collapse in giggles.
It is often more fun guessing the origin of the pregame meal as it is covering the game itself.
One local team whose name I will not mention because they might not serve me again, often feed media members grilled cheese sandwiches that we’ve theorized were toasted in prison using Wonder Bread and an iron.
Which brings us to the Blackhawks.

I believe sonnets have been written about the Hawks’ press food. If not, they should be. The mere thought of it makes me want to cry because it’s like someone really cares about us.
Served on real plates with silverware and linen napkins, it’s the best-kept secret in sports and it really shouldn’t be.
My friend Bob, a sportswriter from Detroit who likes to eat a lot (likes to eat and likes to eat a lot), was coming to Chicago last year to cover the Hawks-Red Wings playoff series and I decided to do him a favor.
“Just thank me,” I told him in a preemptive phone call.
“What for?” he asked.
“Just listen, do as I say and don’t ask any questions,” I instructed.

I then proceeded to tell him that because I would not be there to direct him, he should bypass the regular basement press room meal, which tries but can’t compare, and go directly to the 300 level press box, where he would be met by waiters in uniform carving prime rib and roasted turkeys with soft fresh rolls and choice of horseradish; delectable side dishes that would include gourmet macaroni and cheese with lobster – lobster! — grilled vegetables and garlic mashed potatoes with skins included. Oh, and did I mention the shrimp cocktail, and the cheese and fruit trays?
Sure, the place lacks ambience as we all eat standing up at tall tables, some of us balancing our plates on  garbage cans, but quibbling about that would be in horribly bad taste, and we eat leisurely and happily as if we’re real people in a real restaurant.
The rookies in the group will often hastily grab a Haagen-Daaz ice cream bar from a nearby cooler, clearly unaware of what is to come between the second and third periods. You can always tell who had ice cream because there is a discernible pause as they observe in awe when the desserts are wheeled in, inhaling deeply as they calculate the five-figure calorie counts they are about to ring up.
Then in comes the finale – fruit tarts and mini-éclairs and mocha mousse delights; a tray of giant freshly baked cookies with peanut butter cups and white chocolate chips under a heating lamp so that, god forbid, they should not lose their warmth; brownies and cheese cake and more cookies and cake – the supply constantly replenished, of course.
And then, last week, a sundae bar I’d like to have at my son’s bar mitzvah – with more than a dozen toppings including my personal favorite — giant malted milk balls.
Bloated and semi-nauseous, we stagger back to the game, fighting off unconsciousness despite the thundering roar of the United Center crowd, and contemplate our sins.
On the night of the game last year for which I prepped my friend Bob, my phone rang.
“Don’t yell at me,” he said.

He then started whimpering about how all the writers he was with from Detroit told him that the basement employee cafeteria was the place they were supposed to eat, that they seemed like they knew, that he wasn’t thinking clearly, blah, blah, blah. I think he had a couple grilled cheese sandwiches.
He was now standing before the carving station, phone in hand, nearly in tears, because he knew he could never get it back.
To this day, he cannot speak of it. But I can. And as the Stanley Cup Finals capture the fascination of hockey fans around the country; as the series prepares for its most critical contest in the series; as my colleagues and I prepare to describe the splendor of competition at its very apex, I cannot help but focus on what brings us all there.
And hope against hope that they have the sundae bar again for Game 5.

One of the best things about writing a daily blog is you can pour out your heart, express your frustrations, confess your weaknesses and occasionally, when you’re in the mood, embarrass your family.
 

You can talk about your son’s piano lessons, your daughter’s new bed and your sister’s old boyfriend, and not get fired.
 

“Just, whatever you do, can you leave me out of it?” my daughter Amanda begged tonight as I ran a made-up quote by her. “I think you need to keep your personal and professional lives separate.”
 

“But I don’t have a professional life,” I reminded her, which is about when she ran away from me trailed by her little brother, who was afraid I would follow up the piano lesson blog with an inspired piece about his tuba.
 

As a professional newspaper reporter, writing about women I observed in restaurants not wearing pants was not encouraged. Neither was writing about my loss of memory, naked men or my co-ed softball team.
 

I think that must be why I have written with more frequency and more joy in the last three months than I had in a long while. If I could make a living at this, I’d be the happiest woman in the world.
 

Not that I am not happy writing sports. I am. After a few months of seriously wondering whether I would ever return to sportswriting, I am happy to report that in writing about women in restaurants without pants, I have also re-discovered how much I truly enjoy being a sportswriter in my new duties for ESPN.
 

If I hadn’t returned to sports, I may have forgotten all those off-hand remarks people make when you interview them that never quite find their way into your stories because they just don’t fit, but that never quite leave you either.
 

Like when you’re finished talking to Cubs manager Lou Piniella about Ryan Dempster and the pitcher’s infant daughter’s health crisis, the interview is finished and Piniella slowly shakes his head.
 

“You don’t get it back,” he says quietly, talking in general about how the baseball culture has changed from the days when he was allowed a day off for the birth of only one of his three children. “Kids don’t forget about not being there for their birthdays and mothers don’t forget about not being there for their babies.”
 

Or when you’re sitting in the dugout one morning waiting out a blinding rainstorm with Dempster and your sportscaster friend Peggy Kusinski, and it’s just the three of you, three parents, talking about how much you love your kids.
 

“You know that movie “Taken?” says Dempster, whose baby is still in the hospital at this point, still with a tracheal tube because she is unable to swallow on her own some three months after her birth.
 

Peggy and I nod, though I doubt she knows the movie any better than I do.
 

“Liam Neeson is in France looking for his daughter,” Dempster tells us, “and the chief of police there says, ‘I’d help you but you’re tearing down the city.’ And Liam Niesen looks at him and says, ‘I’d tear down the Eiffel Tower to save my daughter,’ and that’s the way I feel about this. I’ve always felt that way about my son but seeing my daughter sick and in bed and going through this, I’ll do whatever I have to. I just want to get her better.”
 

It was for the same story that I spoke to White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who as always delivered with comments uniquely Ozzie. But then you turn off your tape recorder and he adds:
 

“The only thing in life you have is your kids. As soon as you leave this game, they’ll remember you when you die and if you ever go to the Hall of Fame. The only time they bring you back here is if they can make some money. But when you talk about your kids, that’s the only thing that’s really yours. Your wife, your mom, they’re not yours. If one of my kids gets sick, [screw] baseball, I’ll go be with them.”
 

Those are the best moments, even when you can’t always work them into print.
 

And that’s why I love my blog, because I just did.

Excuse me if I drift off occasionally. I [po[a

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Sorry. You go away for seven weeks and the first day back is exhausting. Even if the first day back only lasts for about two hours.  And I don’t even know if “back” is the right word. But I am going to start writing for ESPNChicago.com, I did venture into the White Sox clubhouse today with an actual working credential and I did experience once again the singular wonder of listening to Sox manager Ozzie Guillen up close and in person.

I never realized how much I missed that.

Dropping into a baseball clubhouse that you haven’t been in all season, not to mention one going through a horrific (can you call it a slump when it has lasted the better part of the last two and a half months?), is not exactly the ideal situation.

I took the safe route and hovered around Jim Thome, who would be courteous to the reporter who just did a scathing expose on him, I’m sure (a scathing expose on Jim Thome amounting to something along the lines of Jim being caught using more than the dentist’s recommended daily amount of fluoride).

It was about that time that Ozzie came by with the newest issue of Sports Illustrated, disgusted at the photo of the miscreant who had to be dragged off the court at the French Open after charging up to Roger Federer in mid-match and trying to put a hat on Federer’s head.

His point was that putting this guy’s picture in a national magazine would only encourage other morons to behave similarly. Sox general manager Kenny Williams suggested it may have been more useful to photograph what went on once the security guards got the guy under the stands.

Guillen explained in a way only he could, that in his country, they’d just pummel the guy in front of the entire stadium: “There, now who else wants to run out here?” he demonstrated with a few extra words thrown in.

I’m so glad Ozzie isn’t one of those men who utters a single curse word and feels compelled to apologize to a woman who has spent her entire career inside men’s lockerrooms. Ozzie lets them fly around women like me, utilized as verbs, adjectives and even the occasional noun, and I view this as the ultimate show of respect. Ozzie being Ozzie.  

I had actual work to do and I managed to do it, getting one entire interview completed before running out of battery power for my tape recorder. Lest you misinterpret, this was a good day for me. Throughout my career, I have carved out a well-earned reputation for having just about every mechanical malfunction a print reporter could possibly have, dead batteries being the very least of it.

The humorous part for my colleagues has been that the malfunctions always seemed to occur at the key moments of every press conference and interview. The non-humorous part is that it often elicited from me one of Ozzie’s favorite words within microphone range of pretty much every TV and radio reporter in attendance.

Reporters can be very kind, very sympathetic people in real life. Many of us would surely stop and open a door for someone older than ourselves. We donate money to charity. We tear up at sad movies. But if one of us trips and falls on the way into a clubhouse on deadline, we all know that being trampled is a perfectly acceptable consequence for our carelessness.  

I was feeling very lucky to be back in this humorless, miserable company again.

We will see what tomorrow brings.

Once, when I was covering the Chicago Bulls, Scottie Pippen decided to boycott the media.

It took several weeks for anybody to notice.

It wasn’t that Scottie didn’t speak to us before that. He did. But we recognized those who were especially quotable and those, like Scottie, who were somewhat deficient.

I bring this up because much has been made by what two NBA players have not said over the last few days.

LeBron James has drawn much criticism after he walked off the court without congratulating his opponents following his Cleveland team’s loss to Orlando in the Eastern Conference Finals on Saturday night. He was taken to task further for not speaking to reporters after the game.

Also over the last few days, Bulls’ guard and the league’s Rookie of the Year Derrick Rose decided to “No comment” allegations that his high school transcript was falsified and that his SAT test was fraudulent as well.

In both cases, the media wanted something. Now that I’m a member of the general public, I can say with some confidence that I didn’t need anything

In James’ case, he came back the next day and, rather than apologizing as some athletes might have done and certainly many would have advised him to do in the interest of p.r., he tried to explain himself.

“It’s hard for me to congratulate somebody after you just lose to them,” James said. “I’m a winner. It’s not being a poor sport or anything like that. If somebody beats you up, you’re not going to congratulate them. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a competitor.”

It’s funny that in this day and age, so much was made of so little. While I am certainly a proponent of good sportsmanship and walking off the court without a simply congratulations for his opponents was both childish and churlish, I doubt very much that Orlando’s players cared at all, so why should we?

If boxers can pummel each other and then hug at the end of a fight; if tennis players can battle for five sets and hug at the net; if hockey players can knock each other’s teeth out and line up to shake hands after a brutal playoff series; then James should certainly be able to shake a hand or two after the game.

But clearly, though James is considered a good NBA citizen by that midget-sized measuring stick, it is not in his makeup to pretend he is a gracious loser when he admittedly is not.

As for not speaking to the media, I admit that would have undoubtedly ticked me off had I been covering the series. And I’d be particularly annoyed if I was a Cavaliers’ beat reporter who was counting on some comments from the star of the team who might very well have played his last game for the franchise with free agency looming.

But sometimes as a reporter, you have to ask yourself just what it is you’re counting on. I remember early in my career, I once wondered aloud how it would be to cover a sporting event as if it was a play or a rock concert and simply write a review. You wouldn’t need to know what the actors or the musicians thought of their performances and frankly, it would not matter in how you reviewed them.

But soon I retreated into my job as quote collector, and more often than not over the years, I relied much too heavily on what athletes said, especially when they said things like, “We’ll put this behind us,” and “It’s not about me, it’s about the team.”

I pretty much had an unspoken agreement with other sportswriter friends that if any of us were ever caught quoting someone saying, “We’ll take it one game at a time,” we were to be forever ostracized, so some of us do have our standards.

But there “we” were again after the Rose allegations, when I heard people in the media demanding that he say something, anything – a denial, an apology for poor judgment, a b.s. non-denial denial like, “I’d like to answer the allegations but I’ve been advised not to say anything.”

The sad fact is, we’re conditioned not to believe what most public figures say. Both James and Rose had nothing to say and so they said nothing. But how dare they not spout trite nonsense for our amusement and to fill our stories?

Apparently, it’s not what they say anymore, but rather how they don’t say it.

The dream job.

More than once over the last few weeks, I have been told that I had that. And I’m not always sure how to take it.

I suggested to a female sportswriter friend that it seemed like it was maybe sexist. As in, “You should be grateful for having a job so seemingly great, being a woman and all.” I asked her if she thought male sportswriters were told the same thing.

Good friends tell you the truth. They also support you when you’re being irrational. I have a guy friend who, whenever I would launch into any complaint, would say, “OK, so what do you want me to say here?” and then give me a multiple choice of responses.

It’s kind of along the lines of asking your husband or boyfriend, “Does my ass look big in these jeans?” Even “No” is not a good answer if you don’t say it the right way or quickly enough.

But my female friend told me the truth, that I was basically an idiot. Women sportswriters do not throw around the “S” word lightly. We save it for when we really mean it, when it really applies. Otherwise, it just diminishes the real examples.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think it’s sexist. And yes, I think male sportswriters are told that all the time.”

I wonder if male sportswriters are as careful in responding as I’ve always been. For example, when someone tells you how lucky you are to be a sportswriter, they really don’t want to hear about the deadlines or travel problems or athletes who treat you like spittle.

And I never tell anyone about the time I nearly neutered a monk.

OK, so he may not have been a monk. But a man of some religious persuasion and I shared a limo from the airport once, and I broke the cardinal rule of limo riding or really any moving-vehicle riding, which is:  Do NOT get up while it is moving.

In my defense, I was merely trying to give the driver my credit card in order to get a little bit of a headstart in getting out of the limo when it arrived at my house. Of course, I did this at a toll booth, which is not technically a stopping point. But also in my defense, it had been an arduous road trip, I was at an advanced stage of pregnancy and there was some urgency in expediting the proceedings, if you get my drift.

As I retrieved my card, the driver inconsiderately started moving again, thereby throwing me toward the back seat, where my co-passenger was sitting, minding his own business.

For those of you who don’t know what happens to a pregnant woman’s fingernails when she takes prenatal vitamins, let’s just say they are not unlike lethal weapons. This can actually be a wonderful and beautiful thing unless you’re being thrown into a perfectly innocent monk inside a limo.

I’m not exactly sure where I violated him, but it was apparent he was in great pain, bent over and nothing I said could either restore his power of speech or keep the limo driver from laughing.

You see what the driver knew that I did not, was the destination of the other passenger. He had been wearing a coat, thus hiding his identity until we pulled up to his stop, which happened to be a monastery.

He was very nice when he got out of the car, whimpering a goodbye and nodding as I apologized for the fortieth time. I asked the driver if the man could have really been a monk and between hysterics, he assured me that he was, adding some other really unfunny remarks.

Now I’m sure you’re saying, “But this could happen to anyone, not just someone with a dream job as a sportswriter.”

And I would have to agree.

So would my co-passenger once he stopped whimpering.