There are few cities on Earth that take sports as seriously as the Chicagoans take theirs. If you take just the four main team sports played in North America (hockey, baseball, football and basketball), the city has five teams to keep up with, with the Blackhawks in the NHL, the White Sox and Cubs in Major League Baseball, the Bears in the NFL and the globally famous Chicago Bulls in basketball. Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, Scottie Pippen and many others have been through the home dressing room at the United Center, with those three all playing for the club at the same time, and bringing it untold success with three titles in a row in the early 1990s.
The landscape of Chicago sports has been dominated in recent years by the Bulls. The Bears reached the Superbowl in 2006, twenty years after their first visit in 1986 – winning in the Eighties due to a team that was more than the sum of its parts, yet still contained enough individual talent for any club in the shape of running back Walter “Sweetness” Payton, one of the best running backs ever to play the game. Perhaps due to having to share the limelight, Chicago’s two baseball clubs have been party to less attention than the Bulls and Bears themselves – this despite the White Sox having taken a World Series title in 2005 and also having been where legendary announcer Harry Caray made a name for himself. Along with the Blackhawks, the city also has a popular soccer team called the Fire, which has been home to some najor US International soccer players including Carlos Bocenegra and Josh Wolff.
