Women and Children, Also

Julia Borcherts: Writer

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By Donald G. Evans

It was 1989, and Julia Borcherts was working as a construction project manager for a steel fabricator out of Rockford. She managed ironworkers, a notoriously macho sect of a notoriously macho world, and Julia would often be subject to ignorant stereotypes, dangerous pranks, and the usual hooting. Around that same time, Julia’s daughter Theresa, then nine, fell in love with the Chicago Cubs. So Julia, to humor her daughter and also because she too became enamored with the Cubs, escaped the man’s world of steel for…baseball.

“We were coming to games from Rockford, so we would have to be on the road by like 7:30 because [Theresa] wanted to get autographs,” Julia says.

Memories of that year were the foundation for Julia’s story “The Year of the Hawk,” one of the most ambitious fictional explorations of the North Side team in Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.

It is a story set in Chicago’s then-seedy Uptown neighborhood, and one that involves a broken family, physical and emotional abuse, drugs, drinking, poverty, and a beacon of light in Chicago Cubs baseball.

“I started thinking how that team, that season, could make a difference to somebody,” Julia says. “I kept thinking about my daughter.”

Female chroniclers of baseball are no longer rare, but they’re still a tiny minority. It’s mostly men - on the radio, TV, in bars, at holiday parties - slicing and dicing the minutia of baseball. But women form an increasing part of the fan base. And it’s got to be true that women and men process the game differently.

“If a man had written that story, there might have been a lot more analysis of the game or the players - the science of the sport,” Julia figures. “Despite the fact that the Cubs had a fascinating team in 1989 and I knew that team well - so well, in fact, that I could quote every players' stats every single day of that season - the only analysis I incorporated into the story was through the voice of one of the male characters, Darrell the beer vendor. And I think that because I'm not a man, I didn't want to write a story that sounded like I was trying too hard to be one of the guys. I wanted to write something that sounded like me. And because little girls don't often have dreams of growing up to become major league baseball players, I looked more at the social aspects of how a baseball star might have an effect on a kid who wasn't dreaming of growing up to be one.”

Julia’s story captures the way in which the Cubs capture a young person’s imagination. The surface story, compelling enough in its own right, acts as a vehicle for the more complex emotional subtext swimming below. The story is rich in details about the Wrigley Field atmosphere during that time. Frank Eubank, Julia’s brother, was a law student back then, and a lot of his classmates moonlighted as beer venders. That gave Julia and Theresa free entrée to the park, and also gave Julia a warehouse of memories to incorporate into her fiction.

“[Theresa] fell in love,” Julia says. “She was a little kid in ‘89, but somehow she found out where the players’ parking lot was and demanded I take her. She memorized all the players’ cars, and as soon as the car came in, she had no doubt exactly who everybody was.”

Details of Theresa’s fanaticism, including the memory of when she captured and had autographed a treasured ball at Wrigley Field, find their way into the story, as do atmospheric details like the Shawon-O-Meter and the W flag. Julia’s first instinct was to write an essay, so she could use all those true details. But she decided upon fiction to heighten the tension and drama of a time when innocence crashed head-first into adult realities.

Certainly, Julia had the experience to write a non-fiction sports piece. She’s written extensively on the Chicago boxing scene, publishing articles in Chicago Boxing, TimeOut Chicago, Red Eye, boxingkingdom.com and chicagoboxing.com, and her profile on the Harvey Boxing Club was reprinted in the 2006 Chicago Golden Gloves program.

Julia got her start as a boxing writer while working for an ex-boxer-turned-personal-injury lawyer in ‘99. Her employer did a lot of pro bono work for boxers, and Julia often found herself running errands at a local gym, Eckhart Park. She became friends with a variety of boxers there and at other Park District gyms around the city.

“There were all these kids training for the Golden Gloves, between 15 and 35,” Julia says. “Not just people fighting in the Gloves, but some older people - cab drivers, junkies trying to get in shape for a cash fight, guys just out of prison. Some guys were just trying to get into shape. I started asking questions, like ‘Why are you doing this?’ I really wanted to understand the various motivations behind the hard work and discipline in a dangerous sport that wasn’t going to get anyone a college scholarship. If it’s something I have a question about, I figure maybe somebody else will want to know the answer, too. That’s how I usually approach a story.”

The dominant question Julia asked herself in writing “The Year of the Hawk” was, “How does a little girl deal with big change in her life?”

“This girl realizes her life is about to change,” Julia says. “I wanted to look at the things a kid might notice, that sense that something’s wrong here, things are not going the ways she hoped things would go. Wrigley Field is the catalyst for this experience. I wanted to hit on the things that make Wrigley Field different than any other ballpark.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Julia moved around a lot as a child. Her mechanical engineer father followed his Westinghouse career from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Southern California, with intermittent moves back to Philadelphia. In 1971, he took a job with Colt Industries (guns, steel and water treatment) and moved the family to Rockford. Julia moved to Chicago in 1995 to work in the furniture industry, but made a life change when she enrolled in the creative writing program at Columbia College. She graduated in 2001 and is in her fourth year as the co-founder and co-host of the popular reading series Reading Under the Influence at Sheffield’s, where the anthology’s book publication party was held.

Though Julia hadn’t previously written about baseball, she’s long been a fan of the game. She likes the pace and the athleticism and the drama. “There’s an order to it, and a lot of beauty and grace that you can find in so many ways. I really like that year [1989]. I loved watching [shortstop Shawon] Dunston, who would make these flying sideways leaps from his shoulder and maybe throw a double play. Mitch Williams would throw himself on his head and execute this beautiful pitch. In baseball, you can see every little thing that happens. It’s kind of like a story that unfolds - it’s in little sections, each piece you can see.”

Theresa is now 28 and no longer has the baseball that was thrown to her in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. She boycotted Wrigley Field for a few years after the Cubs declined to resign Andre Dawson. She gave the baseball to a friend’s little brother, “a kid who hadn’t lost his ‘baseball innocence’ yet.”

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Want more Julia?

• Read "Five Minutes With Julia Borcherts"
• Stop by Reading Under the Influence