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One Funny Essay
Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 09:25PM Rick Kaempfer: Author, Humor Writer
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By Donald G. Evans
Skipping around the great Chicago Cubs Web site justonebadcentury.com, you bump into one after another hilarious bit. The Mustache Hall of Fame. Great Nicknames (a.k.a. the Mad Monk and Available Jones). Tales From A Bad Century. This Week in 1908. Celebrity Cubs Fans. And on and on. Great artwork is interspersed with crisp, comical prose, and the narrative, as it were, is unlike anything you find on the countless other Cubs sites, which tend to be interested largely in the same things as the major newspapers and sports radio shows—statistics, trade rumors, game reports, predictions and speculations. This is much more pop culture than team news.
Justonebadcentury.com is so packed with interesting content, I was surprised to learn it’s essentially a one-man show. Rick Kaempfer.
It was my fascination and admiration with the work of justonebadcentury.com that inspired me to contact Rick and see if he had any prose pieces that might fit Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. While there are other very good Chicago Cubs sites out there, including Bleed Cubbie Blue, the Heckler and Cubbie-Blue, justonebadcentury.com most matched the sensibility I brought to the anthology project.
Rick gave me a funny, personal essay called Go (Away) Sox. Originally a piece Rick wrote for his blog Half Empty, it’s the evil side of his co-blogger and good friend Dave. “We constantly fight all year-long about the Cubs and Sox,” Rick says. “I don’t have to watch the news; if anything bad happens, I will find out from Dave.”
The essay is notable for its keen comic timing. It’s a short, breezy piece that is perfectly executed, like a gymnast executing a stripped-down routine flawlessly. It hits on a longstanding civic debate, Cubs or Sox?, but does so in a fresh way.
“It was something that came right from the heart,” Rick says. “I’ve been preparing emotionally for it for 20 years, because of my relationship with Dave.”
Rick worked as a radio producer for 20 years for Steve Dahl and Garry Meier, as well as John Records Landecker. Rick was responsible for coming up with material for the shows. With Landecker, he wrote shorts gags—volumes of jokes and parody songs Landecker could use during his four-hour, five-day-a-week slot. For Steve and Garry, he came up with discussion topics the personalities used to riff on.
“I guess in a way, comedy writing is what I’ve been doing my whole professional career,” Rick says. “Landecker was looking for 45 seconds; Steve and Gary were looking to kill forty-five minutes.”
Rick has also written a satirical novel called $everance, as well as the non-fiction The Radio Producer’s Handbook. He writes a weekly humor column about parenting called “Father Knows Nothing” for NWI Parent magazine too.
“I try to write without putting humor into stuff, but I wind up putting it back in,” Rick says. “I just feel more comfortable.”
A Cub fan his whole life, Rick’s attachment to his team dates back to his early childhood in Jefferson Park on the northwest side of Chicago. He and his family were German immigrants, but his Uncle Manny took a liking to this strange American sport of baseball, and went to Cubs games as often as he could. Manny passed on this Cubs-itis to his oldest nephew. They went to their first game together in 1968, and still go to games whenever Manny comes back to town. Rick doesn’t know whether to thank him or curse him for that.
“I have a very love-hate relationship with the Cubs, depending on the day,” Rick says. “In general, I consider myself a realistic Cubs fan. But somewhere along the way every year, I have that one moment of weakness where I check my realism at the door and allow myself to believe. Before I know it, it’s too late, and I end up hating myself again for being so stupid.”
Justonebadcentury.com, like Cubbie Blues, focuses on a century of pathetic, heartbreaking, odds-defying baseball. “I always get sucked in; I always get mad,” Rick says. “My site focuses on how this could have happened for a hundred years. I’m on a quest to discover whether there are mistakes that have been made over and over and over again, or some mystical force. I’m convinced that they’re just incompetent.”
Rick is always adding new features to the site, like this year’s Cubs Through History. It takes particular historical eras, like Hugh Hefner’s reign on State Street in Chicago, and examines them through a Cubbie Blue lens. “The Playboy Club and Playboy mansion, when that was a real swinging time, which Cubs would go there?” Rick asks. He does the hard work finding documentation into the activity of the Joe Pepitone’s and Leo Durocher’s, which humanizes and pokes fun at our heroes in a time in which they’ve been afforded celebrity status.
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“I don’t want to do interviews and stuff like that; that sort of thing is out there,” Rick says. “I’m trying to find interesting nuggets and stories not widely known. I didn’t know much about Cubs history prior to 1969 prior to doing this. Cubs fans are not that historically-inclined, otherwise they’d be crushed by their own disappointment.”
Rick jokes that his three sons--Tommy (13), Johnny (11), and Sean (6)—will have to understand that he’s used all their college money to buy Cubs’ memorabilia. The youngest son Sean is ready to take the baton from his father; he already practices Cubs’ batting stances, and “does a perfect Kosuke striking out.” In fact, Rick’s memorabilia collection includes a print of Norman Rockwell’s famous Saturday Evening Post cover, tobacco cards of the entire starting lineup of the 1908 Cubs, and a dozen or so autographed baseballs from his childhood heroes, including Ernie Banks. He also has a closet full of red and blue clothing (“I’m never buying another jersey with a player’s name on it. Want some Mark Prior stuff?”), and every ticket stub from every game he has attended since the mid-80s (including the Ryne Sandberg game vs. St. Louis, and Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game).
This year will be more of the same for Rick and the Cubs. He says he’s worried about the pitching staff—Zambrano’s unpredictability, Harden’s fragility, Dempster’s ability to repeat his career year. “It could go right,” Rick says. “But I have a feeling it’s not going to.”
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Want more Rick?
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Visit JustOneBadCentury.com
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