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Don De Grazia: Author

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By Donald G. Evans

Uncle Ernie’s second-story Waveland Avenue window practically kissed Wrigley Field’s left-field foul pole, and Don De Grazia sat there watching the “circus atmosphere” around the ballpark. That was 2003. Don was living temporarily in a spare apartment his uncle had rented basically for Cubs parties. The Cubs were setting the stage, day-by-day, game-by-game, for another historic collapse.

“My impetus was to pore all those negative emotions into a story,” Don says. “I’d just devoted all those days, all those hours, to what?”

Don’s “Yard Dogs” is a kind of psychological study in fandom. Billy is a typically devoted Cubs fan who uses gambling to chain his fate to that of his favorite team. The narrator, a small-time bookie, in turn attaches his fate to Billy’s. The sports world food chain that results brings into question the ultimate worth of fandom. Is victory theirs or ours? How about defeat?

“The bookies made a lot of money in 2003,” Don says. “People started betting with their hearts, especially when the Cubs needed one more victory [to win the National League championship]. A lot of Cubs fans went in real deep.”

Don’s literary reputation is built on the 2001 novel American Skin, a stunning portrait of a racist, violent underworld where adolescent wayfarers take refuge in a “family” of other lost souls. Don’s novel dispels the stereotype that all skinheads are the same and that they’re all racists, and the unraveling of these differences between sects gives the story added heft. The literary coup of the novel is that it is even-handed and humorous despite the subject matter, and that it manages to show compassion without approval. American Skin’s narrator, DeGreaser, is likeable in his many tragic flaws.

As DeGreaser provides unique insight into the psyche of a skinhead, the “Yard Dogs” bookie gets inside the head of a gambler. The bookie’s point of view highlights the nature of his moral struggles. His ambivalence about success at the cost of Billy’s (and the Cubs’) failures relates to a cultural obsession with winning. Here, Don intertwines a narrative about Michael Jordan and his win-at-all-costs attitude with the story of a small-time bookie looking to expand his empire while his players lay broken across the harsh Chicago landscape. Is winning, ultimately, all that matters?

“The narrator becomes a kind of monster as a result of the Messiah-like approbation sports heroes get from everyone because.... because they win,” Don says. “He takes what he seesas logical steps in emulating them to become (in his mind) a sort of God, like them.Although he is an obvious grotesque, I am not without sympathy for him. Not to sound corny, but I saw him as a product of a society that had its values wrong.”

But if the story is psychological, the setting is sociological. It takes place in a bar teeming with new-generation Cubs fans. It’s a bandwagon consisting less of fans that die hard and more of fans that fall over drunk. The landscape is far removed from the classical play Bleacher Bums, where blue-collar lifers were inseparable from their team.

“Especially by end of season, and by time the Cubs do something ridiculous to blow it, I find myself kind of disgusted by some Cubs fans,” Don says. “If you go back to when the Cubs weren’t as popular, there was a serious love of the Cubs. Now it’s more typical sports fans stuff in the bleachers, guys who wear a suit and tie all week but come out to the park once every couple of months. Which is fine, but the less it is an actual community, the uglier and more banal certain things can get."

These days, Don prefers to watch games at Southport Lanes, a place with lots of bowling shoes but no suits and ties. “I don’t overall like the sports culture and bars, and yet I am very seriously involved with Cubs seasons,” he says. “I think it’s one of these strange situations where I’m actually able to have some self awareness or see myself as a character to some extent.”

“Yard Dogs” is a quintessentially Chicago story, just as Don is a quintessentially Chicago writer. It is a love note to Michael Jordan and the electricity he generated in this city, and a dramatization of that time when the ever-hopeful populous was denied, against all reason, another defining moment. Sports, like a snowstorm, is an element, or event, that brings the city together.

“The Cubs are one of the only American treasures that are still loved even when they don't win,” Don says. “I think that says something special about Chicago.”

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Want more Don?

• Read "Five Minutes With Don De Grazia"