This was a big weekend at our house. Our eldest daughter, Elizabeth – Katie the Prefect Elizabeth, Hamilton Elizabeth, Springsteen Elizabeth – got engaged to her long-time boyfriend, Elijah. There was cake and tears everywhere.
Twenty-four years ago – although it feels like just last week – I was sitting in a hotel room at the Best Western SunDome in Hutchinson, Kansas. I was there to cover the US Women’s Open. I brought my young family with me. Margo. Elizabeth. Katie, our youngest, was not yet born.
I brought them because I wanted them to experience the full luxury of the Best Western SunDome in Hutchinson, Kansas, which overlooked an Amoco parking lot and car wash and, as I wrote at the time, “has one of those wall-mounted air conditioning units that makes noisier than those SportsCenter guys and still manages to keep the room at a comfortable 96 degrees.”
I was overly harsh on the Best Western SunDome to get a few cheap laughs because I was still young and giddy and didn’t yet understand how much I would miss the place if it were torn down. And I do miss it. Because in the hotel room overlooking a parking lot, and with that air conditioner blaring, and with Happy days on the television—the one where Fonzie met the Lone Ranger and Chachi rode a mechanical bull—Elizabeth, ten months old, stood by the television, held on to the stand for dear life, and then, suddenly, miraculously, took her first step, then her second, and finally her third as she reached the bed.
That feeling. I honestly didn’t think anything could ever top that feeling.
The truth is, so many moments with Elizabeth have surpassed that feeling. She’s never been particularly happy to be at the center of so many of my stories. Once, at an event, she heard two guys behind her say, “I like Joe, but I wish he would write more about sports and less about his family.” Elizabeth turned and said, “I agree!”
But now that Elizabeth writes some of her own workI think she understands better than ever that writers write what is at the center of our lives, what is at the center of our hearts, and that is where Elizabeth and Katie breathe.
I am happy to say that she has become a good, sweet and dedicated young man.
He’s found someone even better.
I’m not going to lie: from a football perspective, this was a disappointment of a weekend. I came in with two very strong roots: The Bills and the Bears. They both lost in heartbreaking fashion. Watching Josh Allen break down in tears after that Broncos-Bills game is the most crushing sports image of 2026 yet.
The Bears-Rams game, something happened towards the end that haunts me. With 27 seconds left in regulation time, Bears quarterback Caleb Williams made perhaps the most absurd and impossible NFL play I have ever seen, and I have written a bit about NFL plays.
It was fourth and four, the Rams led by seven, and Williams dropped back to throw. This had been a typical Caleb day, full of wonders and mistakes, blunders and beauties, but now it was midnight and the entire season was at stake. The Rams broke through the Bears’ offensive line, as they had done all day. Williams started scrambling and then realized he had nowhere to go but back. So he ran back and kept running back until he was 10 yards behind the line, 20 yards behind the line, 25 yards behind the line.
And then he threw the ball as he fell backwards. It was a kind of Hail Mary and a kind of pointed arrow. The ball flew toward the end zone, where tight end Cole Kmet was covered by the Rams’ Cobie Durant… only for Durant to appear to lose his place with the ball in the air. He moved FORWARD. The ball went BACK. And it landed softly in Kmet’s hand for a touchdown that, no matter how many times you see it, boggles the mind.
Soldier Field was a mess of cheers, tears, gasps and hope. It was, say those who were there, as loud as they have ever heard the place. And I was sure, very sure, that Bears coach Ben Johnson was going to go for the win right away and then go for two. I thought that because Johnson almost ALWAYS chooses the risk option. That’s at the core of his coaching philosophy and is undoubtedly part of the reason the Bears had such a magical season. Johnson plays fast, he plays loose, he goes for it on fourth down.
In fact, he had gone for it on fourth down several times in this game, which (you could argue) was why the Bears were behind in the first place. The Bears turned it over three times on downs within relative field goal range. You can’t say there are nine guaranteed points that they left on the table because the weather was bad, but there are certainly some points left on the table.
But this is how the Bears play. This is how the bears think. This is how the Bears win.
I thought for sure that Johnson would go for two and the win after the miracle play.
He didn’t. And if you listen to his explanation, you can see where he was coming from: The Bears, as demonstrated, were shut down for pretty much the entire day due to key goal-to-go situations. Johnson was undoubtedly tempted to risk it all, to try to take advantage of the bewildered Rams defense, to put it all on one play. I have no doubt he had the football courage to do just that.
He calculated that the Bears’ best chance to win was in overtime.
And here’s where it gets tricky, because I think he was right. I really WANTED him to go for two there because it fits the spirit so perfectly. As ours friend and co-author Mike Schur texted:
If you’re a Rams fan and you give up that touchdown, and you see them come out for the extra points… you breathe a sigh of relief.
Right. Going for it suits the spirit.
But… things that suit the spirit are not necessarily good. This may not seem like a valid comparison, but I was really struck (as does Patriots fan Mike Schur) by how many people picked the Texans to beat the Patriots on Sunday. The reason this struck me was that one after another, people seemed to connect the Texans’ dominant defense to the Seahawks’ dominant defense, and that the Seahawks had just battered the 49ers 41-6.
But this is complete nonsense – or what Bill James affectionately calls ‘nonsense’. The Texans defense has absolutely nothing to do with the Seahawks defense.
And yet it makes perfect sense to our narrative minds.
And our narrative mind felt like, YES, this was the moment for the Bears to strike, for them to go for two, for them to ride the incredible momentum wave of the big game and put the game away right then and there.
But what were the Bears’ chances of actually winning the game if they went for 2?
Well, the league made 46% of its two-point conversions this year.
With the new overtime rules and the game being played at Soldier Field, they almost certainly had at least a 50-50 shot in overtime.
And here’s the thing: the Bears could have won in overtime. They were in a position to win in overtime. They stopped the Rams on their first drive. And then they pushed the ball to midfield, just fifteen yards away from a viable game-winning kick, when Caleb Williams dropped back to throw, faced no pressure and made one of those decisions that only come when Caleb is Caleb: he fired the ball downfield in the hopes that DJ Moore would get on the same page and break away from his defender.
Instead, it was the defender, safety Kamren Curl, who broke away from the receiver and picked off the pass. It was the wrong throw at the wrong time, and the Rams drove down the field for the winning kick.
And now that we know how it turned out, yes, we’d like to know what was behind Curtain No. 2, and would like to know how it would have gone if the Bears had tried for two. But that’s not how time works. At this point, I think Ben Johnson did the right thing.
I’d like to tell you about the book I’m working on next year… but I feel like I should probably wait to save the surprise. I will tell you that one of the chapters in the book (maybe this will give some of it away) is about Wilbur Wood, who died on Sunday at the age of 84.
Wilbur Wood was so great. Everything about him. He started his career as a hard-throwing strikeout pitcher – fastball and curveball, like Koufax. That didn’t work out — his hometown Red Sox sold him to the Pirates — and he started leaning on the knuckleball he’d been throwing all his life. None other than Hoyt Wilhelm helped him hone the pitch. The Pirates traded him to the White Sox, where he became a super-reliever in 1968, playing in 88 games and throwing 159 innings with a 1.87 ERA.
Over time, the White Sox brought him into the rotation. From 1971 to 1975, he averaged – AVERAGE – 45 starts and 336 innings per year. If you want to win a bar bet (assuming “bar bets” even exist anymore), ask a baseball fan to name the highest WAR season for any American League pitcher in the 1970s.
Answer: Wilbur Wood, 1971, when he went 22-13 with a 1.91 ERA and posted 11.7 wins above replacement.
But it was more than his performance. The man was simply wonderful in every way. “On the hill,” Roger Angell wrote of him, “he displays a comfortable expanse and the stiff-looking knees of an inveterate indoor man, and thus resembles a left-handed accountant or pastry chef on a Sunday outing.”
#Dad #moments #miracle #throws #knuckleballs