CHICAGO — Noah Pinzur had a piece of advice for Eric Bohn.
Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame. It goes by fast.
Bohn and Pinzur never have met and probably never will. They’re just a couple of Chicago sports fans who religiously follow their teams in and out of season.
The strange tie that binds them is that both had accidental run-ins with future Chicago sports executives and felt the urgent need to let their fellow fans know about the imminent hiring.
In an age when teams go to great lengths to prevent the media from reporting the news before having a chance to leak it themselves, Bohn and Pinzur were flies in the ointment.
Bohn’s proverbial 15 minutes began Monday night at O’Hare International Airport, where he had returned from a skiing trip to Stowe, Vt. Coming down an escalator in Terminal 1, he was surprised to see Chicago Bears Chairman George McCaskey, who Bohn correctly theorized was there to pick up a coaching or general manager candidate.
“If it was a crowded airport, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed him,” Bohn said. “But he was literally the only person standing there.”
McCaskey held a sign that said “Canandaigua,” a reference to GM candidate Ryan Poles’ hometown in western New York. But Bohn said McCaskey wasn’t holding it up “and doing the whole limo chauffeur” thing, as many imagined when his story came out.
So was Bohn sure it was McCaskey? Yes, he was, in spite of McCaskey’s brilliant disguise.
“It didn’t help him that he was wearing a Bears jacket and a Bears mask,” he said, laughing. “I was like, ‘(Bleep), that’s George McCaskey.’ ”
Sightings of Chicago sports executives at O’Hare are rare. The last memorable one occurred in July 2000, when Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, nicknamed “The Sleuth,” was seen hugging free agent Tracy McGrady as McGrady stepped off a plane, back before 9/11 security measures banned visitors from going to the gate. The Luvabulls were also there to cheer on McGrady, and a band played “Sweet Home Chicago.”
The recruitment effort failed, and Krause was criticized for making Chicago seem like Hooterville. But McCaskey is no Krause, and apparently he was working undercover, waiting to pick up Poles. As the old Chicago saying goes: “Nothing says I love you more than picking up someone at O’Hare.”
Bohn, a 41-year-old realtor from Glenview, did what any navy-and-orange-blooded Bears fan would do at a George McCaskey sighting. He took out his phone and surreptitiously shot a brief video.
“I lingered there for a minute and took a quick little video to send to my buddies and we’ll all get a good laugh,” he said. “Then a minute later Ryan Poles comes down the escalator (and) they head to the luggage carousel. George graciously picked up his bag and rolled it for him and they went on.”
After a quick Google image search to confirm it was indeed Poles, Bohn sent a text to his friends. He said he didn’t want to bother the two, so he didn’t introduce himself. One of Bohn’s friends suggested he alert ESPN 1000 to the video, which he did, tagging the radio station’s Twitter account and some of its personalities.
By Tuesday morning, Bohn’s video had been discovered on Twitter. He was asked to talk about it on ESPN 1000. Before long the video was on almost all of the local TV stations and Bears fans were on social media debating the meaning of the pickup, judging McCaskey’s attire and wondering whether he actually drove Poles back to the North Shore.
It wasn’t long before news leaked that Poles would be the next Bears GM.
Pinzur followed the Bears saga with great interest, having been in Bohn’s shoes more than 10 years ago. Pinzur was at a North Side Starbucks in October 2011 when he ran into someone who looked conspicuously like Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, rumored to be the top candidate to run the Chicago Cubs.
Pinzur asked the man if he was Epstein. “No,” the man replied. “I get that a lot. ... Who is Theo Epstein?” Pinzur told him this Epstein guy was the one most fans wanted to head the Cubs front office. After the man left, Pinzur did a Google search of “Theo Epstein” and “Theo Epstein’s wife” to confirm what he had just seen.
Then he did what any blue-and-red-blooded Cubs fan would do in 2011 at a Theo Epstein sighting at a Lincoln Park Starbucks. He left a voicemail with a Chicago Tribune writer advising him Epstein was in town.
An article on the alleged Starbucks sighting appeared in the Tribune the next day — and was widely mocked. But it wasn’t long before news leaked that the Cubs indeed would hire Epstein as president of baseball operations.
At his introductory news conference, Epstein admitted his cover had been blown at Starbucks.
“When I’m somewhere when I don’t want to be recognized and someone recognizes me, I have a couple standard lines I go to,” he said. “I usually always say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me, but I guess I kind of look like him. I get that a lot.’ Or I say, ‘Theo Epstein? Who’s that?’
“And I was so excited to be in Chicago and so surprised to be recognized that I dropped both lines on this guy without stopping to think they really don’t work very well in concert with each other.”
Pinzur, who had been mocked by his buddies for spreading a false rumor, was finally vindicated.
“My 15 minutes were extended by a few minutes,” Pinzur said that day. “But it was fun while it lasted.”
The moral of the story is it’s hard to keep a secret in Chicago, no matter how much effort a team puts into keeping things under wraps. Someone always is looking for clues, and with smartphones and social media, everyone is an amateur sleuth.
“That’s the world we live in now, right?” Bohn said. “If you see something, say something.”
