Finally, a feel-good moment for Chicago. For the first time in 15 years, the Bears will be in the NFC\u2019s divisional playoff. A victory Sunday night before the home crowd in Soldier Field would put the team \u2014 admittedly the underdogs \u2014 just one win away from their first Super Bowl appearance since 2007.<\/p>\n
Chicago is totally digging it. After everything the city has gone through lately, most locals are reveling in the team\u2019s dramatic showing and their widely held belief that success by the Bears or any of Chicago\u2019s other pro sports teams can unify the city\u2019s often fractious people, interests and neighborhoods and boost the city\u2019s reputation across the country.<\/p>\n
We certainly need a lift. Since the COVID-19 lockdowns turned downtown Chicago into a ghost town that\u2019s still pockmarked with zombie office towers and empty storefronts almost six years later, the city has had a plague of widely publicized (and politicized) problems that have worried even boosters about our hometown\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n
Amid a tsunami of violence and lawlessness across the U.S. in 2021, Chicago became the undisputed \u201cmurder capital\u201d of the U.S. by total numbers, logging roughly 800 homicides. (Fortunately, killings and violent crime in general have steadily declined since then, with total homicides retreating last year to their lowest total in 60 years.)\u00a0 <\/p>\n
In 2022, Texas began sending immigrants here by the busload, an influx that eventually topped 50,000 and overwhelmed the capacity of the city\u2019s makeshift emergency shelters. Last year, Chicago began facing a new immigrant-related crisis when the Trump administration began deploying masked and heavily armed agents to round up and deport migrants in the country without legal permission.<\/p>\n
And all the while, President Donald Trump has kept a running public commentary on Chicago, calling the city a \u201chellhole,\u201d the \u201cworst and most dangerous city in the world\u201d and \u201cembarrassing to us as a nation.\u201d Right-leaning media have regularly chimed in, too, with one outlet tagging Mayor Brandon Johnson as \u201cAmerica\u2019s worst mayor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phew!<\/p>\n
But as we make our way into the new year, our city at long last has something definitively positive going for it that\u2019s earning national media attention \u2014 the Cinderella Chicago Bears. Let\u2019s take advantage of it, say supermajorities in a new Outward Intelligence poll of city and suburban Cook County residents.<\/p>\n
More than 9 in 10 respondents say they think professional sports success influences national perceptions of Chicago, with 44% saying it\u2019s \u201cvery\u201d or \u201cextremely\u201d influential. Half also believe that the success of a major-league team improves how outsiders view Chicago.<\/p>\n
More than 90%, once again, think Chicago sports teams bring us together across neighborhoods, backgrounds and political views, with more than half saying that power of team affinity is \u201ca lot\u201d or \u201ca great deal.\u201d And 56% say they feel more proud to live in Chicago when our teams are winning.<\/p>\n
There are subtle differences between women and men. Women are slightly more likely to see sports as a way to bridge differences among people and to believe that team success raises outsiders\u2019 opinions of Chicago. They also are more likely than men to be proud of a triumphant Chicago team.<\/p>\n
Regardless of demographics, the pride is naturally bigger when the win is bigger. Although it\u2019s been a while, those of us who are older remember the elation we felt when a Chicago team won their league championship, and the residual rush when we traveled around the country or even abroad later on and spotted people wearing Bulls jerseys in the 1990s or Cubs caps after the 2016 World Series.<\/p>\n
Winning the Super Bowl might even change elected officials\u2019 minds about subsidizing a new Bears stadium in northwest suburban Arlington Heights to keep the team from defecting to northwest Indiana when they hang it up at Soldier Field in the next few years.<\/p>\n
Or maybe not. Though Gov. JB Pritzker has said he\u2019s still talking with team owners about public investments in stadium-related infrastructure, he has reiterated that he\u2019s most concerned about \u201cnot wasting taxpayer money.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not the only skeptic. In previous polling<\/a>, 94% of Chicagoland residents said pro sports are an important part of our culture, and three-quarters agreed that losing a team to another locale would hurt. But 60% also said public financing of a sports stadium is a bad idea. (A caveat: That survey was conducted when the Bears were closing a 5-12 season.)<\/p>\n Of course, the Bears could end up losing Sunday night, which would shift national media attention immediately to Los Angeles. If that happens, Chicago\u2019s die-hard fans will respond like they always have: Wait till next year.<\/p>\n Will Johnson is the Chicago-based CEO of Outward Intelligence, an artificial intelligence-powered quantitative research company, and former CEO of The Harris Poll.<\/p>\n Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Finally, a feel-good moment for Chicago. For the first time in 15 years, the Bears will be in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":525042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,531,5386,1818,87645,118374],"class_list":{"0":"post-525041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-chicago-bears","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-polling","13":"tag-unity"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115915925114315184","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}