CHICAGO
Chicago sports fans had a lot of things to pay attention to this past weekend.
The local papers were full of stories on the No. 1-ranked University of Illinois men's basketball team, the NFL playoffs and the Cubs' inability to attract star outfielder Carlos Beltran to Wrigley Field.
But a few people were paying attention to something else.
They were focused on something that had not taken place in their city for nearly 21 years, enough time for a whole generation of fans to experience the misery of Chicago sports.
For the first time since Jan. 22, 1984, the Penn men's basketball team was in town. And the Quakers fans in this part of the country took the occasion as a personal celebration.
"It's a big family," said Duvol Thompson, a Calumet City, Ill., native who just finished an impressive career with the Penn football team. "When I see guys wearing the Penn sweatshirt, I go and introduce myself -- I don't know them, or they come up to me."
Thompson never got to play in his hometown, or anywhere near it. That's part of the nature of Ivy League football, though, where trips outside the Eastern time zone only come around every 50 years or so.
"I wish we played football out here -- I wish we had a game at least in the Midwest somewhere," Thompson said.
Penn's basketball team, on the other hand, has a far bigger frequent-flier mile balance. This season's schedule has games in 10 states, stretching from New Hampshire to California.
You wouldn't normally think that a program of Penn's nature would have significant fan support wherever it plays. Schools like Duke, Notre Dame and Texas are known for bringing out big crowds when they play under the glamorous lights of big cities.
But an Ivy League school?
Apparently so.
"When you're kind of far removed from Penn geographically, it's kind of nice to see Penn come out to where you are," Penn Global Alumni Network assistant director Bart Miltenberger said. "It's a good chance to get out and relive a little bit of the Penn thing, and see some people they haven't seen for a while."
Miltenberger was in charge of coordinating parties before this past week's games in Chicago and San Francisco. Both drew nearly 200 people, and Penn's fans were often louder in the stands than those who cheered for the home team.
Granted, the Illinois-Chicago students had yet to return from Winter Break when their team took the floor Saturday afternoon. But it was striking to hear Penn fans participating in the rhythmic clapping during the starting lineups while sitting in an arena hundreds of miles from the Palestra.
And while he was surely focused on other things for much of the afternoon, Penn senior guard Tim Begley was well aware of the vocal support for his team.
"It's nice to look up in the crowd and see some Penn sweatshirts and sweaters, and know that there are people all over the country supporting you."
For both Begley and coach Fran Dunphy, that made the loss even harder to take.
"It's disappointing that we didn't play better to reward them for their loyalty," Dunphy said.
That loyalty comes even though Penn is far from the national college basketball spotlight these days. UIC has also struggled for attention lately, even in its own market. Northwestern and DePaul's games on Saturday were both given greater prominence in local media than UIC's, even though the Flames were the only team in the city to make the NCAA tournament last year.
And at about the same time that the Quakers and Flames were tipping off, the high-flying Illini were playing at Purdue on national television, with 4,000 orange-clad fans making the trip from Champaign to Mackey Arena.
For a few hours, though, Penn fans in Chicago got to put their team above the rest of the sports world. The game itself was disappointing, but sometimes other things matter more.
Jonathan Tannenwald is a junior Urban Studies major from Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.
