One Last By Crackee

Fare thee well, buddy.

I don't think I'm going out on much of a ledge to say a fair few of you, like me, had Terry Boers as a major part of your childhood. Which is a truly terrifying thing to admit, but we're all too old to lie to each other now. For me, it's an easy through-line to listening to The old Afternoon Show, to being a regular caller (I'll still get you one day, Goff!), to never really having a fear of public speaking, to love of performing on stage (high school theater dork alert), to stand-up comedy, to The C.I. and S.C.H, to Deadspin, to here. At the root of it, was Terry.

When the Score started, I don't want to say that sports coverage was humorless. This is when Sportscenter hosted by the likes of Keith Olbermann (before he went totally crackers, or at least more totally crackers), Jack Edwards, Charlie Steiner, Tom Mees, Kenny Mayne...all of these guys had a sense of humor. But obviously, television had a gloss that didn't apply to the way we watched sports at home.

Though Chicago hadn't had a full-time sports radio station until The Score, the medium still had a rep for being for the truly lost. Ok, The Score quickly also became for the truly lost, but a different kind of truly lost. It was where sports was discussed and debated as if it was life and death. This was SERIOUS STUFF. Sports radio was just for the weird uncles who didn't get invited to Christmas.

Then there was the first time I heard Terry and Dan McNeil. These guys weren't taking it all that seriously. They obviously had other interests. They goofed off. They made dirty jokes, they made silly jokes, they made jokes that made no sense. They made fun of their coworkers for taking things too seriously. They talked about sports the way my brother and I talked about sports. This was how, I imagined at age 11, it sounded at the bar (turns out, it did). Obviously, I was immediately hooked.

Every Afternoon Show started the same way. There would be transition with the midday show, commercial, update, and then Terry would do a 3-4 minute monologue on whatever was on his mind that day, and generally there wasn't ever an incorrect syllable in it. Whether he was just analyzing something, or tearing some schmuck to shreds, it didn't matter. He always nailed it, proving that you could be a total doofus and highly intelligent at the same time. Not hard to see how this spoke to me.

When Terry wanted to be smart, there was no one smarter. When he wanted to be angry, no one did it better. When he wanted to be funny, no one had us on the floor more. I distinctly remember when The Score finally started streaming, and my brother in New York could listen daily again and how excited he was. And his work partner who had the misfortune of having to share an office with Adam, who had been raised on WFAN and Mike And The Mad Dog, hearing B&B for the first time, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THESE GUYS?!" We still don't really know.

Terry showed a lot of us that there was a different way to cover sports, and that the guys covering it were actually way bigger weirdos and freaks than we'd previously known. Whenever he had a fellow scribe on as a guest, some beat writer he had traveled with back in his Sun-Times days, you could tell that there were dozens of stories they couldn't tell about their adventures as an undercurrent to every exchange. The podcast guys and I were just talking about how he and Bernie Lincicome couldn't stop touching each other on "Sportsfire" whenever he was on that show. How much was really going on there?

I and my brother were lucky enough to call Terry a friend for a long time after becoming regular callers. Dan and Terry called my brother and me at home when our mother passed. Bernstein and Terry shouted us out when our father passed a couple decades later. His presence was always a constant for us.

I'll just share some stories that I get to keep from my time with him.

-Somewhere around age 15, Dan and Terry were doing a remote from The Taste Of Chicago. I happened to be downtown for other reasons, so I sauntered over. During a brief chat with Terry during a break, I mentioned that I was flying down to Miami to see Adam the next day. He told me to hang on a second, and went back into the Score's tent. He emerged and handed me one of those promotional headshots, that he signed...

"Dear Adam,

Bite me!

Sincerely,

Terry Boers"

The image of a smiling Boers telling my brother to bite him was a delight, and Adam kept that on his fridge in various apartments in at least four different cities over a span of 15 years at least, bewildering a collection of roommates and friends alike. That was the first thing I thought of upon hearing the news.

-Somehow, when I was 14, I was invited on the Scorehead trip to Milwaukee to see a White Sox-Brewers game at County Stadium. I definitely should not have been. Terry pulling me aside to tell me a story about O.J. Simpson and Farrah Fawcett was the biggest reason why, and I'll leave it there.

-During the 2013-2015 Hawks seasons, I was lucky enough to be an in-studio guest for Laurence Holmes a handful of times. It was always right as his show began, meaning I would get to the station right as Bernstein and Boers were ending their show. Though I only got to see Terry sporadically over the years, every time I was greeted with a hug and a quick catch-up, and how excited he was to watch me go from a child caller to doing my own thing and finding success with it. It always left me bouncing. A lot of people who listened to Terry daily thought he was an asshole, and he could certainly be for effect, but for those who knew him, I doubt they have found too many people warmer in their lives.

There's little question that Terry addled my, and a generation of young Chicago sports fans', mind. Look at the title of this fucking tribute, for god's sake. Just the other day, I thought of something random that made me laugh, and I sat in my house alone, doing that off-mic howl that Terry would make when he found something funny. "BAAHHHHHHHHHH HAAAAAAA HAAAAAAA!" There's a language that all of us speak, that anyone listening to it who wasn't clued in would assume we'd all suffered a stroke.

Terry was a daily part of my life, and many others', for nearly 30 years. He helped put me on the path I've been on...so it's his fault, mom! I think Terry would be ok with me blaming him. But it's been a lot of fun, and he'd appreciate that more. Thanks for everything, T.B. Diddler (there's another one).