Chicago Again...and Again (Excerpt from: "I'd Rather be Wright") by Steve Wright

I talked with a friend of mine, Tom Fears, who was the head coach of the California Suns, and he said he wanted me to play out there. So, it didn't thrill me at all when I got a telephone call one day that said Congratulations, I'd been drafted by the Chicago Fire. I didn't want to go to Chicago. I played with the Bears before and I really didn't like Chicago. I still don't.

I had trucked on out to Montana and was living there up in the mountains in a cabin. It was three and a half miles down the road to the first telephone, a trip I had to make two or three times a day, trying to get sometihng going between Chicago and California, getting put on hold and everything else, until I just decided the hell with it, I'll go out to Chicago and see what they're going to offer me.

So I flew to Chicago and talked with a guy by the name of Bill Byrne, the Player Personnel Director. Now, about Player Personnel Directors, these guys are the greatest con artists in the world. It's like somebody took a rubber stamp when they were born and said, this guy's going to be a con artist or a Player Personnel Director. They're made out of the same mold. They can tell you the sun's going to come up tomorrow and it's maybe a fifty-fifty shot that it will. After a while, you take everything with a grain of salt.

So anyway, I talked to Bill and somehow ended up with a $45,000 contract, which wasn't too bad. In fact, it was the most I'd ever made. Everything was hunky-dorey until I asked them to reimburse me for the plane fare. They didn't really want to, but I told them they'd either pay it or I'd tear the contract up. We were going to do things professionally or not at all. Well, they finally went ahead and paid for the plane from Billings to Chicago and back, and that is basically how I joined the World Football League. I figured to give it my whole-hearted effort and be a professional football player again.

Training camp was a fiasco from the start. There were at least a hundred and fifty people there, all trying out. Christ, you couldn't even find a place to sit down for dinner. But, the biggest thrill, I guess, was the coaches, who were into the high school and college bit where you try to kill everybody.

Head coach was Jim Spavital, a drill seargent type. He made us wear socks. I mean, he made us wear socks all the time. Now, training camp attire is casual. You're hot, you're tired, and you don't want to be messing around with anything, just cut-offs, a tee-shirt, and flip-flops, or sandals. But, at Lake Forest, it was sandals and socks at all times. It got to the point where guys started taking socks from the club just wear with their sandals. But, these socks had big marks on them so you could tell where they were from, and the club announced that if anybody got caught wearing the team's socks, he'd be fined!