Golden (4 page)

Rod also developed a passion for basketball, hoping maybe that was the pathway to athletic success. He was drawn to the game and especially the
American Basketball Association, the young upstart league best known for its freewheeling style, flashy players, and red, white, and blue basketball. He practiced incessantly, shooting hoops outside in the summer and inside neighborhood gyms when winter arrived.

“I felt I got actually pretty good,” Blagojevich said proudly from the witness stand. “And I can't say this for sure, but I think when I was governor, out of the fifty of us, I was the only governor in America who could spin a basketball on all five fingers of his right hand. At least I had that going for me.”

Around Blackhawk Park and on the streets around their apartment, Rob and Rod were well known and well liked by the neighborhood kids, forming friendships that would last well into their adulthoods. A few blocks away lived Danny Stefanski, who was part Serbian, and Michael Ascaridis, a Greek kid who, because he was raised orthodox, had cultural and religious similarities. And there were the Wolfer brothers and Danny Colla, who years later would hang out with Rod and constantly be mistaken in public for the male model Fabio. There were the Angarola brothers, Danny and Michael, who would later help Rod get a job with the Cook County State's Attorney's office.

At Lloyd, Rod was an average student still very much living in the shadow of his brother. But he began developing an uncanny knack for memorization. Millie had purchased a set of World Book encyclopedias, and Rod would sit down in the front room and read sections over and over, especially history and the encyclopedia's mini-biographies of American presidents. Rod would soon turn around and recite nearly all the facts back to his parents.

It was almost as if Blagojevich had a photographic memory, but his skill was different. Rod had developed a memorization trick that allowed him to take a piece of information and associate it with an object he wouldn't forget, thereby allowing him to remember the facts. He would most often do it with the presidents, playing an association game in his mind that allowed him to recite long lists seemingly with little effort.

“Give me a list of forty-two common words that I could picture, a mug or a tape recorder, and give me ten seconds with each word, and I can associate them with each president and I can give them to you backwards, forwards, you know, number 16, number 12,” he'd later tell reporters. “I'd win bets doing that. I developed that interest…. I was very interested in presidents
and birds. My favorite president was Lincoln, and my favorite bird was the scarlet tanager.”

It quickly became clear Rod was headed more for a life in politics than ornithology. And the skills he was developing as a child would come in handy as a politician. He'd amaze average people he had met only once, mentioning details about when they had met and where and who else was with them. It was a skill Blagojevich would use to connect with people, allowing them to feel like he wasn't the typical arrogant elected official but instead the downto-earth neighborhood guy who had just happened to have gotten lucky and grown up to become governor.

As a boy, he also memorized famous phrases, inspiring sayings, and poems. Among his favorite was the well-worn poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which is known for its famous line, “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Rod didn't learn of the poem while reading it at school or the library. No, he became intrigued with it while watching an NFL Films television episode about running backs, in which the narrator delivered the line as the screen showed slow-motion action shots of football stars dodging tacklers and bolting down the sidelines.

Still, he memorized it quickly and would again try to impress his classmates with his keen skills of recollection. This ability also helped him a bit in school, compensating for his lack of book smarts and poor performance on standardized tests, especially compared with Robert, who after grade school went on to attend one of the better public high schools on the North Side, Lane Tech. Though it had started as a technical school, Lane Tech's focus had become a college prep curriculum, something Rob and Rod's parents appreciated as they regularly talked about how their goal was to send both boys to college. Rob was doing well at Lane and just as well in athletics. He played all manner of sports but was especially good in baseball. By his senior year, though, he tore a bicep that cost him later.

Rod soon followed his brother to Lane. Built on more than thirty acres on the city's crowded North Side, Lane is a landmark in Chicago. The massive red-brick school at the corner of Addison Street and Western Avenue looks like a castle. A little more than two miles west of Wrigley Field, it
stood five miles—and several neighborhoods—away from the Blagojevichs' apartment. More than five thousand students attended the school—fifteen hundred in Blagojevich's class alone.

Although the school had high standards, it still had some rough pockets, and some of the Blagojevich brothers' fellow students joined gangs. One of the larger gangs on the North Side at the time that had members at Lane was made up mostly of white, greaser-type teenage boys who called themselves the Gaylords. Also a student at Lane, Rod's friend Danny Stefanski joined up with the group. The members hung out on street corners drinking, picking up girls, and getting into fights. Stefanski inked a small tattoo of the gang's main symbol, a cross, on one of hands with India ink and a small needle.

Years later, the Gaylords became a modern-day street gang as members carried guns, dealt drugs, and committed crimes all over the North Side. Increasingly, the nearly all-white gang got into racial and ethnic battles with black and Latino gangs that moved into Cragin and other North Side neighborhoods European immigrants were abandoning. Rod continued to hang around with Stefanski and the neighborhood guys who joined the Gaylords, but Blagojevich stayed on the periphery. It was clear to most of them he was no fighter.

“He'd hang out on the perimeter with the guys but not get into trouble,” said one neighborhood friend who was in the Gaylords. “Rod never got into that. We socialized, but he wasn't in on that end of it.”

Blagojevich's focus was more on making Lane's sports teams. He tried out for the baseball team but got cut right away. So he tried out for basketball. Rod wasn't much for attacking the boards or taking the ball to the hole, choosing to rely on his jump shot. And still trying to live up to his brother's standards, Rod practiced constantly in the gravel lot around his home, in the school parking lot, even in his bedroom where he looked at himself in the mirror and examined how good he looked shooting.

On Friday nights, Blagojevich could be found in the gym at the neighborhood high school, Foreman, which hosted after-school “activity nights.” Rod was frustrated because he was riding the bench at Lane. Foreman's basketball coach saw Rod practicing one night and told him that if he transferred he could play on Foreman's varsity team. By his sophomore year, Rod was ready to leave Lane. Not only was he failing at basketball, but he also failed his drafting class.

Unlike Lane Tech, which was set back from the streets and had almost a college campus atmosphere, Foreman stood right on the corner of Belmont and Leclaire and lacked any distinctive architectural flair beyond average neighborhood high schools. Fewer kids attended Foreman, which meant less competition for the basketball team. Rod heeded the coach's advice and transferred. But before enrolling for his junior year he spent the summer— occasionally donning red Converse All-Stars that drove his anti-communist father nuts—wearing ankle weights when he practiced to make him quicker and jump higher.

At Foreman, he was good enough to make the team. He was also good at adding tricks to his basketball repertoire. He was remembered less for his play and more for a move in which he drove down the court, dribbled twice behind his back and once under his knee, and then swished the ball through the hoop. But Blagojevich's high school basketball career was brief. Early in the season he broke his wrist, officially ending his basketball dreams.

Rade was also struggling, but on much more serious matters. Rade's work brought in a steady income but not enough, especially with Robert already in college and Rod about to go. It was around this time in 1974 that Rade learned about lucrative jobs on the Alaskan pipeline. Rade and Millie talked it over, and Rade decided to go.

Rod was sad to see his father leave, but he was also caught up in his high school life. He took a summer job for $3.25 an hour at Stewart Warner, which manufactured vehicle instruments such as speedometers, working in the packaging department. Nights were still spent at Blackhawk Park, hanging out with friends from the neighborhood.

But with his basketball dreams dashed, Rod was looking for something else to pique his interest. Never finding his stride as a student, he enjoyed reading, especially history books about politicians. Rather than do his chemistry or math homework, Rod routinely whiled away hours in libraries reading about Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Entering his senior year in high school, he picked up a biography about Teddy Roosevelt and learned that as a young man Roosevelt was sickly, with terrible asthma and worse eyesight, and was bullied by other kids. Roosevelt took up boxing and vowed never to be weak again.

Blagojevich had no such inspiring story. But when he read about Roosevelt, he thought it would be cool to try the sport. His friend Mike Ascaridis was a good boxer and helped Blagojevich along. Ascaridis was so good, he'd
fight regularly throughout the Chicago area and later be nicknamed Lou Nova after the amateur boxing champ from the 1930s.

With Ascaridis's assistance, Blagojevich hooked up with the Chicago Park District boxing program and the Golden Gloves tournament, the local amateur boxing competition. Worried his mother wouldn't allow him to fight, Rod got a girlfriend to forge his mother's signature on the application.

His first fight was at Clarendon Park, where Blagojevich lost in a decision. Afterward, Rod had to pick up his mother from her CTA ticket-taking job. When Millie got into the car, she looked at Rod's face and body. He had bruises and rope burns all over.

“What have you done?”

Rod explained his newfound boxing career. Millie was not amused.

“No more,” she insisted.

But Rod persisted a little while longer.

Before a Golden Gloves match in March 1975—held in church gym near Wrigley Field—Blagojevich was sitting in the ring when he saw photographer Richard Younker hanging around the perimeter. With Blagojevich's coach, Jerry Marzullo, standing nearby, Rod made the unusual request of asking Younker to take his picture. The photographer wouldn't have taken Blagojevich's picture otherwise, having found Rod to be a particularly uninteresting subject. But Younker went ahead and took three photos of Blagojevich, including one in which Rod winks his right eye as Marzullo gives him some final instructions before a bout Blagojevich quickly lost.

In total, he had six fights in a decidedly unremarkable career, splitting two bouts in the Golden Gloves and two more in the Chicago Park District tournament. He won just two exhibition matches, and another coach, Pat LaCassa, explained why. During Blagojevich's final fight, he said, Rod lost because he spent far too much time with his gloves up, trying to protect his face.