Sports bucket lists are a mission for some fans – Chicago Tribune
For many sports fans, nestling into their seats at an arena to root for their team is a comfort zone of American sports tradition.
But for others, spectatorship is a quest.
“As a kid, my family would say, ‘We don’t have to spend a lot of money to go to that event. We’ll watch on TV together and everyone can enjoy it,'” said Mike Jennings of South Holland. “I did that as well, but at the same time, I was like, ‘Man, I wish I could be there.'”
Jennings now has a binder full of hundreds of ticket stubs as evidence of “being there” — a Super Bowl, PGA tournaments, the Final Four, NASCAR races, the World Series, a Floyd Mayweather fight in Las Vegas, more than a dozen baseball and football stadiums and basketball arenas.
For some, like Jennings, it’s all about attending spotlight events. For others, bucket lists become more specific.
Karen Travis, her husband, Dan, and 7-year-old daughter Riley are on a mission to see every Major League Baseball stadium together.
At one point, she had seen 30 of 32 stadiums, but “they keep rebuilding and now I have to catch up.”
The Travises, who live in Lake in the Hills, will tick off six ballparks this summer.
Having a child surely didn’t slow down the Travis family.
“We never skipped” going to games because of their daughter, Karen Travis said. “She traveled well and she still does. It was just, ‘This is how we roll.’ Now, she has a placemat for dinner that’s a map of all 50 states and we talk about where she’s been and what we did.”
Jamie Westall and her husband, Stephen Noffke, who are expecting their first child in December, hope to say the same. The couple is attempting to see all 14 Big Ten football stadiums — and are five away from completing this bucket list.
Graduates of Indiana University, they often travel to Hoosiers road games after beginning their quest as college seniors seven years ago.
They braved a tornado warning at one Indiana game and sat through a “monsoon” at a Northwestern game.
“Weather won’t stop us,” Westall said.
Jim Daly, a sports history buff, has a mission to attend every sports hall of fame and museum. A New Yorker, his travels have taken him from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to the International Volleyball Hall of Fame in western Massachusetts to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago.
“The Hall of Fames are the ultimate source of everything,” Daly said. “It’s not time specific. It’s supposed to span the (existence) of the sport.”
Some sports bucket list trekkers are on an even more personal quest.
Juanin Valdez, who lives on the South Side, is out to run a marathon in every state. He’s up to 17 after running his first Chicago marathon in 2011 wearing a cotton shirt and basketball shorts with virtually no training on a dare from his boss.
Now, his wife, Aida, is on the same mission. They plan to run marathons in West Virginia and South Dakota later this year.
After running a marathon in South Bend, Ind., in 2013, he clicked on the state on his online marathon map that tracks his goal and realized he had run a marathon in Illinois and all of its border states. He figured, why not run one in every state?
“As you look at the U.S. map and you start coloring in those states, you become that child that just wants to complete the whole map, but you can’t until you officially finish those 26.2 miles,” Valdez said. “It becomes so worthwhile. It’s nothing more than a piece of metal, but when it’s around your neck and you see it, it’s something else.”
Completing sports bucket lists is no easy task. After all, people have families, jobs and budgets.
Jennings said he spent more than $400 to buy a ticket to see the Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII in 2007. But he said friends in the sports industry or with corporate connections can help him with access to games. He said the experience has more value than the ticket price.
The best time to create a sports bucket list, according to those on the journey? Now.
“I’ve shown a lot of people this book (of ticket stubs) and they say, ‘Wow, that’s impressive,'” Jennings said. “People say, ‘I should have done that.’ When you go back in time, you can’t go and see Michael Jordan play. You can’t see Magic Johnson play. You have to do it at the time.”
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