And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that Kermit the Frog insisted it wasn’t easy being green, and I am finding out it isn’t easy being a sports fan without Internet access.

In advance I had noticed that the Masters golf tournament would be on TV all four days, so I looked forward to seeing how Iowan Zach Johnson would do. He did not do well, and in fact missed the cut and so missed the final two days.

The Chicago Cubs opened the season on the west coast, which is good news for the players because it was cold and nasty in the middle of the nation. I did not see any of those first five games when the Cubs won four of them. They were televised on two stations which my basic cable service does not offer, plus with the time difference they did not start until 8:30 or 9 p.m., which means it would be midnight before they were over, and that’s well past my bedtime.

Some Cubs games are being shown on a Cedar Rapids channel this year, also not available to me.

Since the Cubs cut WGN off about the only times I get to see them play on TV is when it’s against Milwaukee, because a Wisconsin station carries all Brewer’s games, or once in a great while on ESPN. A tremendous difference for someone who used to watch every game on WGN.

So, I sometimes listen to radio broadcasts, but stations which carry the games are AM stations, and after sundown reception is chancy.

Iowa University is supposed to have a good baseball team this year, so when I found KXIC in Iowa City was broadcasting the Iowa-Illinois game Sunday afternoon, April 10,1 listened.

Iowa had the lead by a run going into the ninth, but Illinois had the bases loaded, and things were getting tense. At that time, KXIC cut away from the Iowa game to cover the Cubs!

So I listened for a time, but as sundown approached, the signal faded.

I went to the Big Ten TV channel which sometimes runs a crawl at the bottom of the screen to show how games other than the one they are televising are going. But they had to leave the game they were covering because of weather, and each time it seemed the crawl would cover Iowa’s final score, the apology crawl replaced it.

By that time, the early KWWL TV news show came on, and I figured they would have the Iowa game score. But just as the announcer was into the story, they had a technical glitch. He said they would be right back. Not so.

So it wasn’t until the KCRG TV news show half an hour later that I found out Iowa won.

So did the Cubs, according to the ESPN crawl. My Cubs info has come mostly by means of box scores in the dailies, but because the games are not over by their early deadlines, the box scores are two days old.

Frustrating for an old fan... old in more ways than one!”