Daley: I wish we’d had Bears ball boy in Copenhagen

Mayor Daley, playing Monday morning quarterback, said he now wishes he would have had the young man who plays catch with the Bears quarterback rather than the president of the United States at the city’s pitch for the Olympics in Copenhagen last week.

The young man, Darryl Magee, a junior at the University of Illinois, achieved 15 seconds of fame on Sunday when he was seen running on the Soldier Field sideline to keep up with Bears player Johnny Knox, who was in the process of returning a kickoff 102 yards for a game-changing touchdown. Magee is a Bears ball boy and part of his responsibility is to retrieve footballs after kickoff returns.

“I just wish we’d had him in Copenhagen. He represents the ‘I will’ spirit of the city,” Daley said. “The president was off his game. But this kid, he’s like all of us. He’s about the Olympics.  He was literally chasing the dream.”

Magee, who wears jersey number 1, may have eclipsed Ronnie Woo-Woo Wickers as Chicago’s most famous uniformed wannabe. Wickers, of course,  is the pseudonym of former Cub great Ernie Banks, who simply cannot stay away from the park or the limelight.

Still, Magee  is a distant second to former Blackhawk star Tony Amonte, who once bought a Tony Amonte jersey number 10 at Hawkquarters on Michigan Avenue, put the jersey on  and then walked up and down the Mag Mile to see if anyone would recognize him. No one did even though his name was on the back of  his uniform.  He was a wannabe who wanted to be himself  but no one cared.

Magee has gained such fame that he re-created his sideline run for photographers at a park near his home in Champaign. In other words, he was, as the Doobie Brothers once said, re-creating what had yet to be created, that is, an actual touchdown run.

Magee, though still at Illinois, is 24 years old. He took time off from school but has come back to study kinesiology, the study of human movement.  It is not known whether he received independent study credit for his anatomical feat on the sidelines.

And at 24, the ball boy is actually two years older than the ball man, Knox, who ran back the kickoff.  As such Magee is reminiscent of famous Cubs employee  Marla Collins, who was the Major Leagues’ first ball girl. She was forced into retirement at age 28  but not because she was older than many of the players.  She was dismissed when she displayed her friendly confines in Playboy.

Magee also has become the city’s most popular person to wear jersey number 1, ahead of the Bulls’ Derrick Rose, who recently insisted that he took the ACT even though it was the SAT that he was accused of cheating on, and the Cubs’ Kosuke Fukodome, the Japanese-born player who fled to the Phillipines  immediately after Chicago was eliminated from Olympic consideration and before Tokyo was knocked out of the competition. It is not known yet whether Fukodome was informed that the war is over, and both sides lost.