USOC awards Chicago the right to bid for 2016 Summer Olympics

The story is here.

The question is: why?

Anyone who has watched Cubs games on WGN over the years knows this thing to be true: Chicago, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, is the most miserable place on Earth, outside of Mississippi and Alabama.

Heat, humidity. I mean, awful. Visiting players dip towels in ice water and drape them over their heads in the dugout. In the stands, Bobby Backlava look-alikes strip to the waist in Wrigley Field--not a pretty sight.

In July and August, Chicagoans with money and sense escape to Michigan's north peninsula, to Canada, to--don't deny it--Southern California. Those stuck stay stuck--as in, the bus seat, the El seat, the office chair, the bleacher seat.

Conversely, the same slate of time Southern California is Heaven. Seventy degrees, no humidity, no rain, cool breezes off the Pacific.

What were these people thinking?

For people with enough money, geography influences behavior. Washington empties out in August, Paris in July and August. The Hamptons are a graveyard between Halloween and Easter. P-town is a ghost town after Labor Day. Houston's restaurants literally close down on Memorial day weekend. And the Arizona snowbirds go home at Easter, and come back at Thanksgiving, just in time to give us all a picture-perfect view of a powder-blue Cadillac El Dorado going 35 miles per hour on the Squaw Peak Parkway.

Given all that, it mystifies me why great entities with unfathomable money would go out of their way to create such misery. In 1988, the Democrats held their National Convention in Atlanta, the Republicans in New Orleans, and from my vantage point in upstate New York, all I could ask was: Why? Why torment yourself with 90-degree weather and 95-percent humidity, when the weather is so great in Vermont, in Montana, in Southern California?

I thought the same thing four years later, as a nascent journalist covering the Houston convention. There was much to complain about in Houston, but the weather wasn't one; it rained for a week before anyone showed up, and the cool breezes blew. But still.

So. So I can reconcile myself to the notion that Georgia and Louisiana were important state in 1988. What was to prevent the GOP from meeting at the basketball arena in Syracuse, NY, or the Minneapolis Metrodome?

So, Chicago, 2016. Peter Ueberroth is supposed to be in charge of all this. Doesn't he remember that the Los Angeles Olympics, circa 1984, were the greatest in history, that those were the games that signalled the modern Olympics as we know them?

Guess not.