I have a visitor for much of this week: Adam King, the son of my best friend of yore, Kenny King, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in April of last year. The link in the previous sentence goes to my memoriam for Kenny, but now his son is passing through Chicago on his way back to Valencia, Spain, where he lives.

Kenny was a sports fan, and so is Adam, so he wanted to see some baseball—and have a Chicago pizza. We’ve now fulfilled both of those aims, though so far baseball has been limited to the White Sox, a team that, as Kenny’s sportswriter brother Peter says, “blows.” (You may know Peter King from his football broadcasting on television and his weekly column in Sports Illustrated.) Tomorrow Adam will go to a real baseball game, watching the Cubs at Wrigley field.

But first, the pizza. There are two unique Chicago-style pizzas: deep dish (a thick bready crust, about 1.5 inches thick, covered with cheese, tomato, and, ideally, homemade sausage) and the stuffed pizza: two crusts bracketing a filling of melted cheese and other stuff, and with tomato sauce on top. I decided that the stuffed pizza was more representative of a pie you can’t get elsewhere, at least of the quality it attains in Chicago. So we went to Giordano’s and ordered the Giordano’s special, the “Chicago Classic,” size medium. This feeds four people, since two slices are all most folks can manage.

Here’s Adam about to dig into his first piece:

I just realize that Adam reminds me a bit of the younger Tom Cruise. Do you agree?

A closeup of this vaunted pie, which is groaning with gobs of cheese, pepperoni, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms. You haven’t lived till you’ve had one of these—but only in Chicago.

Giordano’s is BYOB, so I went down the street to get beer while our pie was cooking (it takes 45 minutes). I was about to get a six-pack of a good craft beer when I spotted a huge case of Rolling Rock: 30 cans for $13. I immediately bought it, but not because of the price.

I bought it because it was the beer that Adam’s father and I drank most often when we were in college (probably because it was cheap and fairly drinkable). You can see below a picture of Kenny and I taken in 1977 by Clark Quin, a fellow W&M alumnus who was also a photographer. I’m holding a cigarette (I smoked a bit at that time), and Kenny is holding a “pony bottle” of Rolling Rock. Besides being tipsy on Rock, we were also stoned out of our gourds, which is probably obvious from the photo.  Rolling Rock is really beer-flavored soda, weak and watery, but we drank it as a toast to Kenny.

The game between the Chicago White Sox and Texas Rangers was played at what is now called “US Cellular Field,” a capitalistic corruption of the Sox’s old stadium: Comiskey Park. It was an exciting game, with some great fielding, and a long one. Many players got on base, but couldn’t score; and, with the score tied 2-2, it went into extra innings. Finally, at the bottom of the 11th inning (there are normally nine), Gordon Beckham, the Sox’s third baseman, poled a long homer to left field that won the game. Although many misguided fans had already left the stadium, it was a dramatic ending that created pandemonium on and off the field. Here we are in the 10th inning.