THE GREAT RABBINO: Babe Ruth, The Great Bambino, wears a tallis in the logo introducing Rabbi Jeremy Fine’s sport’s blog (http://www.thegreatrabbino.com/).
By RICH SCHREIBSTEIN
AMSTERDAM–Jeremy Fine is six-foot three-inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, can head feint a defender and dunk a basketball. He averaged 20 plus points a game as a small forward on his high school basketball team, writes a blog about Jewish athletes, and on holidays and alternating weekends is the student rabbi at Sons of Israel Synagogue in Amsterdam.
Fine, 29, is a 2004 University of Illinois (UI) Champaign-Urbana graduate with a major in speech communication and a minor in Jewish studies. He and his wife, Jessie, an Indiana University graduate and high school math teacher, are living in an Upper West Side apartment while he finishes his last year of study at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s (JTS) rabbinical school. This past summer, on his return from a year at Machon Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Israel, he responded to an e-mail sent to JTS’s placement office from the Sons of Israel congregation and after interviewing was offered the student rabbi position.
Becoming a Sports Fanatic
“I picked up my love of sports from my father,” Fine said. “My dad would play baseball and basketball after services with the rabbi’s kids and other kids from the synagogue.”
A native of the North Side Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Fine lived five blocks from the Chicago Bulls’ practice gym and in the mid-1990s used to hang out cadging autographs from arriving players. He succeeded with Dennis Rodman, Steve Kerr and Bill Wennington, but wasn’t so lucky with the mega-stars. “I tried to get [Michael] Jordan’s and [Scotty] Pippen’s, but they used a private entrance to avoid the crowds,” Fine said. “Rodman was really friendly to us kids, not at all like the media portrayed him,” he added.
During high school, Fine’s dream was to play and coach basketball. He was on his high school’s varsity team and made the Chicago-area youth Maccabi team, going to Seattle in 1997 and Detroit in 1998. In 2000, his senior year at Chicago’s Ida Crown Jewish Academy, he volunteered as an assistant coach for the seventh- and eighth-grade team at the Sager Solomon Schechter Middle School in Northbrook. While in college, he continued his coaching with a voluntary gig at University High School (UHS), where the UI professors sent their children.
His Beloved White Sox
He may be from Chicago’s North Side, but his heart is in the South Side. Fine’s Uncle Izzy was a Chicago White Sox season ticket holder at the old Comiskey Park. Once, in 1983, when his uncle couldn’t go, his father got the tickets and Fine attended his first game. He has been a White Sox fan ever since.
“I saw the White Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays in the second game of the American League Championship Series (ALCS) in 1993. We were seven rows up on the third base side. Walking down the ramp and seeing that field and those players was a thrill,” Fine said. “We don’t get to see a lot of playoff baseball in Chicago.” Toronto won that game, 3-1 and went on to take the ALCS four games to two. Fine was in Israel in 2005-2006 attending the Conservative Yeshiva when his beloved White Sox swept the Houston Astros to win the World Series. He is not quite over that.
While his White Sox didn’t win their division in 2010, Fine still considers Ozzie Guillen the best manager in baseball. “He always goes to bat for his players. He takes the attention and media off them on purpose. They can relax and focus on playing. The White Sox have been super successful with Ozzie with an upper middle-of-the-pack payroll. He’s gutsy and smart at the same time.”
Fine took a more pragmatic approach to his own baseball playing. When he joined the local Little League, his father told him to choose a position and carve himself a niche. “I chose catcher,” Fine said. “Not a lot of kids wanted to be catchers. The glamour positions were pitching and infield, so I got to play a lot more than the other kids.”
Switching Goals
When UHS offered him a paid coaching position, Fine hesitated: taking on a paid position meant adhering to a defined schedule that sometimes meant coaching on Shabbat. Fine remained a volunteer. As his Jewish studies and Hillel involvement began to take on more relevance, Fine sat down with his parents to discuss his changing plans. “They had changed from coaching to becoming a rabbi, and I wanted to know how my folks would react to that.”
Fine’s father, Marc, a gastroenterologist, and his mother, Nan, a retired middle school gym teacher, approved of his decision to switch career goals. “My dad told me that being a rabbi and being a coach had many similarities. Rabbis and coaches are both ethical and moral leaders.” Fine said. “They were quite supportive of my decision.”
Two Pursuits: Judaism and Sports
To prepare for his August 2009 wedding, Fine took some time off from his studies. When he found himself not as interested in the wedding details as he thought he would be, he worked on creating the sports blog that he named The Great Rabbino (http://www.thegreatrabbino.com/). The site’s logo features a photoshopped picture of Babe Ruth wearing a tallis, and the name is a takeoff on one of Ruth’s nicknames, the Great Bambino. The blog features stories about Jewish athletes. Fine said, “I wanted something to do, so I thought about my two loves, Judaism and sports.”
The blog and web site feature news about Jewish athletes and coaches, college and professional, in all sports, as well as interviews Fine and a few volunteers conduct. He estimates that his blog, which was recently picked up by the Fox-affiliated sports blog site, Yardbarker, has over 50,000 readers.
The increasing popularity of his blog has allowed him access to some of the best known Jewish athletes. He interviewed Dolph Schayes, a member of the National Basketball Association Hall of Fame, who in 1996 was selected as one of the 50 greatest NBA players of all time. He has also interviewed Ron Blomberg, whose place in baseball history is assured. Blomberg, while playing for the New York Yankees in 1973, was the first major leaguer to play a game as a designated hitter. Both Schayes and Blomberg are in the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Fine just missed out on a summer interview with Ian Kinsler, the Texas Ranger’s all-star second baseman, and hopes he can reschedule it for next season.
“People love following Jewish sports, and I don’t feel there is enough press about it,” he says, adding that fans of the site range from “young people through college age through retired people.”
Fine sees sports and Judaism as being alike in many ways. “Tradition and faith are the two big words,” he says. “In sports, you always root for the same team; you don’t switch, and you have faith that every year they’re going to win.”
When not immersed in his studies, the rabbi still keeps his hand in the game, or games. He shoots hoops for the Ramah Basketball Association and the New York Urban Basketball League, and catches for the Players Sports Chicago Softball League
Athleticism apparently runs in the family. Fine’s sister, Dana, while at Ida Crown, hit 10 three-pointers in a game. Good enough for second place in the Illinois high school record book.
