Paul Sullivan: George Wendt's ‘Super Fans' character endures in a long tradition of on-screen Chicago sports nuts
He was one, albeit not nearly as deluded as his 'Saturday Night Live' character, Bob Swerski, of the 'Super Fans' sketches.
Wendt, who died Tuesday at age 76, gained fame for the iconic role of Norm Peterson on the 1982-93 sitcom 'Cheers,' before his popular caricature of Swerski, a Chicago sports fan who enjoyed beer and sausages with his friends while lauding 'Da Coach' Mike Ditka and the Bears and Bulls franchises.
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But Wendt also was an old-school Chicago fan from Beverly who grew up watching the Bears, White Sox and Notre Dame football, the sports pyramid of almost every kid on the South Side or in the south suburbs.
When I was the Sox beat writer back in 1996, I met Wendt at a game at what then was called new Comiskey Park and interviewed him for a story on the team's attendance woes.
'I wish I could come up with some cute little sound bite that could explain it, but it's sort of inexplicable,' he said. 'Has it ever been a hot ticket, really? … Maybe you could put it on the free TV versus cable TV thing a few years back (when the Sox moved to pay channel SportsVision in 1982), but now they're on WGN, so I don't know.
'It seems emigres to Chicago, the postgraduates who settled here in the suburbs, north or south, become Cubs fans. It seems like to be a Sox fan, you have to be born and raised on the South Side.'
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Wendt starred in a commercial for the Sox in which he huffed and puffed his way to first base, slid headfirst and was handed a beer. He also narrated a documentary on the old ballpark in 1991 called 'Eighty Years of Celebration — Old Comiskey Park.'
The Sox honored Wendt with a tribute on the video board Tuesday night at Rate Field, and team executives acknowledge he was perhaps their third-most famous celebrity fan behind former President Barack Obama and the new leader, Pope Leo XIV, aka 'Da Pope.'
Wendt never really spoke like his character on 'Da Bears' sketches, but his succinct delivery of an exaggerated Chicago accent, along with the funny scripts written by fellow 'Super Fan' Robert Smigel, who played Carl Wollarski, have endured for more than three decades.
Many forget that the image of the meatball Chicago sports fan was panned by some cultural elitists at the time. Former Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin wrote in 1992 that 'the low-brow repartee is bugging Chicago's high-brow temples of culture, perhaps because they feel it indirectly associates them with the blue-collar argot of Mayor Richard Daley's Bridgeport.'
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'People are going from Al Capone … to 'Da Bears' and 'Da Bulls,' ' Susan Lock, deputy director of the Mayor's Office of Special Events, told Kamin. Lock complained that the success of the Michael Jordan-led Bulls was 'eclipsing all these other wonderful programs that are going on in the city.'
Another spokesperson for an organization that promoted Chicago architecture and design complained that 'Da Bears and Da Bulls' skits showed 'Chicagoans to be really dumb. … Our point is that there really are a lot of smart people in Chicago.'
Some people clearly lacked a sense of humor in the '90s.
Few fan bases from other cities have been portrayed on screen as much as Chicago's, including cameos during director John Hughes' movies, such as Ferris Bueller taking in a few innings of a Cubs game with friends Cameron and Sloane in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' or Hughes adorning the bedroom of John Candy's 'Uncle Buck' with a framed Chicago Sun-Times front page from the Cubs' loss in the 1984 National League Championship Series. The headline simply read: 'OUCH!'
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An episode of 'The Conners' featured actor John Goodman and the Conner family trying to explain their loyalty to the Bears to a smug Green Bay Packers fan. Local sports themes are an occasional topic in 'The Bear,' the most Chicago show of them all. In one episode Oliver Platt's Uncle Jimmy character explains to Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) the scapegoating of Steve Bartman during the Cubs' Game 6 loss to the Florida Marlins in the 2003 NLCS. Bartman was widely ridiculed, but Uncle Jimmy fingered the true culprit: former Cubs shortstop Alex Gonzalez.
Another episode of 'The Bear' featured Richie, a White Sox fan, ripping Carmy's brother-in-law Pete (played by St. Charles' Chris Witaske) for 'probably' being a Cubs fan. The age-old narrative of Sox fans accusing Cubs fans of being poseurs who don't know baseball was explored when Richie challenged Pete to name the Cubs first baseman. 'Alfonso Rivas,' he correctly replies, to Richie's chagrin. Maybe no one outside of Chicago got the joke, but we did.
The all-time Chicago sports fan character on TV was Bob Newhart's Dr. Bob Hartley in the 1972-78 sitcom 'The Bob Newhart Show.' Hartley and his buddy, Jerry the orthodontist, always were trekking to Bulls, Cubs or Loyola basketball games, or driving to Peoria to watch a closed-circuit telecast of a blacked-out Bears-Packers game.
I once referred to Newhart in a 2021 column as 'the indisputable godfather of celebrity Chicago sports fans,' a title he did not take lightly.
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'I will wear it proudly, until of course it is eclipsed by someone else,' he wrote in a letter.
Wendt followed in Newhart's footsteps, popularizing the stereotypical loud, opinionated Chicago sports fan who always seemed assured of victory while ignoring the team's storied failures of the past.
Wendt's Bob Swerski had nothing in common with Newhart's brainy psychologist, other than their passion for Chicago's teams. But you can picture them watching a game together, cocktails in hand, while voicing optimism that things eventually will get better, despite evidence to the contrary.
It's a Chicago story that never grows old.
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