Constable: Pandemic gives sports bar time to add Wrigley touch

For the first time this season, I'm watching a Cubs game from a spot where I can see both yellow foul poles with the “Hey, Hey” slogans, the brick walls, the wire basket and some die-hard fans — almost as if I were at Wrigley Field. I can't see the iconic scoreboard because 4-year-old Jayce Chamopoulos scratched the green paint, and his father, Nikko Chamopoulos, is keeping it at their home in Streamwood until it can be repainted and hung back up as part of the Wrigley Field section of North Side Bar & Grill in Glen Ellyn.

Chamopoulos, 42, who owns the downtown sports bar with his brother-in-law, 27-year-old Jason Luszcz, took advantage of the COVID-19 shutdown this spring to add sports-themed walls to the bar he bought five years ago today.

“It gave me the chance to remodel,” says Chamopoulos, who built giant displays for the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bulls, the Blackhawks and the Bears with his general manager, Dave Naruszewicz, and assistant manager, Scott Boyer. He also added Vienna Beef hot dogs, Italian beef, calzones and funnel cakes “for kids” to the menu.

“It's looking good,” says David Blomquist, the masked postal service employee who has been delivering mail for 44 years and comes inside to pass along a stack of envelopes and admire the improvements. “They've done a good job.”

The Cubs section might look nice, but on this beautiful day, Cubs fans Jeff Sojka, 53, and Jon Soderstrom, 58, take in Wednesday's first game on the TV in the patio out back. They generally get to Wrigley Field between five and 10 times a summer, but the pandemic has shut that down.

“I would like to be the only guy sitting in Wrigley hearing everything the players are saying,” Sojka says, after a first-inning grand slam by the St. Louis Cardinals' Matt Carpenter puts the Cubs in a hole from which they never recover, dropping the first game of the doubleheader 9-3.

Sojka was here the last time I took in a Cubs-Cardinals doubleheader at the North Side in June 2016. The Cubs lost both games that day but went on to win the World Series.

“I'd take that again,” Soderstrom says.

This season, nobody is even sure if there will be a World Series for the Cubs to win. But to get there, the Cubs could use some of that offensive power shown this season by the young Chicago White Sox, who are honored on the wall dedicated to the original Comiskey Park,

“I'm glad to hear they exist,” quips fellow patron Bob Guss, who has learned to tolerate Cubs fans during his more than 70 years as a Sox fan. Guss talks Sox with the like-minded Chamopoulos, as they both grew up as Sox fans on the city's North Side.

“Luis Robert would have had that,” Chamopoulos says, predicting the rookie Sox center fielder would have caught a ball that eludes a Cubs outfielder.

“It was hard to get back into sports again, wasn't it?” says Sojka, who generally looks ahead to Saturday afternoon football games on the TVs at North Side.

“I've got about a hundred college football hats and no football,” Sojka says, as the Big Ten, the Mid-American Conference and some other conferences are postponing the fall sport until spring.

An official Blackhawks bar, the North Side and fans were just starting to adjust to Stanley Cup games in August when the Blackhawks were eliminated late Tuesday night. “Now, it's all Cubs,” Soderstrom says. And Sox.

Until the Bears begin the NFL season next month. Fans, however, won't be allowed at Soldier Field.

“That's OK,” Sojka says. “They'll all be here.”