Bob Odenkirk on how Mike Ditka made ‘Superfans’ of us all

The men in the old “Saturday Night Live” skit would not have believed the news Friday. They would have continued to guzzle beer and eat meat with their bare hands, and they would have dismissed the reports the way they dismissed so many heart attacks. No, it can’t be true, Bill Swerski’s Superfans would’ve said. Mike Ditka can’t be gone.

It can’t be true, because Ditka was invincible. Capable of defeating NFL teams by himself, or God, or a hurricane — unless perhaps it was Hurricane Ditka. It can’t be true, because nobody was tougher or more of a winner or more the physical embodiment of Chicago. The city of broad shoulders distilled into human form, never a more perfect match between a place and a person.

In the hypothetical of Ditka vs. mortality, Swerski and his friends would’ve taken Ditka every time. No debate. You can hear them rejecting the question over their mugs full of beer, sitting around a table in their aviator sunglasses and their mustaches and their sweaters, all in homage to the man they idolized more than any other: Ditka vs. Anything, including time?

Ditka, they’d say, between gulps and chest poundings to ward off cardiac arrest. Ditka.

Dit-ka.

But now he is gone, at 86. Now he is gone and Chicago mourns.

“We talked about him. We laughed about him. We celebrated him,” said actor Bob Odenkirk, the Naperville native who played a leading role in the creation of the Superfans skit during his days as an “SNL” writer in the early 1990s. The sketch was as much of a genuflection at the altar of Ditka as it was anything else. For Odenkirk, personally, it also was something of a tribute to his father, and his Bears fandom.

In the years after his time at “Saturday Night Live,” Odenkirk went on to star in movies and in prominent television roles. His portrayal of Saul Goodman in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” earned critical acclaim. But nothing he has ever done, Odenkirk said, would have impressed his father as much as when Odenkirk met Ditka in the years after he helped create the “SNL” skit.

“Everybody wanted to meet him,” Odenkirk said in an interview during the final months of Ditka’s life. “Everybody of a certain age who grew up in Chicago, or lived there.”

Jarrett Payton first shared the news Friday morning in a post on social media. It felt fitting because here was Payton, the son of Chicago’s most beloved football player, announcing the death of Chicago’s most beloved football coach. In the second sentence of Payton’s post, before references to the Hall of Fame and the Super Bowl and the ‘85 Bears — for which his father, Walter, played the starring role — he described Ditka in two words:

“Da Coach.”

Need anyone say more?

Along with the mustache and the aviators and the sweater, along with the plain-spoken gruffness and the gum-smacking and assurance that Ditka was always the toughest person in any room, or on any field or sideline, those two words became a part of his identity. They forever connected him to his city and his team. One couldn’t exist without the other.

Da Coach. Da Bears.

“We thank Ditka and God for all they have provided,” Bob Swerski said during one of those old “SNL” skits, around Thanksgiving 1991.

Notice how Ditka came before God.

Swerski, played by George Wendt, was meant to be a caricature. He and his friends, known as the “Superfans,” were supposed to be a parody of overzealous Chicago sports fans who never came down from the high of 1985, and who believed, indeed, that Ditka was some kind of mythical deity.

But it was always closer to truth than fiction.

How many thousands of Swerskis were there, and are there? How many like Todd O’Connor, played by Chris Farley, or Carl Wollarski, played by Robert Smigel? During the 1980s and early ’90s and especially throughout 1985, how many Chicagoans worshipped Ditka and Da Bears the way the Superfans worshipped them in those skits, between the meat platters and the heart problems?

Wendt, who died last year at 76, is best remembered for playing Norm Peterson on “Cheers.” His work as Bob Swerski is not far behind, despite the relatively limited run. The Superfans skit debuted on “SNL” in 1991 and continued regularly into 1992. Wendt appeared eight times as Swerski, the ringleader of a group that often pondered some of the most important questions of the time.

Like:

Could the Bears win a game if all of their players were 14 inches tall? And what about if Ditka were also a miniature version of himself? And “another scenario,” Bill Swerski — Bob’s brother, and the sufferer of repeated heart attacks — says in the skit’s 1991 debut. “The Bears, they don’t make it. Their plane is delayed, and the only one who shows up is Ditka.

“Ditka versus the Giants.”

“I gotta say, Ditka 17, Giants 14,” one of the Superfans says. “He just barely gets by.”

For Wendt, the role of Bob Swerski was never much of an acting stretch. He honed his craft at Chicago’s Second City, and came of age in a time when Bears mania — and Ditka mania — gripped the city.

“He did not have to search for a commitment to the team by any means, nor to Mike Ditka, really” said Chicago native Bernadette Birkett, who was married to Wendt for almost 47 years until his death. “I mean, it was genuinely felt.”

She and Wendt met in the mid-1970s while they worked at Second City and the Bears became ingrained into their relationship. For years, Birkett said, she and Wendt would have a “full house” whenever the Bears played, and “our relocated Second City buddies and everyone would be gathered with George, hoisting a toast to their wins.”

Those made for good memories. The scenes were not unlike the ones beamed to a national audience on Saturday nights in the early 1990s, or in the years after, when at times Wendt reprised the Swerski character in appearances in commercials or television shows. As much as any “SNL” skit, Superfans became transcendent and entrenched into popular culture.

Go to a Bears game now, and there’s bound to be a number of spectators at Soldier Field dressed up as Ditka — or are they dressed as the Superfans who dressed up as Ditka? “Da Bears” is still very much a part of the American sporting lexicon. And Ditka himself became even more of a luminary because of the endearing absurdity of the scenarios the Superfans pondered.

Was he mighty enough to defeat a natural disaster? Could he win an NFL game by himself?

Too easy. But what if he were a mini-Ditka?

The skit gained prominence in an NBC studio in New York City, but its roots remained in Chicago, through and through. There was Wendt, the lead, who rose through Second City. But the original vision behind Superfans came from Odenkirk, who worked alongside Smigel, the credited creator of the bit.

Odenkirk was born in Berwyn, raised in Naperville and grew up the son of a father who loved few things as much as he loved the Bears. The first Bears game Odenkirk ever saw was at Wrigley Field. And once, he said, his father came home with a story of how his work led him into the office of Abe Gibron, the Bears coach in the early 1970s.

“And he sat in Gibron’s chair,” Odenkirk said in a recent interview, “and Gibron was this huge, massive man, and he had a chair with an extra leg on it” to support his weight. Odenkirk’s father was proud to have met Gibron and to have sat in his chair and the memory left an imprint on Odenkirk, about the connection between Chicago fans and the head coach of the Bears.

It played a role, years later, in inspiring the creation of the Superfans. They could not have come into existence without Ditka, and yet they also propelled Ditka to an even loftier place. To Odenkirk, Ditka’s “persona felt like a Chicago archetype, even though he was from Pennsylvania.”

“There’s a lot of similarities between people from these different areas of America,” Odenkirk said. “Pennsylvania, the working blue-collar areas there, and the blue-collar areas of Chicago. So he sure looked like a Chicagoan. He sounded like a Chicagoan. And he had this harsh, uber-masculine presence that Chicagoans, at least of the time, recognized and really appreciated.”

Odenkirk, who also rose through Second City, came to understand as well as anyone the maniacal connection between Chicago fans and the Bears of the 1980s and early 90s. Other coaches might have led those Bears teams to similar success, but nobody would’ve become as synonymous with the city as Ditka.

And when Odenkirk met Ditka years ago he told him about his father.

“I told him, there’s not a thing in my life that would impress my father as much as the fact that I got to meet you,” Odenkirk said. “And that’s true. And you could say that’s kind of sad. But not writing for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ not being in the movies or on TV …

“But Dad had passed years before.”

Odenkirk, now 63, was 23 when he lost his father. A few years later he helped create a comedy skit about an obsessive group of Chicago sports enthusiasts. “Da Bears” and “Dit-ka” became part of the city’s vocabulary, and spread throughout the country.

A team and its gruff, gritty coach made Superfans of us all.

acarter@chicagotribune.com