Saturday Night Live apparently considered paying tribute to Mike Ditka this weekend with a clip from one of the show’s classic “Super Fans” sketches—but the moment never made it to air.
That’s according to Robert Smigel, who co-created “Bill Swerski’s Super Fans” and played Carl Wollarski in the recurring sketches, who revealed Sunday that he had been contacted by the show about selecting a favorite Ditka joke for a possible tribute.
“I believe @nbcsnl had planned to run a brief Super Fans clip in tribute to Mike Ditka and ran out of time,” Smigel wrote on social media.
Smigel shared his selection, which came from the September 28, 1991 episode hosted by Michael Jordan. In the sketch, the Super Fans envision an Olympics Dream Team anchored by Jordan—and Ditka, naturally.
It’s unclear how close the tribute came to making Saturday’s broadcast. Sources tell LateNighter that the clip was not included in dress rehearsal, suggesting that if there had been plans to show it during the live episode, they’d already been scrapped by that point.
Ditka, who died Friday at 86, was a towering presence in the “Super Fans” sketches despite appearing on SNL himself only twice. As LateNighter noted in our remembrance of the Bears legend, the characters treated “Da Coach” less like a football coach than a deity, routinely imagining feats in which Ditka could single-handedly defeat entire teams.
Smigel himself paid tribute to Ditka on Friday, remembering him as both a willing participant in the Super Fans joke and, away from the caricature, a deeply sincere man.
