A Chicago alley cornhole semifinal lost fourteen seconds of tempo when a volunteer announced Mike Ditka's death. The league honoured the Hall of Fame Bears coach, then opened a hearing into whether the silence counted as a timeout. The final is Thursday, and the slow jam is gone.
The walk-up music at the Logan Square Bags League semifinal started fourteen seconds late on Thursday night. Fourteen. In an alley where every second is a knife fight, that is a lifetime.
The delay came from the scorer's table, where a volunteer paused the speaker to announce that Mike Ditka had died. The Bears legend was 86. Fine. Noted. Now back to the war.
League commissioner Dale Pruitt did not sugar-coat it afterwards. "We held a moment of silence, because that is who we are," he said. "But I want the record to show it was the longest stoppage in league history, and it happened in a semifinal."
For readers who do not follow the sport, bags is cornhole. Two boards, eight beanbags, one alley behind a row of garages off Milwaukee Avenue. Men and women fight for a plastic trophy and a season of bragging rights at a bar that closed in 2019.
Thursday's matchup was the Garage Door Kings against the Fourteenth Street Irregulars. It had everything. Bad blood. A disputed cancellation call from week four. A rain-soaked sweep by the Kings that the Irregulars still consider stolen.
Then came the Ditka news, and the whole alley went quiet in a way Pruitt described as "unacceptable from a tempo standpoint."
The ice job
Kings captain Renata Okafor was mid-wind-up when the speaker cut out. "I had my rhythm," she said. "I had my foot planted. Then a guy at the table says the coach is gone and everybody takes their hats off. Which, respect. But that's a fourteen-second ice job on my throwing arm."
She threw the next bag into the grass.
The volunteer who made the announcement, Marcy Dunne, stands by it. "Somebody had to say it," she said. "I'm not sorry. Next time I'll say it quicker, and I'll have the right song cued."
Ditka, for the record, played tight end well enough to reach the Hall of Fame and coached the 1985 Bears to the Super Bowl XX title. He won NFL championships as a player and as a coach, his players recorded the Super Bowl Shuffle, and SNL built a whole sketch around men who worshipped him. The Guardian has the full career. It took several hundred words. The Logan Square semifinal deserves more.
Irregulars captain Tomas Brisk called the stoppage "a stomach check" and said his side handled it like professionals. "We honoured the man. Then we got back to work, because the Kings had been talking all week about closing us out in three."
The Kings did not close them out in three. The match went the full five frames and ended on a slide-in that Pruitt is still reviewing on a phone video from four angles.
Fourteen seconds, frame by frame
Pruitt released a timeline before midnight. Second one: the speaker cuts. Seconds two through six: the announcement. Seconds seven through twelve: silence, hats off, one dog barking two garages down. Second thirteen: somebody says "da Bears" under his breath. Second fourteen: music back on, but the wrong track.
"The wrong track," Pruitt repeated. "We came back in on a slow jam. You cannot run an alley semifinal on a slow jam. People's knees were cold."
"Mike Ditka was a Hall of Famer and a great Chicagoan. That takes nothing away from the fact that we lost fourteen seconds of tempo in a knockout round." — Dale Pruitt, commissioner, Logan Square Bags League
The league has scheduled a hearing for next Thursday on whether the stoppage counted as a timeout. If it did, the Kings used one they did not have. If it did not, the Irregulars want the final frame replayed with the original music and the dog removed.
Garage owner Hal Stroud, whose door serves as the backstop at the north end, has filed his own grievance. "My door took fourteen seconds of nothing," he said. "That door is used to abuse. You stop feeding it bags, it gets ideas."
Both captains agree on one thing. Neither could tell you who the Bears play this weekend, and neither cares. The alley plays Thursday. That is the only schedule that matters in Logan Square.
The national angle
Somewhere in the cable coverage you will find the big-shouldered, iron-jawed, lunch-pail tributes. A gruff coach. A hard man from a hard era. ESPN did the broad strokes, mostly about football.
Pruitt wants it known that his league got there first. "Fourteen seconds, hats off, in a semifinal, with a plastic trophy on the line," he said. "Nobody at the networks did that. They just ran highlights."
The final is Thursday. Bring a jacket. The slow jam has been deleted from the playlist, and the dog has been asked to stay inside.
