Pour one out for the great Pat Benkowski

Before Twitter died its miserable death a few years ago, one of the best things about it was getting pulled into threads by either my good friend Jon Greenberg or intrepid reader Joec34 whenever any juicy Pat Benkowski content emerged out of the ether.

Like this.

I had a running gag throughout the Cubs and Bears ReCrap podcasts that Pat was a sponsor. When he died at the age of 70 last Wednesday, I worried that he thought he owed me a check.

If you are unfamiliar with Pat, you really missed something. Back before Steve Jobs invented the Podcast (He did, right? Why else are we still calling them a name derived from a fancy MP3 player that his company developed?), there was a place for lunatics like me to film themselves incessantly talking about sports. That place was public access TV, and nobody did it with more vigor than Pat.

Like a bunch of other Chicago sports names you will remember like Les Grobstein, David Schuster, George Ofman and others, Pat got his sports "casting" start working on SportsPhone in the '80s. SportsPhone is exactly what it sounds like. Back when there was no Internet, there was no way to get scores on demand. You either waited for the three minutes of sports at the end of the nightly local news, or you tuned into an AM radio station waiting for an update, or you really waited and read them in the paper in the morning. SportsPhone was a service where you could call in and listen to a frequently updated voice message from whichever of those aces was on call at that time. I always got the feeling that they were just pretending it was a recording, kind of like when Kramer's phone number was close to the MoviePhone line, and he just started answering the calls.

Pat worked at Q101, WMET and did some time at channel 5, but none of that is where I knew him from.

Sometime in the late '80s he started a public access TV show called Benkowski Sports Spotlight, and he hustled around town interviewing athletes and cutting them together into a half hour show.

At some point he "sold" the show to Chicago's original regional sports TV network, SportsVision. SportsVision became SportsChannel which became Fox Sports Chicago. SportsVision was a Jerry Reinsdorf, Eddie Einhorn, Fred Eychaner boondoggle. The first of many. It was pay only for a while, and the reason Harry Caray said "fuck this" and left the Sox for the Cubs. but in early 1984 Cablevision bought it, put it on regular cable and eventually renamed it.

I put "sold" the show to SportsVision in quotes because what I assumed really happened was that SportsVision made Pat pay for the airtime and he had to take in more in sponsorships and ads than he was paying for the airtime.

And if you ever watched a Benkowski Sports Spotlight you know the sponsors by heart. Lansing Floral, Fat Sam's Bar and Grill, Huck Finn Restaurants, Perfect Pitch Auto Repair, Pat's entire medical team from Dr. Sherman Clay (chiropractor) to Lawrence Furlan, DDS. There's a non-zero chance that Pat traded a colonoscopy for a few Sports Spectacular ad reads.

"Check out the good folks at Palos Hills Gastroenterology. Take it from me, the only thing you'll feel is relief. And a big hose up your ass."

Lansing Floral may have sponsored every single episode of the show. As Greenberg said to me, "We know who's doing the flowers for the funeral."

If he paid for airtime on SportsVision, it was well worth it. Other than Sox and Bulls games and Hawks road games only, they didn't have much to show, so the Benkowski Sports Spotlight was on a lot. The first time I saw it, I was probably in junior high and I loved how haphazard it all felt. A lot of the time you could tell Pat was running the camera during interviews, but often he'd appear in the same show. When he did interviews at Wrigley, I just assumed he'd suckered Yosh Kawano into the holding the camera for him for a few minutes. The editing was always a little off, the sound levels never quite matched, but I loved it. I probably loved it more because it was just a little bit off. It was certainly good enough for air.

Pat really made it fun. He couldn't have sounded more Chicago if he tried. He didn't have the stupid Da Bears accent, but he had that gravel in his voice. He asked real questions, and it was always fun to see who he could sucker into an interview. The show always had a bit of a a satire feel to it, but Pat was taking this all very seriously.

There's a ten minute interview with then-Pistons coach Larry Brown on the floor during a shoot around at the United Center, and Larry is patiently answering all of Pat's questions, but he keeps looking around like, "Who the hell is this guy?"

He had several sit downs with Mike Ditka and he frequently interviewed Cubs players before games in the dugout. You can almost hear the Andy Frain's freaking out in the background. "How did Benkowski get down there? He's annoying Shawon Dunston!"

But he did most of his finest work in the Chicago Stadium and then the UC. He did A LOT of Bulls interviews, and many Blackhawks interviews. He loved to interview Jimmy Butler, and Jimmy seemed to genuinely like talking to him.

I think the Blackhawks were making Pat do laundry during his interviews with them. "You can have four minutes with Larmer, but you need to wash this basket of jock straps while you do it."

But the thing Pat did that nobody ever topped were the incredible chyrons he'd put on the screen.

Greenberg picked out a couple of his favorites.

I was always amazed at how often Pat just put guy's dates of birth on the screen.

But Pat didn't miss a chance to educate the viewer.

Or to clue you in on the vibes.

Pat was still doing new versions of the Sports Spotlight as late as the end of the Fred Hoiberg era in 2018. His obit says he did his bar trivia nights for more than 30 years.

A few years ago he started putting clip packages of the Sports Spotlight on YouTube and it's a veritable treasure trove with more than 400 episodes.

Pat studied journalism and broadcasting at UIC, though he might not have actually graduated. I love that his family emphasized how much Pat enjoyed coaching his sister's little league softball team.

I can just see it now.

Pat stopped posting videos six years ago, and that was about the time I started trying to contact him to be on the podcast. It's a thing I now regret I didn't put more effort into.

He was truly a one of a kind, and there are fewer and fewer of those these days. He specialized in non-essential sports reporting, but there's a time and place for that. Hell, I'm kind of counting on it.

I'm sad that we'll never get another Benkowski Sports Spotlight.

And frankly, I'm embarrassed that I never realized how tall Pat was.

He was basically a giant.

He requested that in his memory people consider a donation to St. Jude's Children's Hospital in his name. It's a very nice sentiment.

While the man is gone, we have more than 200 hours of his interviews to remember him by.

And it's too bad he wasn't still doing the Sports Showcase last season.

Speaking of one (or two) of a kind Chicago media personalities...