It was 3 AM, an early-summer night turning into an early-summer morning. Ben Steger was bicycling home to Edgewater from a party in Pilsen when he got the text from his friend Chris Batte: K.C. Haywood, captain of the Fighting Cocks kickball team, was in a coma.
Haywood, a Kansas native, was working as a firefighter in Taos, New Mexico, when he met Hart in 2004. His “speed country” band Handsome Molly had played a bar where she worked. He pursued her for months, and then, just a few months after they’d finally started dating, they decided to move together to Chicago, where Hart had been accepted to the School of the Art Institute.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Gina Black, former bassist of the alt-country band the Blacks, was one of the few people Haywood knew here. Handsome Molly had opened for the Blacks in Missouri in the late 90s. “I asked him to join my kickball team the Ass Panthers,” Black says. She assured him he’d meet everyone he’d ever need to know in Chicago.
Some 200 players and hangers-on, many artists and service industry workers, make up the league’s ten teams. There are games every Sunday from May to September, with regular postgame parties, an all-star game, a championship, and a slew of extracurricular rituals like the prom and a Valentine’s Day bikini party. Black, 33, started the league with a handful of friends in 2004, when she was bartending at the Streetside Cafe in Humboldt Park. “As quasi-adults we never get any sunshine on our faces and roll around in the grass anymore,” she says. One friend had a regular croquet game, “but I wanted more contact. I can’t throw a ball from first to third, but I played soccer for 13 years. Kickball came to mind.”
Steger filmed the end of the ’06 season and the prom and had started collecting interviews, thinking he’d turn the footage over to Batte to make a short film. A few players refused to be filmed for fear that footage of their weekend antics could hurt them at work. “People were concerned about how they were going to come off: ‘Am I going to look like a jerk or a fool?’” Steger says. “There were some things people didn’t want to do in front of the camera.”
Haywood seems to have been the embodiment of the league’s freewheeling, anarchic spirit, always looking to undermine competitiveness by inventing new rules, running bases backward, and provoking marginally more serious players on other teams. “We have to continuously keep this weird,” he tells Steger in an interview for Left Field.
“The outpouring of generosity was amazing,” Hart says. “I couldn’t have made it though with the strength I have now if it wasn’t for their support. This whole experience put me in awe of K.C.’s ability to touch people on a personal level.”
Thu 2/26, 7:30 PM, Portage Theatre, 4050 N. Milwaukee, 773-736-4050, leftfieldthemovie.com, $10.
