Mike Ditka, the Hall of Fame tight end who coached the 1985 Chicago Bears to the only Super Bowl title in franchise history and became the face of a city, has died. He was 86. His family announced his death Friday. No cause was given.
“While the world knew Mike as a Hall of Fame football player, legendary coach, and leader of the Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl XX championship team, we knew him as the heart of our family,” the family said in a statement. “Mike will be missed beyond measure and remembered forever.”
Who was Mike Ditka?
Ditka was born Oct. 18, 1939, in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, the son of a welder, and grew up playing football in Aliquippa, steel country that gave him the nickname “Iron Mike,” Yahoo Sports noted. He was a three-sport athlete at Pitt and a unanimous All-American in 1960.
The Bears took him fifth overall in the 1961 draft. He was Rookie of the Year and the first tight end to top 1,000 receiving yards in a season, ESPN reported. He changed what a tight end could be, a blocker who could also catch and run over people. He won the 1963 NFL title with George Halas’s Bears, played two years in Philadelphia and four in Dallas, and won Super Bowl VI with the Cowboys. In 1988 he became the first tight end inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
What did Mike Ditka do with the 1985 Bears?
After nine seasons as an assistant to Tom Landry in Dallas, Ditka was hired by Halas in 1982 to bring the Bears back. In 1985, with Walter Payton, Jim McMahon and maybe the greatest defense the NFL has ever seen, Chicago went 15-1 and crushed the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX. Ditka was named Coach of the Year in 1985 and again in 1988.
He wasn’t easy to work with. He fought with McMahon and with defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, who was carried off the field next to him after the Super Bowl. But in 11 seasons he took the Bears to the playoffs seven times and to three NFC Championship Games. The Bears fired him after the 1992 season. He later coached the New Orleans Saints from 1997 to 1999, going 15-33, a run best remembered for trading eight draft picks to move up for running back Ricky Williams.
Why was Ditka such a Chicago icon?
Because he was Chicago: loud, blunt, working class and proud of it. Saturday Night Live’s “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” sketch turned “Da Bears” and “Ditka” into a national joke that Chicago happily claimed. He opened restaurants, sold wine, cigars and sausages, worked as an analyst for NBC and ESPN, and played himself in movies and TV. In his later years he started the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund to help former players who were struggling after the game left them behind.
He survived heart attacks, including one in 1988 while coaching the Bears, and a minor stroke in 2012. “Success isn’t permanent and failure isn’t fatal,” he liked to say.
The BeezLoop Take
There are coaches with more wins and players with bigger numbers. But very few people in American sports ever became as tied to one city as Ditka did to Chicago. Four decades after the Super Bowl Shuffle, the 1985 Bears are still the team Chicago measures every other team against, and Ditka was the face of it.
He had real flaws: the temper, the feuds, the hot takes that aged badly. He also used his fame to help forgotten players who built the league and got little for it. That part of his legacy deserves to be remembered as loudly as the Super Bowl.
The open question: with a Bears-Packers game at Lambeau Field coming up, how will the team and its fans honor him?
Also on BeezLoop: the Cowboys, one of Ditka’s old teams, lost at home to the winless Bucs, and more from this NFL season.
Sources: ABC7 Chicago / ESPN · Yahoo Sports · Gray News via WBAY · Bleacher Report · CBS Chicago (video)
