Picture the table: a green checked tablecloth, a mountain of sausages, four or five guys in dark sunglasses and thick fake mustaches, all of them certain that “Da Bears” could beat anybody, any week, forever. That image, the “Saturday Night Live” sketch Chicago has never stopped quoting, only existed because one real man stood on an NFL sideline first, in a Bears sweater vest, daring anybody to tell him he was wrong. Mike Ditka coached the Bears to their only Super Bowl title, and then he spent three decades as one of the most recognizable faces in American sports television. He died Friday, October 9th, at the age of 86, at about 9 a.m., surrounded by family and friends, according to The Athletic. No cause of death has been released.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather and friend, Mike Ditka,” his family said in a statement. “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. Mike will be missed beyond measure and remembered forever.”
Mike Ditka coached the Bears to their only Super Bowl title, and then he spent three decades as one of the most recognizable faces in American sports television.”
The sketch itself, “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” started airing in the early 1990s. It worked because Robert Smigel and Bob Odenkirk weren’t inventing a caricature so much as photographing one that already existed on the North Side. The dark glasses and the mustache were lifted straight off Ditka. The rotating cast of superfans, played across different episodes by Smigel, George Wendt, Joe Mantegna, Mike Myers and Chris Farley, worshipped him with a sincerity that read as comedy only because it was true. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ditka himself showed up on “SNL” twice while the sketch was airing, which is a strange, almost circular honor: a man getting to walk into his own impression and play along.
That willingness to be in on the joke carried him through a screen career most coaches never get near. The Hollywood Reporter lists him turning up as himself on “Cheers,” visible on a bar television in the show’s 1993 series finale, and made smaller appearances on “L.A. Law,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Entourage,” “Becker” and “According to Jim.” The biggest of these was the 2005 comedy “Kicking & Screaming,” where he played a gruffer version of himself. Will Ferrell’s character recruited him to help coach a kids’ soccer team, and Ditka gets the line The Hollywood Reporter still quotes: “I eat quitters for breakfast and I spit out their bones.” Ferrell later said Ditka’s hip had actually popped out of place during filming, not long after a hip replacement. He finished the scene anyway on little more than a couple of Advil, which tracks with pretty much everything else people said about him.
Broadcasting, though, is probably where more people met him than anywhere else. NBC hired him as an NFL analyst shortly after the Bears let him go in January 1993. He later moved to CBS Sports as a studio voice on “The NFL Today,” before settling in for years at ESPN, where he became a fixture of “Sunday NFL Countdown.” In Chicago, long before any of that, he had already hosted “The Mike Ditka Show” with WBBM sports director Johnny Morris for his entire coaching tenure. He came back to local television in the mid-2000s for a run on “2 on Football.” Off camera he turned into a one-man Chicago brand. He opened a steakhouse that carried his name, fronted commercials for everything from wine to wieners, as CBS Chicago put it, and kept a quiet, standing commitment to Misericordia, a Chicago facility for young people with developmental and physical disabilities.
None of the television or the sketches would exist without the football underneath them, and that part of the story starts in western Pennsylvania. Ditka was born on October 18th, 1939, in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Aliquippa, a steel town that shaped the persona almost as much as any playbook did. He played three sports at the University of Pittsburgh, football, basketball and baseball, and made first-team All-American at end as a senior. The Bears took him fifth overall in the 1961 NFL Draft. He responded with 56 catches for 1,076 yards as a rookie, becoming the first tight end in league history to crack 1,000 receiving yards in a season and winning NFL Rookie of the Year in the process.
He played six seasons in Chicago, made five Pro Bowls, and helped the Bears win the 1963 NFL championship. A contract dispute with owner-coach George Halas sent him to the Philadelphia Eagles in 1967, and he landed with the Dallas Cowboys two years after that. His four seasons there ended on a high note: a touchdown catch from Roger Staubach in a 24-3 win over Miami in Super Bowl VI, Dallas’s first NFL title. He retired after the 1972 season with 427 career catches, which was, at the time, the most by any tight end in NFL history.
Tom Landry kept him close, hiring him as a Cowboys assistant in 1973. Ditka spent nine years on that staff, winning another Super Bowl in 1977 while quietly angling to get back to Chicago the entire time. In 1978 he wrote Halas a letter, later printed in his own book, “In Life, First You Kick Ass,” co-written with Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander: “We didn’t part on the best of terms when you traded me, but I would love to come back someday, back to Chicago. And be the head coach. I’m not ready yet, but I will be someday. I’ll bring back Chicago Bears tradition and pride. I promise.” Halas hired him in 1982. “I believe everyone has a destiny in life, and mine is with the Chicago Bears,” Ditka said at the press conference announcing it, and for once the bravado turned out to be accurate.
It took three years for that destiny to arrive in full. The 1985 Bears went 15-1 behind quarterback Jim McMahon, running back Walter Payton and a 335-pound defensive tackle named William “Refrigerator” Perry. Ditka lined Perry up in the backfield for short-yardage touchdowns, partly for the points and partly, it seems, because he liked the spectacle of it. He clashed constantly with defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan over who deserved credit for the team’s dominance. The two of them were carried off the field together anyway, after the Bears demolished the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX on January 26th, 1986. Ditka said for years afterward that he regretted one thing about that game: Payton never scored, while Perry and McMahon did. “We won the Super Bowl because of our defense,” he said in 2018. “I mean, you’d have to be a fool to say otherwise. We had great players on offense, and Walter Payton and Willie Gault and some of the other guys we had, and we had a wonderful offensive line. But our defense is why we won.”
The Bears never got back to that level, not with him and arguably not since. Ditka was fired in January 1993 after a 5-11 finish. He returned to coaching in 1997 with the New Orleans Saints, in a stint now remembered mostly for one trade: New Orleans sent up the board for Heisman winner Ricky Williams, giving up every one of its 1999 draft picks plus a 2000 first-rounder to get him. Ditka later posed for a magazine cover in a tuxedo next to Williams, who wore a wedding dress, and called it their football marriage, which is either funny or a little sad depending on how the Saints’ three losing seasons under him sit with you. New Orleans went 6-10, 6-10 and 3-13 across those years. He was fired again after 1999.
The honors kept arriving regardless of the won-loss record, probably because none of it was really about wins and losses in the first place. In 1988, Ditka became the first tight end inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “In life, many men have talent, but talent in itself is no accomplishment,” he told the crowd in Canton. “Excellence in football and excellence in life is bred when men recognize their opportunities and then pursue them with a passion.” The Bears retired his No. 89 during a Monday Night Football halftime ceremony on December 9th, 2013, the 14th number the franchise has retired, and team chairman George McCaskey said at the time that the Bears did not intend to retire any more numbers after it.
Tributes landed within hours of the news breaking. “Mike Ditka epitomized football over so many years,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “He brought intensity, authenticity and an unmistakable personality to everything he did.” The Bears called his impact on the franchise “immeasurable,” and the Saints said his life “was defined by an unyielding work ethic, a fierce love for the game, and a relentless determination that helped reshape American football.” Current Bears coach Ben Johnson called him “the gold standard in terms of this place.” Former quarterback Jim McMahon, never Ditka’s easiest relationship, told the Sun-Times simply, “He’s going to be missed. He made his mark in this world and in this league being who he was.” Barack Obama once hosted Ditka and the 1985 Bears at the White House for their 25th anniversary, back in October 2011. On Friday, Obama said Ditka “set the tone for a team that was punishing, dominant, and fun, and the city loved him for it.”
What Do You Think? Is “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” still the sharpest piece of pop culture any NFL coach ever inspired, or does Ditka’s own screen work, from “Kicking & Screaming” to a decade of Sunday morning analysis, deserve equal billing alongside it? Which single year defines him best: the 1985 Super Bowl season, the 1988 Hall of Fame class, or the two decades he spent as a television fixture after he stopped coaching entirely? And with the Bears having now gone more than thirty years without matching that 1985 team, does Ditka’s standing in Chicago only grow the longer that drought runs?
Rest in peace, Mike Ditka. Thank you for “Da Bears,” for the only Lombardi Trophy Chicago has ever won, and for four decades of somehow never being boring.
