He was a pugnacious, combative man who played and coached a pugnacious and combative sport. Even in today's "kinder, gentler" NFL, football is not a game for the faint of heart or the weak-spirited. It is still an extraordinarily violent, emotional game, where a certain kind of personality thrives.
Mike Ditka, who died Friday at age 86, had that "certain kind of personality" and then some. Ditka had a face once described as a "clenched fist," and he had a habit of thrusting it forward in conversation, as if daring whoever he was talking with to take a swing at him.
Long before the "Superfans" parody that made him and the Chicago Bears beloved of working-class sports fans around the world, Ditka played tight end for the Bears for six years. He foreshadowed the game's future: until Ditka, tight ends were blockers, not pass catchers. For six years, Ditka caught 316 passes in George Halas's legendary "T" formation. He played with the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys for another six years, totaling 427 receptions in his Hall of Fame career.
This 63-yard reception against the Pittsburgh Steelers is considered one of the top 100 plays in NFL history (69). The game was mired in controversy because it was played two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“One of the greatest individual efforts I’ve seen in my 40 years of football,” Bears owner and coach George Halas said afterward. “They had him stopped a half-dozen times, but his feet never stopped churning.”
Ditka coached the Bears from 1982 to 1993, and led them to the franchise's only Super Bowl win in 1985. But Ditka's popularity came from more than victories on the field. His combative relationship with the press, along with his disdain for management, struck a chord with the Bears' working-class fan base. Ditka didn't take crap from anyone, and Chicagoans fell in love with "Iron Mike" and his intensity.
In later years, Ditka became a parody of himself, deliberately courting controversy because that's what fans and the press wanted.
"Michael Jordan may be the greatest cultural sports icon across the globe, but Mike Ditka remained the sporting icon of Chicago, the largest personality from a team that was full of swashbuckling, sometimes rogue characters," writes Chicago Tribune columnist Paul Sullivan. "In a very big way, that’s perhaps one reason it all worked — because Ditka showed how to walk the walk."
When "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) began to parody Ditka and Bears fans, Chicagoans took to it immediately. It may have been meant to gently rib working-class Midwesterners obsessed with their sports teams, but Chicagoans loved it. Even today, you can catch glimpses in the crowd at Bears' games of fans dressed up to look like Todd O'Connor (played by the late Chris Farley) and Bob Swerski (played by Cheers! George Wendt). Ditka loved the parody and even made an appearance in the sketch.
During the taping of the "Superfans" sketch, the real Mike Ditka made an appearance off camera.
On January 5, 1993, the Bears fired Ditka after 11 seasons as head coach. Four days later, SNL opened its Danny DeVito-hosted episode with the Super Fans drafting an open letter protesting the decision.
At the end of the cold open, Ditka himself appeared in a pretaped cameo, decked out in a patriotic sweater, chewing gum, and speaking on a Bears telephone.
Years later, raw footage from the shoot surfaced online and revealed an even more quintessentially Ditka performance that hadn’t made air.
As the crew reset for an additional take, the famously impatient coach became increasingly irritated with the process, at one point insisting that a single take ought to have been enough.
It was less an outtake than an accidental extension of the character SNL had already built around him.
"Ditka was different things to different people," writes Sullivan. "Not everyone was on board with his shtick, but it was hard for anyone to ignore him."
Indeed, if you lived in Chicago over the last half century, you could hardly miss him.
