Da Coach: An excerpt on Mike Ditka from Adam Jahns’ ‘The Big 50: Chicago Bears’
· Yahoo Sports
Hall of Fame tight end and Super Bowl-winning head coach Mike Ditka died, his family announced in a statement on Friday. He was 86.
The following is an excerpt from Adam Jahns’ “The Big 50: Chicago Bears,” released in Oct. 2020:
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DA COACH
It was second-and-36 with less than five minutes left to play, and the Bears trailed the Steelers in Pittsburgh by three points.
If the Bears were going to hold off the rival Packers in the standings, they needed something special to happen, something unworldly.
What the Bears got was a short pass from quarterback Bill Wade to tight end Mike Ditka in the flat.
In the huddle moments before, Ditka said he was too tired to run a longer route. But with the ball in his hands, the Bears would still get something heroic.
“Everybody on the team hit him at least once,” former Bears offensive tackle Bob Wetoska said.
Ditka couldn’t be stopped. He turned a short catch into a 63-yard thunderous run in an important game from the Bears’ championship 1963 season.
“He bowled them over,” former Bears defensive end Ed O’Bradovich said. “The first two or three guys that he hit, he ran over them. And he wouldn’t go down. He wouldn’t damn go down.”
When the Steelers finally stopped him, it was too late. Ditka was dragged down on the 15-yard line. In exhaustion, Ditka laid on his back for a few moments, his chest gasping for extra air. It was his seventh catch of the day. He gained 146 yards.
“That’s what really got us into the championship,” Wetoska said.
Three plays later, Roger LeClerc made a field goal for a 17-17 tie on November 24, 1963. The Bears were able to maintain their half-game edge over the rival Packers, who won the previous two NFL championships, in the standings.
Nearly a full month later, the Bears defeated the New York Giants 14-10 on December 29 to win the championship at Wrigley Field.
“That’s one of the greatest runs in Bears history and certainly in the NFL,” O’Bradovich said.
Over time, Ditka’s on-field heroics have seemingly been forgotten.
He’s an endless endorser of products, a restaurant owner, a supporting cast member in movies, an inspiration for Saturday Night Live skits or Halloween costumes, and a frequent interviewee in Chicago for anything and everything.
But he’s an NFL icon first–a championship player from the best Bears team in decades who later became a championship coach for arguably the best team ever. The Bears simply aren’t the Bears without Mike Ditka.
“He gave 100 percent in practice; he gave 100 percent in games,” Wetoska said. “And he was not afraid if he felt that you weren’t putting out to the best of your ability, that he’d let you know right to your face. I respected him, and he was the absolute greatest.”
Da PlayerIn the opinion of Hub Arkush, the longtime publisher of Pro Football Weekly and a former Bears radio broadcaster, it’s Mike Ditka and then John Mackey.
“What [Ditka] doesn’t get credit for is that he pretty much created the tight end position,” Arkush said. “John Mackey came after him. It was him and Mackey, and he was probably the first tight end who became a significant offensive position.”
It all started in 1961. Owner George Halas selected Ditka out of the University of Pittsburgh with the fifth overall pick. It was the result of the advice from assistant George Allen.
Mackey, who has a college award for tight ends named after him, didn’t arrive in the NFL until 1963 as the 19th overall pick by the Colts.
“They were inventing the position,” Arkush said. “They brought these guys in who could block and be tough, but as a pass catcher and a run-after-the-catch guy, nobody had really seen anything like [Ditka]”
As a rookie, Ditka made 56 catches for 1,076 yards and 12 touchdowns–and did so after making only 11 catches in his final collegiate season.
It was unheard of production as the end position became what’s now the tight end in the NFL. Halas and offensive assistant Luke Johnsos were changing the game–and doing it with Ditka, a fiery mad man on and off the field.
“I think Ditka is probably the best all-around football player I’d ever seen,” Wetoska said. “He was so tough and he had so much ability that he could have played on the offensive line, he could have been running back. He could have been on defense. He was just an animal.”
The best team he was a part of came in 1963. The Bears’ defense was loaded with Bill George, Doug Atkins, Joe Fortunato, Richie Petitbon, and Rosey Taylor. Ditka was the face of the offense, who had Wade at quarterback and Willie Galimore and Rick Casares at running back.
“One of the toughest guys I’ve ever seen,” Arkush said. “When you think of that era and that style, you’ve got Mike Ditka. … Any player that you can think of when they pop in your mind and there’s blood on them somewhere, that’s who he was.”
As a player, Ditka wasn’t afraid to get on his teammates or his coaches. Much like Halas, Ditka enjoyed a good fight. But that’s how things ended, too.
After six seasons with the Bears–which included five consecutive Pro Bowl honors–Halas traded Ditka to the Eagles in 1967. It came after Ditka’s now-legendary quote about Halas throwing nickels around like manhole covers–a clear mocking of the Bears owner’s frugality and stinginess.
But Ditka and the Bears would always have that 1963 season, and that 63-yard run against the Steelers. It came two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and the same day that Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted the NFL to play its games to help the nation heal. In his home state, Ditka delivered just that; he made his own history by changing the Bears’.
“That’s what a true champion is as a player,” O’Bradovich said. “He understood the game. He understood the situation that we were in. We were playing in Pittsburgh after the President of the United States gets assassinated and we got to go out and play football. But we knew what it was. We knew what he had as a team.”
The Bears knew what they had in Ditka.
“The will to win,” O’Bradovich said. “The will to win has to burn, just so deep in you that every day is precious.”
Da CoachAdmittedly, players weren’t sure what they were getting when Halas stunned the NFL world and hired Ditka to be the team’s head coach in 1982.
“I think initially because he had never been an offensive or defensive coordinator and he was a former Bear, there were positives and negatives on that,” said former safety Gary Fencik, who had already been with the Bears for six seasons at the time.
“If you talk to some of the players around the league, they were like, ‘Oh, Mike Ditka. Come on. Hot head. Special teams coach.'”
The players’ impressions of Ditka changed with his first message
“He was the first head coach who really articulated what the goals of the organization were. It wasn’t just to get to the Super Bowl but it was to win,” Fencik said. “Well, you may say, of course. Everybody knows that’s the goal. But in an organization, if you’re not orally articulating the goals of the organization, it’s kind of hard to see what your measuring stick is.
“He gave that speech, and he said, ‘But when we get there, half of you won’t be there.’ And if you look at the turnover from the time that he gave that speech, which I did, till the time we got to the Super Bowl, it was about a two-thirds turnover in players that heard that initial comment. He did hold players accountable. He was very impatient.”
That fire–that will to win–still burned in Ditka. Halas knew it, too. After his playing career ended. Ditka became the special teams coach for the Cowboys and Tom Landry.
But his heart belonged to the Bears. Sixteen years after their separation, Ditka wrote Halas a letter, stating his dream to coach his team. How could Halas say no? Ditka turned out to be a loaded personality who was just right for Halas’ loaded teams of the 1980s.
Some players, including center Jay Hilgenberg and Hall of Fame defensive tackle Dan Hampton, don’t think Ditka gets enough credit for the Bears’ Super Bowl-winning 1985 team. To them, Ditka’s impact stretched beyond making things work with defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, a holdover from the previous staff.
“Ditka’s leadership and talent evaluation was just fantastic, and I don’t think he ever gets enough credit for that,” Hampton said. “It’s almost like people treat him like a hood ornament to our team. They were so great, blah, blah, blah. Anybody could have coached them. Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
“But he was able to get us not only to the Super Bowl and win it, but how they rank the teams now, we were like (the) No. 1 team in football for a long time there. And it would have never happened without Mike Ditka.”
In some ways, he was the second coming of Halas. He was intense and stubborn. He sparred with his players, particularly his quarterbacks, Jim McMahon and Jim Harbaugh.
Sportswriter Rick Telander described him as a “loose nut” who became part of what the Bears were as a franchise in the 1980s, which included the passing of Halas and the departure of general manager Jim Finks.
“I was out of touch with reality for about 20 years,” Ditka joked during a panel at the Bears 100 celebration in 2019.
But Ditka still fit what the 1985 Bears were. It took a level of crazy to coach a crazy good team, especially in that decade.
“They could go to places and get absolutely hammered and get into fights,” Telander said. “They could do crazy stuff all together, which they did. And then they had these unique personalities. And then all of it, I want to say was tolerated because it was Ditka. He tolerated it.”
But only if the players worked and won. Earning his praise–“Hey,
good job”–became significant because he rarely did it.
“He knew what it took to be dedicated to be great,” former guard Tom Thayer said. “It wasn’t something he said all the time. He had expectations of work ethic, work effort, the physical style of play that he expected of you.”
He expected his players to be like him–a blue-collar, give-it-your-all tough guy. Ditka was a Hall of Fame player who won 106 games as the Bears’ coach, which trails only Halas.
“Ditka had three rules for us: show up on time, pay attention, and play like hell,” Hilgenberg said. “After that, he said I don’t care what you guys do. That was an open door for us. We had fun. We enjoyed what we did.
“If you weren’t prepared, ready for your day and if you had any type of mental errors during the day, your life was miserable. But if you showed up on time, paid attention, played like hell, it was a great experience. He’s great. There’s no way the Chicago Bears don’t win the Super Bowl without Mike Ditka as the head coach.”