by Rich Cohen
“Ask your son,” his wife told him.
“I got nailed,” Ditka wrote. “He had an old leather Marine belt. It was probably the hardest whipping I ever got.”
Some people, you see a picture of them taken in third or fourth grade, you have no idea who it is. Of course, when you’re told, the features reassemble themselves in a familiar way and you think, Oh yeah, now I see my friend. But with Ditka, you know right away: the chipmunk cheeks and broad forehead, the mouth turned fiercely down, the amused glint, the peaked, bearlike hairline—it was all there from the start. And the smile. Mike Ditka has a great smile. It wrinkles his cheeks and makes his eyes vanish. It’s a cute smile, surprisingly adorable in an otherwise fierce face. In fact, it’s so cute it’s scary. If a bear smiled at you, that would be scary, too. You see a thing like that in the woods, you think, I’m done.
Ditka grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, a boom time for Aliquippa and places like it, hardscrabble towns in Appalachia, where refineries churned out steel for the battleships and fighter planes to defeat the Communists. Main Street was filled with life—candy stores, the men’s shop, the five-and-dime, the union hall, the saloon, parades and banners, excited talk about the high school football game against Beaver Falls. The slums were at the bottom of the valley, in the shadow of the mill, tin roofs, sagging porches, old men in undershirts, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. “It was a very ethnic area,” Ditka wrote, “which was also very prejudiced. Whether you were a Polack or a Hunky or a Jew or a Dago or a Wop or a Cake-eater or Colored—we didn’t use the other slang word for blacks—it was prejudiced.”
The rich people lived up the hill—the more you had, the higher you got, until you reached the mansions built into the ridgeline, from where you could see other valleys where other factories spewed smoke, prejudice, and gridiron heroes. It was the kingdom of football, the breeding ground of so many of the players who defined the game: Bednarik, Unitas, Montana, Marino, Namath—the list is ridiculous. When I asked Ditka why so many great players came from western Pennsylvania, he said, “It’s the work ethic, the way people were brought up. The parents came from the old country and worked in the mills and the mines. People didn’t have anything but didn’t need anything. They were tough. Were they tougher than they were in Nebraska? I don’t know. But they were tough.”
Ditka spent his free time playing games in the lots between the houses. Basketball, baseball, mob ball. He was a bad loser from the beginning. If things went wrong, he went nuts, stormed off, stormed back, threw a bat, chucked a ball, hit a guy, stormed off again, came back again, hit someone else. He was made for football. It became increasingly obvious as he got older. He was a late bloomer, small his first years at Aliquippa High School, but this just added intensity to size when he finally grew in his junior year. He credits everything to his high school coach, Carl Aschman, whom he ranks with the other great coaches of his life: George Halas and Tom Landry. Ditka played every position in high school—offensive line, running back, linebacker, punter—but mostly he was just out there kicking ass. Later, explaining why he loved football, he wrote, “When you step onto the football field, everybody’s equal. And when you step off, everybody’s not equal anymore. Somebody’s won and somebody’s lost. Somebody’s dominated and somebody’s been dominated. Somebody’s taught and somebody’s learned.”
Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Aliquippa by night
Aliquippa won the Pennsylvania State Championship in 1955, with Ditka playing both ways, a mill town all-star. He was recruited by Jim Finks at Notre Dame—Finks was the Bears general manager when Ditka took over as coach—and Joe Paterno at Penn State, but chose Pitt for its premed program. Ditka planned on being a dentist after football—imagine those giant fingers rooting around your mouth. By 1959, he’d become one of the best college players in the nation. He played linebacker on defense and fullback on offense. He was quick, hard-hitting, and mean, but his hands were what made him special. It was rare for a big man to have such soft hands. Pitt did not throw often, but when they did go to Ditka, he almost always made the catch. And after he made it, he was nearly impossible to bring down. A player that size running in the open was a new development, so new most pro scouts hardly took notice. It was assumed that Ditka would play defense in the NFL, where his soft hands would help him make interceptions.
When the Bears drafted Ditka first in 1961, it was with another idea in mind. Halas and his assistant, George Allen, wanted to put Ditka on the offensive line. He would block on most plays but now and then skirt away from the trenches, head downfield ten or fifteen yards, turn around, and catch a pass. Winning football games is not about pitting strength against strength, speed against speed. It’s about finding a mismatch, a situation in which their little guy has to tackle your monster, or their monster has to chase your sprinter. If Ditka got downfield, he’d be covered by defensive backs half his size. It was a strategy made possible only by Ditka’s special gift: big guys almost never had such soft hands. In this way, Halas created what has since become a dominant weapon in the NFL: Mike Ditka was the first modern tight end. “Nobody threw to the tight end back then,” he told me. “He was just another guy on the line of scrimmage, next to the tackle. Then Halas had this idea to throw me the ball. He realized it was hard for me to get off the line when I was next to the tackle, so he moved me three or four yards down. I was the first tight end to flex out.”
Ditka was twenty-one when he arrived at training camp. He had also been drafted by the Houston Oilers of the new American Football League, but his dream had always been to play in the NFL. His first contract paid him $12,000 plus a $6,000 signing bonus, which George Allen said was the “biggest contract we’ve paid anyone since Red Grange.” When Ditka brought the agreement home to Aliquippa, his father looked it over, frowned in a slightly disapproving way, and said, “Most men have to work a long time to get that kind of money.”
Ditka had the hands but caught the ball in the untutored way of the sandlot. Turning what you’ve always done by instinct into a practice, a trade—that’s what makes you a professional. Halas brought Sid Luckman back to work with Ditka, teach him the proper way to catch. Sid was forty-four years old, faded, soft, ancient, a figure of lore. He had a method, a way to concentrate the rookie. He gathered a pile of footballs and wrote a number on each: 27, 61, 33. Ditka ran pattern after pattern. As soon as he made a catch, he had to call out the number on the ball. This would teach him the art of high focus: just you and the ball, watching it all the way into your hands. In 1961, Ditka caught fifty-six passes for 1,076 yards. He scored twelve touchdowns. No tight end had ever done anything like it. He was named Rookie of the Year and made the Pro Bowl, an honor he would secure in each of his first four seasons.
It was not just the statistics that earned Ditka respect—it was how he played, the fierceness of his game. He answered every challenge, returned every insult. He tore it up. In his fifth game, the Bears played the Baltimore Colts, where Ditka faced Bill Pellington, one of the toughest linebackers in football. He’d knocked out the Lions’ tight end Jim Gibbons not long before. “So all week all I heard was how tough Bill Pellington was and how he was going to knock the crap out of me,” Ditka wrote later. “Well, I lined up on the first play from scrimmage and by God they were right. He punched me right in the mouth. I wore that little, thin bar [on my helmet] that didn’t protect anything. He punched me right in the mouth and I said, ‘Oh, Boy.’ On the next play—I don’t know what the play was—didn’t matter. I didn’t even care. I don’t know if it was a pass play or a run. I just gave him a head fake, drew back and punched him as hard as I could.”
In Green Bay, Ditka battled Packers Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke on the field and off. One night, after a rough game, they ran into each other in a restaurant. They started jawing back and forth. Then Nitschke pointed a big finger in Ditka’s face and said, “I’m going to get you.”
“If you get me, you better get me good,” Ditka said. “One
thing in life you’ve got to remember is if you’re trying to get somebody, you don’t get got.”
Ditka was guided by a code, a slightly demented sense of football right and wrong. In the third quarter of a game in Los Angeles, a drunken fan dashed onto the field. The cops pursued. The crowd roared. It used to happen a lot: a drunk running higgledy-piggledy as police fell all over themselves. As he crossed midfield, Ditka stepped out of the huddle and ended it with a single blow. The guy went up, turned over in the air, then dropped lifelessly to the ground. He looked dead. It was sickening—a butterfly meets a tank. Explaining why he did it after the game, Ditka could have been summing up his entire philosophy: “Because that guy’s got no fucking right to be on the field! The field is for players!”
Ditka played his first NFL game in Minneapolis against the expansion Vikings. He earned notice from the veterans right away. A rookie is supposed to be quiet in the huddle, but Ditka cursed everyone out for letting the game slip away. Losing to an expansion team is a particular kind of ignominy. The plane was quiet going home, the Convair 320 rumbling through the dark. Halas came on the PA: “I want to say just one thing to you guys. You’re nothing but a bunch of cunts!”
Halas taught Ditka the game: how to play, how to coach, when to praise, when to call the boys a bunch of cunts. Watching him operate was better than ten years in school. He was a wizard, a pioneer, but it was his attention to detail that really impressed. I mean, here was this guy, a founder of the NFL, a standout for Coach Zuppke, a man who stripped the ball from Jim Thorpe, and what’s he doing at age sixty-six? Weighing every kid on the roster, standing by with a clipboard, stopwatch, and pen. “Nobody weighed anybody except him,” Ditka said. “He didn’t trust anyone. We had to do it twice a week.” It was a $23 fine for every pound over. “The most fun anybody ever had was the weigh-in. They used to trick the scales. The old man would go crazy. One guy would get on and another guy would put his finger under the cheek of his ass. Another guy would get on the scale with weights in his jockstrap.”
Halas personally negotiated every contract. No lawyers, no agents, just you and the old man, eyeball to eyeball across the desk. “Halas embarrassed you,” said Ditka. “Ripped you apart. After I signed my first contract for $12,000 plus that $6,000 bonus, I made Rookie of the Year and All-Pro. I came back and he offered me $14,000. I said, ‘Coach, you’re making a mistake. I made $18,000 last year. You’re giving me a $4,000 cut.”
“How do you figure you made $18,000?”
“Twelve plus six is eighteen.”
“Well,” he said, “The six was a bonus, remember? The bonus doesn’t count.”
Ditka begged and pleaded until Halas agreed to bump him up to $18,000, then reached into his desk and brought out a contract already made out in that amount.
* * *
The Bears had floundered in the seasons since Sid Luckman retired. That’s what happens when a dynasty collapses: the palace falls to ruins, the countryside is plunged into darkness. When Ditka was drafted, it had been fifteen years since the team won a championship. His arrival marked a crucial step on the road back. He gave the Bears a new spirit. They were better in 1961 than they’d been in 1960, and still better in 1962. By 1963, they were ready to make a title run. In addition to Ditka, there was linebacker Bill George, quarterback Bill Wade, running back Willie Galimore, defensive tackle Doug Atkins. Mike Pyle played center, a nasty position: you start the play with the snap, then get hit in the head. In the old days, before it was banned, the defensive player lined up across from the center—the noseguard—often reared back and slapped the center on the ear, knocking him silly.
Mike Pyle was unusual. Most pros come from waste places, mill cities and industrial towns. But Pyle grew up in Winnetka, on Chicago’s North Shore. His father was an executive at Kraft Foods. Mike went to Yale, where he was tapped by Skull & Bones. (Yalies of that era still speak of the Pyle brothers with awe.) I took a special interest in Pyle because we went to the same high school, New Trier, which has turned out lots of bankers, doctors, actors, and politicians—Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Donald Rumsfeld—but few professional athletes. We are the candy-asses by the lake. It made Pyle seem a kind of wonder, a New Trier Indian who’d gone all the way. He spoke at a pep rally my senior year. There is a picture of it in my yearbook. He was still a big man, straining the stitches of his suit, bearded, with thick wrists. He was forty-seven, forty-eight, the age that I am now, but I feel the same age as always, whereas he seemed so much older. I can’t recall a word he said, but I do remember how he looked, the way he carried himself. He pounded the lectern as the high school football coach nodded at his side. He was like Hemingway returning to Oak Park High in a cape, unbuttoning his tunic to show the seniors his scars. I asked Ditka about Pyle: What’s he up to now? The coach crossed his arms, looked at me. “I love Mike, but he’s not doing well,” he said. “You know, in my day, the helmets were not the best, just a piece of plastic, and the center got pounded, slapped in the head all game. I used to talk to Mike every week but it’s been a long time since he’s called.”
* * *
The ’63 Bears opened with a string of victories. By late November, the fate of the season hung on a game against the Steelers. That Friday, as the players were packing, word came over the radio: President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. A few hours later, when the first reports were followed by news of the president’s death, the country was plunged into black sorrow. Everyone assumed the game would be canceled. The American Football League canceled everything, but NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle said the games would go on, a decision he later regretted. The Bears did not want to play: How do you gin up the fury? How do you convince yourself it matters? “We wanted no part of it,” Ditka told me. “We’re Americans first and we were destroyed, but we’re soldiers, too. They tell us to play, we play. Then, of course, you get out there and get popped in the mouth, and the world disappears and there is only the game.”
November 24, 1963: the emperor lay dead in the capital but the gladiators carried on at the Forum. The game was played at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in front of a glowering crowd of drunks who should have been somewhere else. Before the coin toss, Halas got his team in a circle and said, “We’re going to play this game to get people’s minds off the assassination.” Late in the fourth quarter, the Bears were down 17–14. If they lost, no championship. Clouds rolled in from the west. Billy Wade took the snap. Ditka went upfield, hit a linebacker, turned, looked the ball all the way in, caught it, tucked it, and headed for the end zone, the burner’s son running under an inky sky. He had about seventy yards to go. Every time a Steeler came up to make the stop, Ditka would bring his big forearm around. He broke tackle after tackle, leaving the wounded in his wake. He was finally brought down by defensive back Clendon Thomas deep in Pittsburgh territory. He’d gone fifty yards after the catch. He lay on the field spent, a burned-out engine. In Chicago, they called it “the run.” “That was the luckiest run in the world,” Ditka said. “It was a combination of me being tired, them being tireder, and poor tackling. It was terrible.”
The Bears kicker Roger Leclerc hit an eighteen-yard field goal to tie the game. Pittsburgh got the ball back with seconds left, ran a play, then another, then before anyone realized what was happening, a Steelers receiver was going downfield for a touchdown. He crossed the goal line and raised his arms, but at some point, way back there, impossible to hear above the din, a whistle had been blown. The play was no good though no one was sure why. In the meantime, the last second had run off the clock. It was over. A murmur went through the crowd: Halas paid off the refs! He bought the fuckin’ thing! The drunkest fans came over the wall. It was a mob. The refs blew their whistles but were quickly overwhelmed. The Bears grabbed their coach and raced through a storm of beer cans. They got to the locker room and shut the door only to realize a Pittsburgh reporter had followed them inside. He was waving his notebook in the old man’s face, cursing, You bought it, you evil bastard,
you bought it, didn’t you? For a long moment, Halas stared into the face of the reporter as you stare into a garbage compactor that will not turn, wondering, What the hell is down there? His eyes flashed, but before he could move, Ditka had the reporter and was carrying him through the locker room and dumping him in the hall. He slammed the door. It got quiet. They stared at each other. Someone turned on a TV. Cronkite or Brinkley. What he was saying made no sense: the man who’d shot the president had himself been shot in a garage in Dallas.
The NFL Title Game was played in the Polo Grounds in New York. The Giants were led by the Hall of Fame quarterback Y. A. Tittle. One of those ancients who seemed to play forever—he was thirty-seven when he faced the Bears in the championship—Tittle was the subject of perhaps the greatest sports photo ever taken. It shows him on his knees on the turf. His helmet has been knocked off, blood trickles from his head. Beaten and old, the gladiator suffers stoically. The final score was Bears 14, Giants 10. “I guess today’s game proves that if you live long enough, everything you want to happen will happen,” Halas said. He was named Coach of the Year. He was sixty-eight. It was the last time he’d see the Bears win a championship.
