by S. L. Price
And when Ditka lost? “Coach Landry had us rooming together,” Reeves said, recalling Ditka’s first season in 1969. “When we got him, I was a terrible gin player and he was really good, but the cards were just coming my way. He tore that deck in two, took that chair and threw it, and the legs just went into the Sheetrock. I knew then: ‘Holy mackerel, he’s a competitor.’”
That Ditka possessed a rapid-fire intelligence got lost in the carnage, of course; why ruin so wondrously Neanderthal an image? After his playing career ended in 1972, he coached tight ends and special teams for Landry and besides one early, rogue decision to call for an onside—and botched—kick against the Giants (“You ever do that again without telling me,” Landry said out of the side of his mouth, squinting straight ahead, “and you’ll be looking for another job”), proved capable of folding himself within the dictates of one of the more buttoned-down regimes in NFL lore. Ditka even sparked a revival of one wrinkle—the shotgun formation, out of commission for twenty years by then—that remade the modern quarterback position.
“His IQ was off the chart,” Reeves said. “In 1975, we had really struggled on third-down conversion and he was the one who mentioned to Coach Landry: Why don’t we go to the shotgun?”
“Exactly right,” said Roger Staubach, Dallas’s quarterback then. “Ditka was really behind it. He said, ‘Hey, when it’s third-and-three-plus, ninety-nine percent of the time we throw the football, so why not get back there and do something different? It really was creative. Ditka was the one that pushed it. We put it in and everybody thought we were crazy.”
It wasn’t the only thing that worked for the Cowboys that season; the shotgun, after all, was used only on third-down situations or in the final two minutes. But it did prove to be a vital part of the Landry “flex” offense that turned Staubach and the Cowboys loose that year, helping to build its much adored/hated brand as “America’s Team.” Dallas improved from an 8-win club to 10-4 in 1975, made the playoffs, and then became the first wild-card team ever to reach the Super Bowl. That they lost to Ditka’s hometown Steelers in the most exciting title game up to then was, it seems, only appropriate.
“Ditka’s got a subtleness about him,” Staubach said.
“I wish,” Reeves said, “I was that bright.”
But never mind that. Never mind the fact that, in Chicago, Ditka would manage some of the most spectacular egos ever assembled in one locker room and—while feuding with his genius defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan; barely coexisting with his general manager, Mike McCaskey; and holding his nose over the antics of his punk-rock QB, Jim McMahon—led the ’85 Bears to an 18-1 record and a Super Bowl championship. Notwithstanding the passel of Chicago trick plays, Ryan’s delight in questioning Ditka’s coaching acumen made it easier to pigeonhole “Da Coach” as a mere fire-breather. Maybe that’s to the good. Ditka the legend made Ditka the man rich, after all—and, besides, there was almost no way to stop it.
Indeed, you could say that he was the right man at the right time, one of those figures who prompts folks to say, in an echo of Voltaire’s gibe about God, “If Ditka didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him.” He was no slick-haired savant with larger “lessons” to teach. He was a loon, a football animal, and, best of all, someone who smelled like the real deal. That his hulking figure and beaver-pelt hairline made him resemble, yes, a bear, made it easy for writers to classify him as “a throwback,” and most left it at that. How much baggage can one man carry?
But it’s no accident that Ditka’s popular appeal came at the same time as the collapse of American industry and the lower middle class. In his gum-chomping, unapologetic Ditka-ness, “Iron Mike” provided a weekly, televised reminder of the life his dad and so many others had fought and worked for. His was the nasally Slavic voice of those chirping now in unemployment lines, forced to uproot from mill towns and scatter—to piecemeal jobs, to the vague promise of Sun Belt Salvation, to sunny places that had never heard of J&L.
He raged like so many blue-collars raged, and if there was injustice that caused all that growling, you still couldn’t help but laugh sometimes. Why didn’t they change with the times? Couldn’t they see they were only hurting themselves? Ditka was slapstick-funny, but didn’t yet know it: In 1987 he fired a wad of green gum at a fan, leaving the field after a bitter loss to San Francisco, and then flipped her the finger. In 1988, he suffered a heart attack mid-season and promised to come back as “Mellow Mike.” Two weeks later he was back on the sideline, erupting.
“You know, I did calm down for a while,” Ditka said. “But my nature is my nature. I can’t change that. I wish I could.”
Many liked to say that Ditka was the perfect coach for Chicago, but he would’ve been perfect in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland, too, perfect in any city where workers were scrambling and idled and scared. The SNL superfans would dream up absurd competitions—Da Coach versus, say . . . a hurricane!—and all would always agree that Ditka would win. The audience roared; such blind faith was a joke, and even more hilarious because of the sad reality outside. Ditka’s constituency wasn’t winning a thing, and Iron Mike’s force was all but spent. In Chicago he had been king of a one-year dynasty. Fired there in 1992, he came back for an ill-fated three years in New Orleans. He never won another Super Bowl.
But in Aliquippa, his successes had eternal shelf life: His successes were theirs. No place could ask for a better spokesman (as late as 2014, a Canadian reporter asked if the NFL should add more teams to the playoffs and Ditka shot back, “What? Are they gonna be able to get Aliquippa High School?”). People weren’t listening to Henry Mancini much anymore, and every union loss chipped away at the Wagner Act’s legacy, but Ditka provided a safe caricature of the town’s rough virtues. Bears—then Saints—gear invaded Steeler country while he coached, and each visit home to his parents in Linmar—Ya hear? Mike’s in town—was a certifying event, a reminder that Aliquippa product could still stand among the nation’s best.
And he came back every year. In 1986, Ditka initiated a golf tournament to raise money for scholarships for Aliquippa High kids, and over the next two decades pushed the total well over $200,000. By some estimates, Ditka personally donated “in excess of $50,000,” according to the city in 2000, but one of the organizers, his old teammate John Evasovich, said that estimate is low. “I can account for—out of his pocket—at least sixty-five thousand dollars to the Aliquippa football program,” Evasovich said. “And I can account for an excess of three hundred thousand dollars in scholarship money.”
There was, too, some off-the-books action. One year, Aliquippa High graduated covaledictorians; one girl had been awarded $34,000 in scholarships and the other had been given no more than $5,000. When the latter came to his table, Ditka pulled out a rubber-banded wad of paper and bills and one crumpled check—and asked the girl to spell her name. He wrote it down, then wrote “$5,000.00” in the box to the right. “Honey, when you get successful, you do this for somebody else,” Ditka said.
“Do I have the greatest respect for him? Yeah,” Evasovich said. “Do I think he’s a pain in the ass sometimes? Yeah. But is it overweighed by what he does good? Yes.”
Ditka tried for years to get his parents to leave Aliquippa. But where would they go? When they visited their son in his last coaching stop, New Orleans, Big Mike kept complaining that the house was so big that he kept getting lost. So they didn’t move when Big Mike was alive, and for more than a decade after Big Mike died in 1998 Charlotte didn’t move, either. Little Mike tried to keep her comfortable, kept buying her cars, paid for her flights and walking-around money when she felt the itch to go gambling.
But she stayed in the house at Linmar, where the neighbors knew her and the police chief and the postman checked on her near every day. “That’s why I like it here: you’re close,” Charlotte said in 2010. “I could move away, but I just know from my own children; they move into these new places and bi
g homes and you don’t even know your neighbors. Everybody’s got to work to pay for the damn house, and they don’t have time to socialize. So I’ll stay right here.”
For a long time, his mother’s coffee table in the house in Linmar had a small crystal bear on it, inscribed with the words, “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Mike had given it to her, long ago. The phrase has been credited to everyone from boxer Jack Johnson to actor Gregory Peck to televangelist Robert Schuller, but Ditka had barked it out so often, and with such conviction, during his most famous years that it became a kind of town motto. In Aliquippa, in fact, you’d be pressed to find anyone who thinks he didn’t invent the very idea.
When Aileen Gilbert, who had fled Aliquippa after working her dad’s old job atop a J&L coke battery, returned from Hartford with her kids in 1982, she intended the move to be temporary. At least, that’s what she told herself—and her miserable oldest daughter. Diana cried at first sight of tiny Aliquippa, but after her tears dried and nothing changed she took to cultivating a classic teenage rage, primed to blow at the slightest provocation. Anyone—especially a gang-seasoned sophomore yanked out of her big-city high school—could see the future turning its back on the damn place.
“There was nothing here,” Aileen Gilbert said. “Stores were closing. There was already a sense of No Jobs. People were leaving, whole families were going, because they needed jobs. I only meant to stay a year—just to reset myself and then move. I didn’t know where, but I knew I didn’t want to stay here. But that didn’t happen. . . .”
So Diana, the oldest of Aileen’s five—followed by Mark, Sean, Tamu, and Jamal, their three fathers scattered while Aileen raised them alone—entered Aliquippa High for the first time in her junior year, the fall of ’82. She made an immediate impression. “She was horrible,” said Zmijanac, chuckling. “She was tough.” There were fights.
Only her mom knew why she was so mad; it was about then that Diana told Aileen that relatives had sexually molested her from the age of six to the time the family left Hartford. “I’m going to write a book and tell about it,” Diana said. “I’m not going to tell you now. I was angry. It’s a good story.
“I never fit in here. A lot of people don’t—didn’t—like me because they didn’t understand me. I did: I knew why I was angry. But when you’re young you feel vulnerable and powerful. That was my way of controlling my atmosphere.”
Diana was also very fast, a sprinter good enough to draw interest from colleges and—much later, when Sean was playing in the NFL—to beat her big-time pro athlete brother in a footrace out in Moon. (“He won’t acknowledge that,” she said. “I’m his big sister; I’m not supposed to be beating him.”) But Diana was also young, hotheaded, and didn’t care: Come senior year, she was kicked off the track team. One career option, perhaps the best, was gone before she even knew it existed.
She left the summer after graduation, in 1984, to live with a cousin and find work in Washington, DC—but Aliquippa had its hooks in. She returned in the fall, just in time for the football team’s first championship run under Yannessa, and soon was seen wearing a letter jacket to games. She and the senior fullback, Darryl Revis, had found each other. On July 14, 1985, she gave birth to their son, Darrelle.
A year later, her little brother Sean announced himself as one of the greatest players ever to walk onto the field at Aschman Stadium. Even as a sophomore defensive tackle, his gifts were clear: 6-foot-5, 270 pounds, able to sprint 40 yards in 4.8 seconds. He had all the agility of his older brother Mark, who earned a basketball scholarship to Duquesne, and just a hint of Diana’s rebelliousness. “I love Sean Gilbert,” Yannessa said. “I used to tell him: ‘I’ve only known two guys in my life that loved to practice: you and Ditka.’ He could’ve went the other way; he had a temperament as a ninth-grader, and a couple times we had to kick him in the ass. But he was smart and he trusted you. Made me a helluva coach.”
The next season, Sean’s junior year, Yannessa stood him up, made him an inside linebacker. The result was a glorious havoc. Gilbert instantly stood out, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Mike White put it, like “a Cadillac in a lot full of Volkswagens.” No one had ever seen such size and speed combined: Sean would’ve run down and crushed the young Ditka. Recruiters began their siege as the Quips went 12-1 and won their third WPIAL title in four years. Yannessa declared that the Chicago Bears would happily draft Sean as a high school senior. It didn’t seem all that far-fetched.
By then, Yannessa’s machine was starting to pick up where the mill left off. Money wasn’t a problem, not with all the boosters; Ditka, after winning his Super Bowl with the ’85 Bears, had even promised to donate $5,000 a year so long as Yannessa kept coaching. On the field the Quips were steamrolling the WPIAL: With Gilbert even better in 1988, his senior year—he had 91 solo tackles, picked up a fumble and ran 70 yards for a score, intercepted a pass and ran 47 yards for another—the Quips won their first fourteen games and found themselves ranked No. 2 in the nation by USA Today. The paper also named Gilbert the republic’s defensive player of the year. The program had never been held in such high regard.
And somewhere, in all that winning, the town’s racial split had quietly faded. Not that there wasn’t plenty of prejudice, or that Western Pennsylvania had become any more enlightened: The Quips’ arrival for games at predominantly white Montour in 1984 and ’86 were greeted by a burning cross behind the end zone. But with Aliquippa’s population now 31 percent black—and its football team’s 70 percent—with the ’70s riots a constant reminder of the alternative, with football emerging as one of the few remaining pipelines out, an us-against-the-world unity seemed the only choice.
“Growing up we watched Pudgy Abercrombie and Darrelle’s dad, Darryl, and we watched them all as one family,” Sean Gilbert said. “You didn’t see racism. You saw your brother next to you, and it didn’t stop there. When the game was over, we were over in their area of town, they were over in ours: it didn’t matter. I spent the night at David Mike’s, our quarterback—go over there after film, go over all night. Milk at Ed Gripper’s house and, after, hang all night, hanging over there the next day. His parents treated me just like I was their son.
“Had Joe Becker, left tackle, hundred seventy pounds soaking wet. Anthony Barnett, Italian guy, hundred sixty pounds soaking wet, but would jack your jaw. And you know what? You weren’t leaving him out there. I get chills telling you this. Because, man, we loved each other.”
Gilbert paused at the thought, a cause for wonder even now. He lives in North Carolina these days, but upon hearing someone describe a recent visit to Aschman Stadium on a fall Friday night, his voice went softer. “Did you get chills?” he said. “What football will do. Football’s a religion sometimes.”
Summer nights, before he went off to play at Pitt, Gilbert would run to the bottom of the hill and back, up the long, high grade to his mother’s thirteen-room house on Seventh Avenue. Aileen had grown up there, her children too, and now her grandchild, Darrelle, three years old and absorbing the chemistry of the town: its always rough honesty, and the changes now making the men weak and desperate. Once, Diana found her son sitting on the front steps, eyes fixed far off.
“I’m waiting for Uncle Sean,” Darrelle said.
“Where’s he at?” Diana replied.
Soon they heard the sound of her brother huffing, saw that steaming hulk looming. He ran up to Darrelle, touched him on the arm, maybe the shoulder or head, and then pivoted and headed back down the hill again.
“Let him stay right here,” Sean said, over his shoulder. “I’m going to keep touching him.”
It has always struck Aileen Gilbert as suspect, how people became nicer once she came home to Aliquippa with two highly athletic sons. After Sean’s talent began to emerge, more than one area school tried to get her to move into their district—to the point, she says, of offering housing and jobs—and she wonders if Salt Smi
th’s visit to ask her to fill a seat on the Board of Education was a slick way to keep the boy from leaving Aliquippa.
So radical a shift left a sour taste. Her love for the place can modulate by the second. “I do think it’s special,” Aileen said of Aliquippa. “I don’t think it’s that special, though. I think that God has me here. Because I should not be living here under normal circumstances—because I went through so much here.
“When Sean got drafted and I became ‘Ms. Gilbert’ for the first time, it was like, Okay, now I got all these friends, people coming to my house, calling me on the phone? Before it was, I don’t like her—and I did nothing but work and take care of my kids. So I have wanted to move. But every time I would think about it, the thought would just leave. It’s just God. Sean and them have tried to get me to come to North Carolina to stay for, like, three months. I’d say, ‘I’ll come stay a week or two, but I’m coming back home. . . .’ I ain’t going nowhere. I will die here.”
And then, with Yannessa rolling and the stands packed and Gilbert playing like an apotheosis of all the fierce talent that had come before—all the Franks and Suders, Dorsetts and Ditkas, all that speed and power and decades of push, distilled—then, with the team riding as high as it seemingly could, the typhoon hit. Crack cocaine, the pebbled, cheap, highly addictive and smokeable version of the disco-era staple, first hit major urban areas in the mid-eighties. It took a bit longer for the drug to bite down on the small towns, but the damage might’ve been worse there. Because you couldn’t avoid it. There was nowhere to run.
Not that Aliquippa had no experience with getting high. Family stills had long been a basement tradition in the Plans and West Aliquippa, and the children of the wet-your-whistle generation hardly ignored the ’60s drug splurge. Marijuana smoke became a staple during breaks at J&L in the ’70s, and cocaine and hallucinogens were as much a part of the borough’s underbelly as the numbers rackets. “It just wasn’t as noticeable,” Aileen Gilbert said. “I remember years ago—they hadn’t even started making crack yet—it wasn’t just cocaine: there was so much heroin here it was crazy.”
