I have won awards and prizes and earned many, many commissions over a forty-year writing career. Not many prizes, too few commissions, but my cover profile of Mike Ditka is among my proudest achievements. Research involved walking downtown to the Portland Public Library and heading deep into its bowels where I squinted into microfiche for hours. I had an assignment and I had a deadline. Big sponsor, golf tournament, ticket sales. Don’t write the story, don’t get paid. Never talked to the man, still waiting for his call. But wrote the story, got paid. It’s called being a Freelancer. – JDW
THE HAMMER. DA COACH. IRON MIKE DITKA. MASTER OF THE MIDWAY.
“I know who I am. When I wake up in the morning and shave, I know who I am.”
If you look up ‘football player’ in the dictionary, it’s been said, you will see a picture of Mike Ditka.
A football player? When Ditka hung up his spikes, probably sharpened, and removed his helmet, no one was surprised to see his hair was shaped like the business end of a battering ram.
“I wasn’t always the best, but nobody worked harder,” Ditka recalled. “You and me. Let’s see who’s tougher. I lived for competition.”
As sports legend would have it, the great Bronco Nagurski once tackled a Model T on the Chicago Bears sideline and the car had to be towed to a garage for repairs.
Some old-timers think Iron Mike Ditka is tougher.
“God created me, and my parents raised me a certain way,” Ditka has said, “and evidently some of the qualities and some of this drive I have were achieved back home when I was a kid.”
His mother called him “a perfect angel.”
His father never said much. The toughest man in town, the original “Iron Mike,” played football without a helmet. A railroad labor union president, Ditka, Sr. was said to believe praise was poison.
Mike, Jr. was not spared the rod. He, in turn, spared no opponent.
His blocks were bone-rattling assaults, not to be watched by small children or old ladies with weak stomachs. Knocked out legendary Green Bay Packer bad boy Ray Nitschke once, Ditka did.
“That era is gone. I think back to when I played and how much fun it was. I mean, we would have played for nothing. It was almost a macho thing,” Ditka admits. “You were just trying to prove you could do it, that you could play with these guys in the NFL. That wouldn’t happen today. They would not play for nothing.”
Rampaging through the secondary after a reception, Ditka often seemed to seek out a defensive back just for the contact. Hits so brutal, shoulder pads slamming together so hard, you could hear the “THWACK!! fifty rows up in the stands.
An opponent from those halcyon days had this to say about Iron Mike: “He was the meanest, toughest rascal in the league and I’ve got the dent in my head to prove it… anytime you came near Ditka, you had to expect forearms and fists. You came away bruised. He was mean, but he was also as talented as anyone I ever lined up against.”
The man had a penchant for mayhem.
“It’s like when I was a kid,” Ditka remembers innocently. “I’d go hunting bees. I’d throw a rock to get a bee off a tree, and the rock would go through a window and I’d get my butt kicked. I had a knack for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.”
On the football field, Ditka had a knack for greatness. Rookie Of The Year. 427 career catches. 43 touchdowns. Four Pro Bowls. Co-captain of the 1963 World Champions.
Ditka was the first tight end, a position he redefined, ever named to the Hall Of Fame.
In Bear history, there is a play called simply “The Run.”
Playing at Pittsburgh, the weekend of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination, trailing the Steelers with just four minutes left to play, an already exhausted Ditka caught a nine-yard swing pass on his own 31 and proceeded to run through one, two, three, four, five tacklers. It seemed like more, like the entire defense took their best shot.
Breathless, Ditka stumbled, slowing enough to get caught from behind. He collapsed at the 15-yard-line. Close enough for the tying field goal to be kicked.
“I felt like I had died,” Ditka remembers.
“It was the greatest run I’ve ever seen,” said George Allen, a legendary coach himself. “It wasn’t the speed that got Mike down the field. It was just sheer determination.”
Ditka is determined to win. It’s the only thing he’s good at.
Proof? The winningest NFL coach in the decade of the Eighties. 101 regular wins in ten years. In 1986, under Ditka’s masterful leadership, the Bears captured Super Bowl XX. The steel-worker’s son from the mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, had finally reached the top of the heap.
“If you don’t put stress on yourself to do the best you can, you’ll never do the best you can,” says Ditka, who hardly eased up after a heart attack. “You have to put so much pressure on yourself to achieve, to have enough discipline in your life to get up early and practice hard, and do the things it takes to get to the top… If you want to be a guy who floats through life with nobody bothering you and nobody recognizes you… you never create waves. You don’t make decisions that are unpopular. Those kind of guys never have stress….
“You have to say, ‘Hey, I want to be better than average… I want to be the guy at the top.”
Mike Ditka, a millionaire many times over, was just a kid looking to avoid the steel mill.
“Nothing comes too fast. You put yourself in a position in life to get somewhere, and once you get into that position, you go. If you can’t handle that, that’s your problem.”
Outspoken. Outrageous. Outstanding. Out of a job.
That’s about all we know about Ditka. The media paints a portrait of the man, but we don’t seem to get the complete picture on the sports pages.
Ditka has this advice for sports fans who want to know more about the REAL Mike Ditka. “Those who have eyes, let them see,” he suggests. “Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Look here. Listen up.
Ditka is an author with more than one book in the Library of Congress. “People pump up professional athletes saying, ‘You’re the greatest,’ telling you from day one you are it,” he wrote in humbly titled The Meaning of Life. “Then, all of a sudden, you’re not it anymore. You’re part of it. Once I stopped playing ball and became an assistant coach, I started understanding I was just a small part in this big machine. And it sunk in.”
Ditka is not about to forget the folks who forged him.
Ditka hosts his own celebrity tournament, one of the top charity golf events in Pennsylvania. The Hammer insists on paying his own way into the Mike Ditka Golf Classic, which raises money for high school scholarships and other local causes. (You know it’s a tough place to grow up, when you need a scholarship to go to high school.) Too scrawny to make his high school football team as a fourteen-year-old sophomore, Iron Mike, then known as Chicken Legs, put on some sixty pounds of muscle before graduating as captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams.
Not to mention class president.
“One of the best high school players I’ve ever seen,” remembers Joe Paterno, then the esteemed Penn State coach. “And I haven’t changed my mind on that in thirty-five years.”
Ditka is nothing less than a philanthropist, giving generously of his time and money to a wide list of charitable causes throughout his illustrious career.
He’s been quietly devoted to children’s causes since his college days. The Hammer, who makes many unpublicized visits to hospital wards, formed The Ditka Foundation in 1989, to “make grants to charitable and educational organizations.” Funds have gone to fight pediatric AIDS, as well as to build a wheelchair ramp for a small town school.
Mike Ditka was an altar boy throughout his childhood.
Ditka is a successful businessman who competes as hard in the restaurant industry as he did on the gridiron.
“The American dream is alive and well,” Mike Ditka offers with a smile on his face, “if you’re willing to pursue it.”
He’s a motivational speaker who earns more money today for one speech than he earned for signing his first pro contract with George “Papa” Halas.
“I wasn’t as big a name as some of the other guys,” Ditka recalls his first days as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think I understood that the harder you work, the more you get out of life. I became a pretty good football player, not because I was faster or could catch the ball better, but I taught myself to do a lot of things other guys didn’t.”
And that made all the difference.
Ditka is a collector of antique automobiles and a connoisseur of fine wines.
Mike Ditka, artificial hip and all, plays golf like he played ball. He’s been known to holler “290!” before teeing up. He’s been known to lose his bag in the lake after missing a putt. He brings the same focus to the golf course he once brought to the gridiron.
Ditka is a voracious reader, and a Bible quoter. Read Philippians three, verse thirteen and fourteen, he told one questioner.
If you look up Philippians 3:14, here’s what you will find:
Of course, brothers, I really do not think I have already won it; the one thing I do, however, is forget what is behind me and do my best to reach what is ahead. So, I run toward the goal in order to win the prize, which is God’s call through Christ Jesus to the life above.
That’s Mike Ditka. Still competing, still running toward the goal.
03/22/93