Mike Ditka Sat at His Desk Writing Checks to Strangers. Jim Harbaugh Never Forgot It.
Mike Ditka died Friday at his home at age 86, with his wife Diana at his side. No cause of death has been reported. The obituaries will lead with the 1985 Bears and the Super Bowl XX rout and the sideline glare, and they should.
The story worth telling came from Jim Harbaugh, who played quarterback for him, and it has nothing to do with football.
What Harbaugh Walked In On
“I was sitting in his office and we were about to go over the gameplan,” Harbaugh wrote in a post on X. “Mike was sitting at his desk and he was writing out check after check.”
Harbaugh asked. “He explained that he had gotten letters from people who were struggling and needed money,” Harbaugh wrote. “He just wanted to help since they asked him.”
That is the version of Ditka almost nobody saw, because he spent forty years building a public persona that made it impossible to imagine. The man who became a national symbol of yelling was quietly answering mail from strangers who needed rent money, and he never put out a press release about it.
The Career, for the Record
Ditka played tight end for the Bears from 1961 to 1966, the Eagles from 1966 to 1968 and the Cowboys from 1969 to 1972. As a rookie he caught 56 passes for 1,076 yards and 12 touchdowns, a line that would be excellent at the position today and was unheard of then. He scored the final touchdown of Super Bowl VI and won a title with Dallas in the 1971 season.
He went into the Hall of Fame in 1988, the first tight end ever inducted. Chicago retired his No. 89 twenty-five years later.
As a coach he took the 1985 Bears to a 46-10 demolition of New England in Super Bowl XX. That team won its first twelve games and put William Perry in the end zone for a one-yard touchdown in the Super Bowl because Ditka thought it would be funny, which it was, and because he understood television before most coaches did. He was twice voted Coach of the Year. Chicago fired him in 1992 after a 5-11 season, and a later run in New Orleans ended 3-13 in his second year there and ended his coaching career.
He Changed What a Tight End Was
This is the part that gets underrated because it happened so long ago. Before Ditka, the position was a sixth blocker who occasionally caught a flat route. He was a 1,000-yard receiver at tight end in 1961, which is when the modern version of the job starts.
Every tight end who gets paid like a wide receiver now is working in a role he invented by being too good at the old one.
Harbaugh’s Other Answer
Asked what stood out about his old coach, Harbaugh went to the football. “The passion he had for the game, the way he was able to break the game down to what was important.”
Harbaugh is 62 now and coaching in the NFL himself. Chicago drafted him 26th overall in 1987 and he played there through 1993, which means Ditka was his head coach for six seasons. Whatever you think of Harbaugh’s intensity, you can see where he got it.
Eighty-six years, a Hall of Fame bust, a Super Bowl ring on both sides of the sideline, and a desk full of checks nobody was supposed to know about.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
