Tonight Show Ditka 1987
Chicago Bears football coach Mike Ditka chats with Johnny Carson during a taping of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” Jan. 20, 1987.
Mark Avery/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mike Ditka could bowl over a linebacker, make a sensational catch, motivate his players to greatness, dress down a reporter, out-heckle a heckler, sell you a refrigerator, coach “The Refrigerator,” and make an entire city laugh without ever telling a joke.
And then he’d have a cigar.
While Mike Ditka’s primary and iconic legacy as a football player and coach is celebrated elsewhere on these pages, let’s also give Ditka his due as a personality and a performer who starred in dozens of local and national commercials, appeared on “Saturday Night Live” and “Cheers,” and proved to be a worthy comedic partner to Will Ferrell on the big screen.
This list of football greats turned actors is extensive and impressive, from Jim Brown and Alex Karras to Don Meredith to Merlin Olsen, from Dick Butkus to Fred Dryer, from Terry Bradshaw to Peyton Manning to Nnamdi Asomugha. But whereas we could buy into Jim Brown playing Robert Jefferson in “The Dirty Dozen,” or Fred Dryer as “Hunter” and Merlin Olsen as “Father Murphy,” or even Peyton Manning as Coach Gary on “Modern Family,” Ditka almost always played Ditka.
On rare occasions, Ditka portrayed a fictional character — for example, “Coach Mafferty” on a couple of episodes of “3rd Rock from the Sun” in 1997, and the mayor of Chicago in a Make-A-Wish Foundation short film project called “Madzilla!” in 2014 — but from episodes of “L.A. Law,” “Coach,” “Becker” and “Entourage,” among other series, the coach played a lightly fictionalized version of himself, and invariably stole the scene.
It made sense. Ditka was just going to swallow any character whole anyway. How could you script somebody more alpha, more intense, more intimidating, more complicated, more hilarious and more memorable than the real Mike Ditka?
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Mike Ditka as himself and coach Phil Weston (Will Ferrell) in the 2005 movie “Kicking and Screaming.”
Provided
The coach was a Hall of Fame presence in TV ads, from local spots for rustproofers and car dealerships to national spots for products too numerous to mention, including a memorable Super Bowl ad when he donned Packers gear and Jerry Rice wore Cowboys merch. (One of my favorites: the 1988 “Calling Me Home, Chicago” tourism ad, with Butkus returning home and surprising Ditka at Butch McGuire’s, and the two exchange the simplest and most profound greetings: “Butkus.” “Ditka.” Pure gold.)
Unscripted Ditka was also magnificently unpredictable, whether he was heckling back at hecklers at press conferences or on sports talk radio, donning roller skates and barreling through the Bears’ offices after dubbing Minnesota’s old indoor arena “The Rollerdome,” or racing through “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field in a land-speed record of 22 seconds in 1998.
The most complete meta-Ditka performance came in the 2005 comedy “Kicking and Screaming,” in which Will Ferrell’s quintessential suburban dad, Phil Weston, recruits Ditka to be the assistant coach for Phil’s son’s youth soccer team. It’s a fully realized role, with Ditka leaning into his hot-tempered persona to mine tremendous laughs. (In our two thumbs up review of the film on “Ebert & Roeper,” I said Ditka deserved a sitcom deal based on this performance; Roger noted, “Ditka is playing himself, and playing himself as nobody else could, and he gets laughs out of just turning and looking at Will Ferrell.”)
On a personal note, I had the privilege of narrating a live reading of the unproduced “Superfans” movie script written by Robert Smigel and Bob Odenkirk, the creators of that legendary series of sketches. In an Instagram post on Friday, Smigel told the story of 2001 ESPN roast of Ditka where Ditka eschewed the traditional rebuttal: “The whole event was a benefit for Misericordia, a residence where … children and adults with intellectual disabilities are provided personalized care … Coach Ditka used his time to talk about … what Misericordia provides. He could’ve gotten huge laughs firing back at all of us but he cared much more about Misericordia.”
The live reading of “Da Bears Movie Dat Wasn’t” was staged at the Park West in June of 2010, with performers including Smigel, Odenkirk, George Wendt, Joe Mantegna, David Koechner, my Sun-Times colleague Rick Telander, Keith Van Horne and Ryan Dempster — but it was Dikta as Ditka who stole the show.
As he did every time.