Mike Ditka, Forever Chicago

The relationship between sports and the place where those games are played is largely a matter of fans developing a strong but mostly manageable addiction to their own pheromones. Ritual and iconography matter more than the actual results when the results don’t meet the need; the first two are stable and reliable in a way the third will never be. It has always been thus.

And so Mike Ditka, whose death at age 86 was announced by his family Friday morning, was and remains still Chicago in ways that no other figure in any other city could manage. Ditka explained Chicago’s view of itself from head to toe, vocal inflections to hand gestures, minor local biases to general worldview. Chicago is Ditka just as Ditka was Chicago, and that self-reverential truth will remain true even after he’s gone.

Ditka was quite literally the face of the Bears from the moment he left the University of Pittsburgh to seek his fortune in football 65 years ago. His helmet with the white single-bar facemask and his gashed-up face behind it was the image of choice in their 1963 championship, the one that interrupted the Decade Of Lombardi. Ditka’s contractual intransigence in the face of the team’s iconic (and iconically vice-gripped) owner, George Halas, reinforced that status despite the six-year endgame in Philadelphia and then Dallas that completed his playing career. Even Ditka’s Super Bowl championship with Dallas in 1971 felt a bit odd, in that Why is that Chicago guy celebrating next to Roger Staubach? kind of way. He sent himself into exile rather than take what Halas was offering, but Ditka never really left.