Mike Ditka, 1939-2026

Published



In professional football, there have always been coaches who win games, and coaches who win championships. Far rarer are the ones who become part of the country’s cultural furniture — figures so distinctive that decades later people still dress up as them, talk in their accents, and treat their scowls as a kind of civic inheritance. Mike Ditka, the former Chicago Bears tight end and coach who died on Oct. 9 at 86, was one of those. He was not the winningest coach in NFL history, nor the most tactically inventive. But he was by far the most iconic.

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