Mike Ditka, Who Won Chicago Its Only Super Bowl, Dies at 86

He and Tom Flores are the only men to win Super Bowls as a player, an assistant and a head coach.

Mike Ditka won a Super Bowl as a player, another as an assistant coach and a third running the Chicago Bears. He died Friday at 86, his family announced, ABC7 reported.

Only one other man, former Oakland Raiders coach Tom Flores, has won all three ways, according to Yahoo Sports. The last one is the one Chicago kept. The 1985 Bears went 15-1, then beat the New England Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX in January 1986. It's still the franchise's only Super Bowl title.

His family's statement, published by ABC7, said the world knew a Hall of Fame player and a champion coach, but “we knew him as the heart of our family.” No cause of death was announced, The Hollywood Reporter said.

He was a welder's son from Carnegie, Pennsylvania, born Michael Dyczko on Oct. 18, 1939, and he came out of Aliquippa High. Yahoo Sports traced the “Iron Mike” nickname to that steel country. At Pitt, he played football, basketball and baseball.

The Bears drafted him fifth overall in 1961, and he was named Rookie of the Year. He was the first tight end to top 1,000 receiving yards, ABC7 reported. Two years later, he won an NFL championship with Chicago. A trade sent him to Philadelphia in 1967, and he ended up in Dallas. The Hollywood Reporter noted that he caught a touchdown pass against Miami in Super Bowl VI.

He didn't leave Chicago quietly. After the 1966 season, he fought George Halas, the Bears' founder and coach, over a contract and ridiculed him in public as cheap, The Hollywood Reporter recalled. Fifteen years later, after nine seasons on Tom Landry's staff in Dallas, Ditka wrote to Halas that he was ready to come home, Yahoo Sports reported. Halas hired him for 1982.

The champions didn't always get along. Ditka clashed with quarterback Jim McMahon and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, ABC7 reported. He also turned William “Refrigerator” Perry, a 335-pound defensive tackle, into a short-yardage runner. Perry scored in the Super Bowl. Walter Payton didn't, and Ditka later said he regretted that, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Ditka went 106-62 over 11 seasons, with seven playoff trips, before the Bears fired him after a 5-11 season in 1992. The New Orleans Saints brought him back to the sideline in 1997, and he went 15-33 in three seasons there.

New Orleans is mostly remembered for one deal. Ditka traded every Saints pick in the 1999 draft, plus a first-rounder in 2000, to move up for running back Ricky Williams. The two then posed as newlyweds on the cover of ESPN The Magazine, Ditka in a tuxedo and Williams in a wedding gown.

By then, he was famous well beyond football. In the early 1990s, “Saturday Night Live” ran “Bill Swerski's Superfans,” a recurring sketch from Robert Smigel and Bob Odenkirk. In it, Chicago fans in dark glasses and thick mustaches ate, drank and smoked while praising “Da Bears” and their coach. George Wendt, Chris Farley and Mike Myers were among the fans, and Ditka appeared on the show himself twice, The Hollywood Reporter said.

He turned that persona into a business, with restaurants in Chicago and his name on wine, cigars and giardiniera. He also played himself in the 2005 Will Ferrell comedy “Kicking & Screaming,” helping coach a kids' soccer team.

Television kept him around between and after his coaching jobs. NBC hired him after Chicago let him go, CBS put him on “The NFL Today” after New Orleans fired him, and he was part of ESPN's Sunday morning NFL show from 2006 to 2015.

He could start fights on air, too. The Hollywood Reporter said he called himself an ultraconservative and backed Donald Trump in 2016. His 2017 claim that America hadn't seen oppression in a century drew a public rebuke from Joe Namath.

Ditka had heart attacks in 1988, while he was coaching the Bears, and in 2018, plus a minor stroke in 2012. “The thing about me is that people didn't think I had a heart,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2019, as The Hollywood Reporter recounted. “Now they found out I got one.” Later in life, he started the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund for former players who were struggling, Yahoo Sports noted.

He's survived by his wife, Diana, and four children: Michael III, Mark, Megan and Matthew.

In 1988, he became the first tight end inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In his enshrinement speech, The Hollywood Reporter recalled, he told the crowd, “In life, many men have talent, but talent in itself is no accomplishment.”

Source: abc7.com, retrieved October 9, 2026. Other sources: sports.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com (2).