Bears Hall of Famer Steve McMichael was a ‘wild child’ who loved football — and life

After losses, Steve McMichael sat alone in front of his locker in his dirty Bears uniform long after most teammates departed. Dried blood marked the thighs of his white pants. Tape dangled from his joints. Bags of ice covered his knees. He stared a hole in the floor about 20 feet in front of him. It was as if he were somewhere else, oblivious, with an invisible shield around him.

He didn’t experience losing very often. In his entire college career, his teams lost one time. During his tenure as a starter with the Bears, he lost 65 games, the third fewest in the NFL.

But even losing made him alive — he felt those losses deeply, more deeply than almost anyone.

He felt many things deeply.

The irony of McMichael’s life is that it was stopped short, yet he got more out of 67 years than an entire team could. The Pro Football Hall of Famer died from complications of ALS on Wednesday.

In the winter of 2022, he said about his past and future: “I’ve already lived 10 lives. So I’m OK.”

One nickname couldn’t describe him — he had three. At Texas, they called him Bam Bam, like the supernaturally strong baby from “The Flintstones.” With the Bears, he was Ming, as in the tyrannical Ming the Merciless from “Flash Gordon,” or Mongo, the cowboy from “Blazing Saddles” who rendered a horse unconscious with a right hook.

He wore his hair in a ponytail and drove a cherry red Rolls-Royce convertible with a white top and white leather seats. And a Harley Fat Boy. He wore Tony Lama boots and bolo ties, and his bags were Louis Vuitton. He could bench-press 525 pounds, and he once was co-owner of a historic beer garden in downtown Austin, Texas, and a sports bar in Romeoville. He proposed to his second wife, Misty — they were married 21 years — on one knee in a gondola in Venice.

It was McMichael who insisted on carrying coach Mike Ditka off the field, against Ditka’s wishes, after the Bears won Super Bowl XX. McMichael could not let the moment pass.

He called opponents “brother.” Or “hoss,” “little man,” “son,” “boy” and “killer.” Except when a code of honor was broken. Rather than continuing the fight late in a game in which the Cowboys were being trounced by the Bears, Cowboys defensive lineman Randy White put a baseball cap on and took a knee on the sideline. McMichael told him he would never have quit the way White did.

McMichael never wanted to leave the field. He did not miss a game because of injury in 13 seasons. For the Bears, he played 205 games — more than anyone in their 103-year history except a long snapper — and then he squeezed another year out of his career while playing for their arch-nemesis, the Packers.

He played that final season for $400,000.

“But let’s be clear,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1994. “It’s not the money. It’s not the darn money. It’s playing ball, man, the sheer enjoyment of being out on the field.”

No one ever exemplified the love of the game better.

“Oh, he enjoyed playing,” said Rams guard Dennis Harrah, a frequent opponent. “You could see it in his face. Some guys are miserable out there. He was one of those guys that enjoyed the competition.”

In the 1986 book “One Knee Equals Two Feet,” John Madden called McMichael his favorite defensive tackle in the NFL. Wrote Madden, “Steve told me something I’ve never heard another player say. ‘I want to play the best I can in every game. You never know what game is going to be your last. And you have to live the rest of your life with your last game.’ … But the way Steve McMichael plays, he’ll always be proud of his last game, whenever that is.”

In high school, McMichael always was playing a game of some sort. He lettered in basketball, baseball, track (shot put and discus), tennis and golf. In football, he was all-state at tight end, linebacker and kicker. In his junior year, he also played halfback. Legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant called to offer him a scholarship — one of 75 such offers McMichael fielded — but Bryant wanted McMichael to play tight end. McMichael preferred defense, so he went to Texas.

And he did more than sports. Before he got to the NFL, he worked in oil machine fields, on a beer truck, as an electrician’s aide and as a strip club bouncer.

One vocation never was enough for him. When the Bears were at training camp in Platteville, Wis., they attended the town fair. But the band was so bad, according to McMichael, that he and his teammate Dan Hampton took the stage and sang “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” It was the start of a musical career, as the defensive linemen founded a band with linebacker Otis Wilson and others called “The Chicago Six.”

For years, McMichael was a presence on television and radio in Chicago. His career as a commentator began during his playing days when he made postgame appearances on WMAQ-TV with sportscaster Mark Giangreco. He didn’t just talk about football, though — he put on a show, sometimes crossing the line of tastefulness. McMichael smashed a raw egg on Giangreco’s forehead, sprayed whip cream on him, squirted him with fake blood, cut his tie and held him down while his wife put makeup on him.

McMichael’s antics eventually got him fired. On his way out of the studio for the last time, he spray-painted a photo of a talk-show host in the lobby, giving her a mustache and goatee.

He left laughing.

“Mongo is the entertainer, baby,” he told the Tribune’s Rick Kogan in 2005. “It’s a voice. It’s a part of the real me, but it’s not anywhere near that big a part. Now there were times when that Mongo voice went out of control, when I went out of control. But there has always been a method to my madness, baby, which really isn’t madness at all.”

Professional wrestling was the optimal stage for Mongo the entertainer. After his football days, he joined the Four Horsemen in the WCW, teaming with Ric Flair, Arn Anderson and Chris Benoit. He entered the arena wearing an old-school Bears jacket, calf-high black boots and shades. He carried a steel briefcase, which often proved an ideal weapon. On his arm was his first wife, Debra, dressed for a beauty pageant. McMichael often applied the finishing touch to an opponent with the “Mongo Spike” and even had his own wrestling action figure.

He paid the price for being a wrestler and football player. There were eight knee surgeries. During the later stages of his NFL career, he would have 60 cc of fluid drained from his knees during the morning, then practice that afternoon. He had three bulging disks, and the entire right side of his body didn’t work well even before ALS.

When he started to have difficulty holding a fork, writing and taking a cap off a bottle, he initially thought he was experiencing symptoms from his disk issues. In 2020, as the symptoms worsened, he was given a much grimmer diagnosis.

McMichael never blamed football for ALS. During his illness, he repeatedly said he had no regrets and that it was his choice to physically abuse his body in football and wrestling. He would not have done it any other way.

His mother, Betty Ruth, an English teacher, once told Chicago Magazine that Steve was “a happy baby who wanted to hug and laugh all the time.” McMichael’s biological father left the family when McMichael was a toddler and Betty Ruth married E.V. McMichael, an oil company executive whom Steve considered his biological father.

It was clear from an early age that McMichael was unmoved by fear. As a small child, he put a towel around his neck like a cape, climbed on a sewing machine and jumped off to see if he could fly. He carried a scar on his chin for the rest of his life that said he could not. Undeterred, he later climbed on a roof and jumped off with an umbrella to see if he could float down.

McMichael spent most of his childhood in Freer, Texas, an oil town between Laredo and Corpus Christi so arid it could make the Sahara look tropical. He was one of 54 kids in his high school class. In Freer, culture is the annual rattlesnake roundup. Hunting venomous reptiles became Michael’s hobby.

During Steve’s first year at Texas, E.V. was shot by a disgruntled former employee. He died a few days later from a heart attack. Steve took the loss hard, but he credits the death of his father with unleashing him as a football player and inspiring him to become a “wild child.”

He became a consensus first-team All-American in college. After making 14 tackles and winning the defensive MVP award in the Hula Bowl, McMichael looked like a potential first-round draft pick. But after knee surgery, he fell to the Patriots in the third round.

The “wild child” didn’t fit with the Patriots, however. Coach Ron Erhardt told him he was part of the NFL’s “criminal element” and cut him before his second season. Some knew immediately it was not a smart move. “When Ron (Erhardt) got rid of him, I thought he made a big mistake that would come back and haunt us, and it did,” Patriots Hall of Fame guard John Hannah said. “In practice, he gave me a handful. I was one of his supporters in keeping him and was upset when he did get let go.”

Both the Steelers and the Bears worked out McMichael at center. Neither signed him as one, but the Bears called back a few weeks later when they needed a defensive tackle.

Bears scout Jim Parmer asked Hampton to pick up McMichael at the airport. Hampton and McMichael hung out that afternoon, then went to a charity event that night. That’s where Hampton saw McMichael chug a pitcher of beer for the first time. “I’m thinking, ‘Well, looks like he’s found the right spot,’” Hampton said.

Did he ever. But the beginning was rough. McMichael had used a portion of his $45,000 Patriots signing bonus to purchase a used Coupe de Ville. When he joined the Bears, he drove that car 1,000 miles to Lake Forest and parked it in the Halas Hall lot. His imitation cheetah skin luggage was in the back. Then one day, the luggage was in the foyer of Halas Hall, and the Caddy was gone — repossessed because he couldn’t make the payments after being cut.

By 1983, he had established himself as one of the pillars of one of the most dominant defenses in NFL history. With an arm-under rip-and-slap counter move, he became a force as an interior pass rusher. His 95 career sacks still rank fourth-most among defensive tackles since sacks became an official statistic in 1982. The number is especially impressive considering he played alongside Hall of Famers Hampton and Richard Dent, and he often sacrificed himself for the good of his teammates. And McMichael may have been better against the run than the pass. He finished his career with 847 tackles.

Ditka once called McMichael the toughest player he ever coached. Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan said he was “one of the toughest son of a guns ever to play the game.” In the forward to linebacker Mike Singletary’s book “Calling the Shots,” Ryan wrote, “He belongs in another era, a time when the players wore high-top shoes and single-bar face masks.”

McMichael and Hampton became partners on the field and on the streets, creating mayhem wherever they went. Ditka nicknamed them “The Night Riders” after they showed up to practice looking particularly haggard after one night of revelry. They brought a liter of Crown Royal to every road game. Then, on the way home, McMichael and Hampton took the exit row of the team charter and pushed the seats in front of them forward so they could prop up their legs and ice their knees. They played booray and blackjack while blasting Hank Williams.

They had earned it. “Those two guys at the point of attack were as good as anything I’ve ever been around coaching or playing,” former teammate and former Panthers and Commanders head coach Ron Rivera said.

McMichael and Hampton were tone-setters on the Bears. The night before Super Bowl XX, it was a poorly kept secret that Ryan planned to take the Eagles’ head coaching job after the game. In the defensive meeting, Ryan told the players, “No matter what happens, you guys will always be my heroes.” Then he walked away.

McMichael wrote about what happened next in his book “Amazing Tales from the Chicago Bears Sideline.” “It pissed me off so much. I couldn’t sit there in my rage. I jumped up, grabbed the chair I was sitting in — a metal chair — and there was a chalkboard up in the front of the room, which I was pretty close to. I wasn’t one of those guys sitting in the back. I grabbed my chair, and to sound off as loud as I could about my angst about this, I grabbed my chair and threw it at the blackboard, thinking it was just going to shatter. I threw that chair and somehow it had the right spin so that all four legs hit the blackboard first, went through and stuck there. Hampton saw that, jumped up from his chair by the projector, smashed his big club of a hand into the projector and just destroyed it.”

Next to be destroyed was McMichael’s former team, as the Bears took apart the Patriots by the score of 46-10.

In those days, a Bear was not a Bear until he had McMichael’s approval. In Neal Anderson’s rookie training camp, McMichael indoctrinated the running back by slamming him to the ground when he wasn’t supposed to, hitting him late and challenging him verbally. After taking all he could, Anderson threw a punch that landed on the side of McMichael’s helmet.

Teammates waited for McMichael to retaliate, but he only stared down Anderson. Finally, McMichael said, “That’s what I wanted to know. He’s not just gonna bark, he’s gonna bite. You’re gonna be all right, kid.”

Former Bears receiver Tom Waddle said he didn’t talk to McMichael for two years out of fear and respect. One-time Bears tight end Jim Thornton, speaking within earshot of McMichael during McMichael’s illness, said every rookie on the Bears was afraid of him.

“You didn’t know what he was going to do,” Thornton said. “Is he going to slap you or hug you? He’s got that Texas slang. And then he’d give you the death stare, pull up the pants, look at you. He was the hardest to get to know.”

Said McMichael, “I was protecting my heart because I didn’t want to get close to you and then see you cut.”

The image McMichael projected didn’t always reflect the man. McMichael enjoyed playing a role.

“Intimidation is mental,” he said. “It’s a way of showing my intelligence. Everybody thinks, ‘There’s a big dumb football player who can’t say anything but (expletive).”

He was a doting husband who indulged his wife, and a loving father to his daughter, Macy, whom he and Misty call “Baby Girl.”

Dent confirmed there was an unexpected depth about the man.

“Steve didn’t come to the Bible study, but he would sit around and talk about things,” he said. “And he had a lot to offer. I used to love how he would check Singletary about the Bible and things of that nature. He is a guy I appreciate so much because he had some character about himself. He loved people in a different way.”

He once told Singletary, “You thought I was the devil when I really was an archangel.”

McMichael was an animal lover who could not walk out of a shelter without taking home a pet. At one point during his playing career, he had three dogs and three cats. He was known for owning a string of chihuahuas — from Pepe to Blue — whom he would dress in Mexican attire and take to events.

He also had a soft spot for those who weren’t treated fairly. When Vince Tobin replaced Ryan as Bears defensive coordinator and Bears defenders weren’t showing him much respect, McMichael told them to give him a chance.

“I’ve always been a bully’s bully,” he wrote in his book. “But don’t take that to mean I was the best bully. I bullied the bullies. Even in elementary school, I’d see a bigger kid bullying a smaller one, and I’d take up for the little kid. Or the stripper. They’d come into the club (where he worked as a bouncer during his college days) from time to time beat up, and most of the time it would be the man they were living with doing the beating. I’d say, ‘Just tell me who he is when he comes here to pick you up tonight.’ There was a side exit door, and I’d go wait for them in the dark. Those girls never got hit again.”

McMichael said he raised more money for charity than he made playing football. Before he became an ALS victim, he was an ALS fundraiser. His kindness returned to him during his illness, as the Bears donated expensive medical equipment, and others, including fans, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help pay his bills.

Nothing, though, could stop the disease. In early 2023, he signed a DNR, which instructed medical personnel to avoid resuscitation in a medical emergency. McMichael didn’t want another ambulance ride, didn’t want to spend another night in a hospital, didn’t want to leave the world in a room that wasn’t his own.

He had a last wish, though — to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It was an honor that seemed well beyond reality. McMichael had been Hall of Fame-eligible for 24 years and had never even been discussed by the Hall’s board of selectors as a candidate. Hope, however faint, came in the summer of 2023 when news came that he was one of 12 senior semifinalists for induction. He still was a long shot.

While awaiting the senior committee to vet his case, McMichael came down with pneumonia. The DNR meant Misty should let him be. But she had a feeling about the Hall of Fame. She asked him if, given what could happen, he wanted her to rescind the order. He did. McMichael was taken to the hospital, where he was treated and released.

In August, the senior committee heard his case and advanced him to the board of selectors as a finalist. The following January, the board considered his body of work and decided he should indeed be inducted. McMichael was enshrined in August with the class of 2024.

Because he was unable to travel to Canton, the Hall of Fame came to him. Jarrett Payton’s presentation speech played on a monitor in front of McMichael, who wore a gold jacket and was surrounded by 13 former teammates and other close friends and family members. Misty and Macy unveiled the bust. Mostly, the new inductee was expressionless and motionless but aware.

Less than a month later, he indicated he no longer wanted to be resuscitated if his heart should give out. By then, he had survived more than two years beyond what doctors told him he should expect.

While dying a slow, torturous death, he could not move his atrophied limbs and could barely communicate. Yet he did not give in to anger or despair. He had his moments, understandably, but mostly he was the same old Mongo.

The illness could not diminish his spirit. His wit remained sharp, his smile warm, his glare powerful and his appreciation palpable. Many came to visit with intentions of brightening his day. Then he brightened theirs.

Two things were remarkable about the way he dealt with his disease. The first was his grace. The second was his toughness.

When he still could speak, a group of his former teammates visited him. One told him how sorry they all were.

“It’s a good thing this happened to me and not one of you sons-of-b——-,” McMichael told them. “Because I’m the only one who could handle it.”

They nodded. They chuckled. And they wept.

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