Her eyes lit up as she looked through my closet and excitedly pulled out my old sweater.
My oldest daughter, who was a freshman or sophomore in high school at the time, stumbled upon my favorite Christmas present form my Grandma Jean, and it immediately brought me back to Christmas Eve of 1986 or 1987.
After all the presents were opened, my grandma let me in on a secret. The present she got me was something she had run out and get in the last second. That is because she figured the first present she ordered for me was too big, and she was going to send it back.
But she let me check it out anyway.
My eyes lit up as I saw the navy-blue sweater with “Bears” written across the front of it in white. It had orange stripes on top and on the bottom of the Bears. It also had orange and white stripes around the sleeves.
It was the sweater that Mike Ditka wore as the Bears destroyed the Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX. Well, it was almost the one that Ditka wore. This one had sleeves, while Da Coach wore a sweater vest.
His assistants, though, wore the exact same sweater my grandma was showing me. That includes defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, the architect of the famed 46 Defense.
My grandma let me try the sweater on. It was a little big, but it was close enough. I gave my grandma the biggest hug of my life when she told me I got to keep it.
I wore it that night when we went to my other grandparents’ house. I wore it the next day, and the next and maybe even the next.
That sweater did not just come to mind because Ditka passed away just a few days shy of his 87th birthday last Friday. I was thinking about that sweater a few weeks ago when my youngest daughter, who is now a junior in high school, asked me why I care so much about the Chicago Bears.
We are not from Chicago, and we have no family from that area.
Logically, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense how so much of my life can revolve around a football team, especially when I literally never met a single player on the team. It is silly that my day can be ruined by a loss, especially one like Sunday in Lambeau Field.
I told her that my bond with the Bears goes well beyond any geographical connection. Being a Bears fan is woven so deeply into my identity. It has been for as long as I can remember.
The Bears are my team because they are my dad’s team. Even when the Bears were horrible in when I picked them sometime in the 1970s, the Bears were our special bond. They still are.
I loved cheering for the same team as my dad — on that rare occasion they were on television. It was better than cheering for a winning team like the Cowboys, as my front-running older brother did.
I loved the color combination of the Bears. I loved the name of the city. I loved the picture of the bear mascot. More than anything, I loved Walter Payton, and I loved his No. 34. It didn’t matter if they were no good, the Bears were my team for life.
Then the 1985 Bears happened. The team shuffled to the Super Bowl victory behind a cast of characters that quarterback Jim McMahon compared to the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
In addition to the incomparable Payton and the Punky QB, the Bears had a cast of characters that included Steve “Mongo” Michael, William “The Refrigerator” Perry and “Samari” Mike Singletary. They beat the heck out of everybody, and they had fun doing it.
That cast was held together by “Iron” Mike Ditka, the hard-nosed, non-nonsense coach whose team won despite a whole lot of nonsense, like recording a rap video about winning Super Bowl in early December.
That team meant so much to me. Not only did they beat the Cowboys, giving me my first victory over my older brother, they humiliated them 44-0 in Dallas.
The 1985 Bears represented everything I wanted to be. I wanted to be humble like Payton, but I also wanted to never be afraid to speak my mind like McMahon and Ditka.
McMahon taught me to never give a rip what others think about me, and Ditka introduced me to the song “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. That’s how I wanted to live. My way.
For 41 years, I have been chasing the feeling that the 1985 Bears gave me. Those 41 years featured a whole lot more humiliation and heartbreak than they did good times, but I still watch each and every week.
Most of those games were watched with my dad or while talking to him on the phone for most of the game.
We still live and die with the team even after idiot Michael McCaskey fired Ditka in January of 1993. That felt like a close family member died.
Those years with Ditka — and the decades after him —always provided a conversation starter between my dad and me. When we got into a fight and didn’t talk for a few days, the impasse never ended with an apology or an “I love you.”
It usually ended with a sentence like, “Who do the Bears play this week?” If it was in the offseason, it might start with, “Did you see who the Bears signed?”
Sentences like that could usually be directly translated into “I’m sorry” and “I love you,” and we both understood that.
Good or bad, the Bears always give my dad and me something to talk about. They healed a lot of wounds that might not have been healed otherwise. The Bears are a part of us.
Last Friday, I called to tell my dad to tell him some bad news. Ditka passed away, and that one really stung both of us. He was a central figure in our lives, even if we never met him.
Ditka had not coached in Chicago since the 1992 season, but he still represents everything that is good about the Chicago Bears. He always will.
He was the tough-as-nails Hall of Fame tight end for Papa Bear Hallas, helping deliver the 1963 NFL title. He was the unapologetic coach who later took the franchise from the outhouse to the penthouse.
Iron Mike embodied the ‘City of Big Shoulders,” and he is the reason so many of us who never lived in Chicago still cheer for the Bears, even if we cannot convince our daughters that we are not just lunatics.
All of that pretty much fell on deaf ears for my youngest daughter, who could not possibly care less about football or any other sport. We will never bond over the Bears like her brother and I do, and that is fine. We have a lot of other close connections.
For a moment, though, I thought I had her older sister when she pulled out that old Ditka sweater.
“I have to go to a Christmas party,” she said. “Can I wear this?”
“Of course,” I said, beaming that my daughter seemed to love the sweater as much as I did when I first saw it. Then she added one more sentence that broke my heart in two.
“It’s an ugly sweater party.”
— This Bill Foley, who can still sing every word of the Super Bowl Shuffle, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
