Mike Ditka only appeared on Saturday Night Live twice, but you could be forgiven for remembering him as a recurring character.
The legendary Chicago Bears player and coach, who died Friday at 86, loomed over one of SNL’s most enduring recurring sketches: Bill Swerski’s Super Fans, the mustachioed, meat-loving Chicago sports obsessives for whom Ditka wasn’t merely a football coach but something closer to a deity.
Created by Robert Smigel and inspired by the swaggering Chicago sports fans he encountered after moving to the city in the 1980s, the Super Fans made their SNL debut in January 1991, with Joe Mantegna as Bill Swerski, Chris Farley as Todd O’Connor, Mike Myers as Pat Arnold, and Smigel as Carl Wollarski.
Ditka was there from the beginning, at least in spirit. The characters’ irrational confidence in “Da Bears” was matched only by their reverence for “Da Coach.” In the first sketch, when Swerski posed a hypothetical golf match between Ditka and God, his fellow Super Fans immediately picked Ditka.
Ditka himself wouldn’t actually appear on SNL for another two years.
When he finally did, the circumstances could hardly have been more appropriate.
On January 5, 1993, the Bears fired Ditka after 11 seasons as head coach. Four days later, SNL opened its Danny DeVito-hosted episode with the Super Fans drafting an open letter protesting the decision.
At the end of the cold open, Ditka himself appeared in a pretaped cameo, decked out in a patriotic sweater, chewing gum, and speaking on a Bears telephone.
Years later, raw footage from the shoot surfaced online and revealed an even more quintessentially Ditka performance that hadn’t made air.
As the crew reset for an additional take, the famously impatient coach became increasingly irritated with the process, at one point insisting that a single take ought to have been enough.
It was less an outtake than an accidental extension of the character SNL had already built around him.
Ditka would make just one more appearance on the show, in October 1997, when Farley returned to host.
By then, there was a problem: Da Coach was no longer coaching Da Bears.
Ditka had taken over the New Orleans Saints earlier that year, and “Super Fans Revisited” caught up with his old disciples as they struggled to reconcile their devotion to Chicago with their devotion to Ditka. Carl had begun rooting for the Saints. Bob Swerski had moved to Tennessee, roughly halfway between Chicago and New Orleans. Todd, meanwhile, had adopted a simpler coping mechanism: He believed it was still 1986.
The sketch turned out to be the last Super Fans installment featuring Farley, who died less than two months later.
But the characters—and their conception of Ditka—had already long since escaped SNL. “Da Bears” became part of the sports-fan lexicon, while Ditka’s sweater, mustache, temper, and absolute certainty became inseparable from the exaggerated Chicago masculinity the Super Fans were parodying.
Smigel remembered Ditka Friday as a willing participant in the joke, but said one encounter in particular had stayed with him.
At a 2001 roast benefiting Misericordia, a Chicago residence for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Smigel said Ditka had every opportunity to return fire after spending the evening as the target of jokes. Instead, when it was his turn to speak, Ditka used the time to talk about Misericordia, the work it did, and the importance of giving its residents opportunities to participate in their community.
“He could’ve gotten huge laughs firing back at all of us but he cared much more about Misericordia,” Smigel wrote.
Smigel called Ditka “a great sport, always up for anything,” but said what he remembered most was a sincere and loyal man who “knew what he believed in and never hesitated to fight for it.”
