With the Bears back in the NFL playoffs, it’s time to reevaluate club icon Mike Ditka as a Chicago hero and his zealots as lovable blue-collar guys with funny accents

Three things are certain in Chicago: death, (lots of) taxes, and the instinct to “bear down” on Mike Ditka and his legendary 1985 squad every time a Bears team emerges as a serious contender.

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Chicago’s WGN News giddily proclaimed that fans “are partying like it’s 1985” shortly after the Bears vanquished the Green Bay Packers and clinched the NFL North title last Sunday. The televised segment included an interview with a middle-aged mustachioed man dressed up like vintage Ditka: aviator sunglasses, tight navy blue sweater, cigar and all. Bushy mustaches are an increasingly familiar sight at Soldier Field this season – even Chicago quarterback Mitch Trubisky, born a year after the coach was fired, got in on the Ditka act for Halloween.

When the Bears opted to go with 322lb defensive tackle Akiem Hicks for a fourth and goal carry at the Giants’ one-yard-line earlier this month, many saw it as coach Matt Nagy covering one of Ditka’s greatest hits from ‘85 – when he used William “The Refrigerator” Perry as a hilariously large short yardage back.

Thankfully, Nagy’s team hasn’t recorded a Super Bowl Shuffle sequel yet but there’s still time. The “Superfans” would likely approve. For Illinois’s bicentennial celebration event on 3 December, comedians George Wendt and Robert Smigel revived their three-decade-old “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” skit from Saturday Night Live. Dressed in their cartoonish Ditka disguises, they joked that the staging of the original Super Bowl Shuffle ranked as the greatest event in Illinois history, yes, above the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

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If you’re scoring at home, it’s Ditka 1, Abraham Lincoln 0. While Ditka himself is in a physically weakened state due to a massive heart attack suffered last month, the religion of Iron Mike is stronger than ever in Chicagoland. “You cannot underestimate the effect of the ’85 Bears and Ditka on the Chicago psyche,” John Roach, creator of The Sports Writers on TV on Chicago’s now-defunct SportsChannel told the Ringer. “He still haunts Chicago.”

Haunt is the operative word here. There’s a distinct way in which Ditka’s trapped-in-amber-from-1985 folk hero status obscures his actual legacy and the awfulness of his politics. It’s time to reevaluate Ditka as a Chicago hero and hardcore Bears fans as lovable blue-collar guys with funny accents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Defensive Lineman William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry was used by Ditka as a short yardage back in 1985. Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty Images

Monster of the Midway

Let’s go back to those glorious 80s Monsters of the Midway. Ditka famously once said that people who write about the past are “losers and cowards” but the history of the Hall of Fame coach’s career is instructive.

Over his decade-long reign of terror leading the Bears, Ditka routinely berated and threatened his players, feuded with fellow coaches, battled with the media, belittled his opponents, and occasionally lit into fans (“You tell me what time and where and I’ll whip your ass. You got that, big boy?” he told “Neal from Northlake” during a 1992 radio call-in show.) In 1987, he was accused of assault after throwing a tantrum in a loss to the San Francisco 49ers in which he struck an opposing fan, a 38-year-old woman, in the head with a massive wad of his chewing gum on his way back to the locker room.

Even worse, he cavalierly sent players back into games with concussions, including Jim McMahon, the former star quarterback who now struggles with the early onset of dementia and the brain disease of CTE. Safety Dave Duerson, another standout from the famed ‘85 Bears, committed suicide in 2011 and in death also was diagnosed with CTE. Before he died, Duerson noted that “Mike was not one who gave a damn about the players or their injuries when he was coaching.” Ditka even tried to bust the union – he berated his own players for not crossing a picket line when the NFLPA went on strike in 1987 and called the scabs that played against Buddy Ryan’s Eagles “the real Bears” as the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia threatened a disturbance at the game.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mike Ditka is carried off the field after the Bears’ win in Super Bowl XX in January 1986. Photograph: Phil Sandlin/AP/PA Photos

In his frank 1992 biography, Armen Keteyian described Ditka as a monster of a man who was a careless, absent father (“I really can’t picture back to one moment when we were really happy,’’ his son Matt is quoted as saying), a bad businessman with a trail of failed ventures, and a member of the one percent who identified as a “common man” when it suited him but when those same common men criticized his decisions, he dismissed them as “losers in life ... $100-a-week guys.”

The truth has always been out there. It’s just that when Ditka ruled as a petty tyrant, fans and the media too often celebrated his behavior as hard-nosed toughness or excused it with a smirk and a shrug. C’mon, it’s just boys being boys – Ditka being Ditka. Fans and the media rarely soured on his antics when he was winning football games, but even when his teams failed (his record was a combined 20-44 over his last four seasons coaching the Bears and Saints), Iron Mike remained Teflon Mike when it came to maintaining his reputation as the ultimate “old school” coach.

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And then there’s his post-coaching career, which for the last two decades has mostly meant playing a caricatured version of himself for television. He’s either hawking whatever product Madison Avenue throws at him – from Coors beer to Vienna Beef hot dogs to (God help us) Iron Mike “male virility supplements” – or he’s grunting about current players being wimps or clowns for NFL broadcasts on NBC, or espousing toxic or reactionary politics. In other words, he’s a grizzled version of Trump.

The Trump-Ditka comparison would have been even more perfect had the latter followed through with his plan to run against Barack Obama for US Senate in 2004 (he’d “get the Bubba vote,” House majority leader Tom DeLay said at the time). Ditka eventually bowed out of the race but later claimed he could have beaten Obama and ended his political career then and there. Like many conservatives, Ditka’s rhetoric has grown steadily worse. In 2016, Ditka pronounced Obama “the worst president we’ve ever had” and said he’d vote for Trump.

Ditka has also stumped for Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, a billionaire businessman who, like the coach-turned-pitchman and Trump, equates masculinity with a kind of peacocking performance; a pantomiming of working-class grittiness. Just as Trump cosplays like he’s in the movie Top Gun while emceeing at military events or pretends to pal around with coal miners, Rauner dons flannel shirts or leather jackets and poses on Harley Davidson motorcycles – also to aim for Ditka’s “Bubba vote”. Granted, Ditka genuinely grew up modestly in Carnegie, Pennslyvania, but has spent most of his adulthood a multi-millionaire who developed a taste for expensive vintage cars and fine wines and owned an extravagant second home in Florida. He left behind his lunch pail decades ago.

It was no surprise when Ditka echoed Trump in last year’s controversy involving Colin Kaepernick and other players who took a knee during the anthem by saying he would have kicked the ex-Niners quarterback off his team. “Kaepernick would be an unknown – a complete unknown. He’d be a complete nobody,” Ditka barked. “Nobody would know who he was without the game of football, without the sport he’s playing. Not to respect that, you have to be a pretty unintelligent person, I would think.”

The real “Super Fans”

That’s red meat for the Bears faithful, who are largely different than the goofy stereotype. George Wendt’s Super Fan is woefully outdated. Chicago is no longer a working-class city (a greater share of adults now hold college degrees – 38.5% – than in New York) and the Chi-caw-go accent is disappearing along with them. The typical hardcore Bears fan makes over $60,000 a year and can afford what consumer advice company ValuePenguin rated as the least affordable ticket in the NFL last year. A Sunday gameday for three people, to pay for tickets, parking, and some food and drink, adds up to $483. An average Chicagoan would need to work 16½ hours just to cover the cost.

Those blue-collar guys with the thick white ethnic Chicago accent? They might be watching the game on TV, but these days Soldier Field is a haven for the NFL’s prime demographic: well-off aging suburban men who tend to vote Republican. In other words, Trump voters. Here in the overwhelmingly blue city of Chicago (83.7% of voters went with Hillary Clinton in 2016), Soldier Field feels like a bubble of deep red on game day.

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I noticed plenty of fans this season who bedeck themselves with Ditka costumes or the team’s wishbone “C” logo but they’re increasingly worn on camouflage versions of Bears gear, like say, an olive-green military-themed Trubisky jersey (the Bears have an entire web page devoted to veterans-themed team merch). Likewise, it’s hard to miss all the SUVs or trucks parked at tailgates decked out with pro-Trump or conservative slogans. I’ve met angry men at Soldier Field who hate leftists more than the Packers.

“No one took a knee for our beautiful National Anthem today at the Chicago Bears game!” tweeted someone purporting to be an Indiana man named Rod Stryker who posted a Ditka-like (or Trumpian) rant from the stands of the Bears’ 11 November home game against the Lions. “It would really take a commie loser scum bag like Krapernick to disrespect the Flag & Military on Veterans Day at Soldier Field. Notice the stadium is packed with PATRIOTS who love America.”

There were plenty of reasons why Stryker, whose puckish avatar is a photoshopped image of Alexander Hamilton in a Maga hat, might feel right at home. That boycott of the NFL that conservatives loudly supported on social media last year after Trump encouraged them to do so in response to the anthem controversy? Instead of staying away from each other, If anything conservatives and the NFL appear to be engaged in a season-long recommitment ceremony to each other. If you’re a right-wing Bears fan, you really can go home again – especially if you never really left.

A kind of authoritarian conservatism has always hummed in the background of the NFL experience, but in 2018 we can see how it’s curdled to the point where we get Trump as president and Ditka as his patron saint – all cheered on by today’s real-life Super Fans, a demographic disproportionately made up of aggrieved right-wing culture warriors who want to make the NFL and America great again by yelling at black players who don’t stand for the national anthem.

The truth is: it’s kind of hard to rewatch those Super Fan skits these days and listen to the worship for the “Da Coach” and “Da Bearsss”. It now sounds too much like an unquestioning, “post-truth” devotion to a dictator-like leader–no matter if they’re the kind who favors sweater vests and steakhouses or expensive suits and skyscrapers.