Steve McMichael, Hall of Fame Tackle for Champion Bears, Dies at 67
Steve McMichael, a Hall of Fame defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears with a theatrical personality and a ferocious intensity who helped anchor what might have been the most predatory defense in the history of the N.F.L. during the team's 1985 Super Bowl-winning season, died on Wednesday in Joliet, Ill. He was 67.
The Bears confirmed his death, in hospice care. The team said he had struggled for years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative disease of the nervous system more commonly known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig's disease.
McMichael played 15 years in the N.F.L., 13 of them with Chicago and none more rapacious than the 1985 season. The Bears lost only once that season while rampaging through the league with the so-called 46 defense, orchestrated by the team's boisterous defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan.
Placing eight defensive players near the line of scrimmage, Chicago hounded, outmuscled and intimidated opponents. No victory was more thorough than the Bears' 44-0 dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys on their own field on Nov. 17, 1985. It was the worst defeat in the team's then-26-year history.
That afternoon, McMichael collected one of the 92 ½ career sacks he accumulated with the Bears, placing him second in franchise history to his teammate Richard Dent. In the view of many, Dallas simply gave up. Tom Landry, Dallas's coach at the time, called the defeat 'an old-fashioned country licking.'
'I call it the piranha effect,' the Chicago defensive end Dan Hampton told reporters afterward. 'We start getting on somebody and we smell blood. We seem to go into a frenzy.'
Chicago's only loss that season came against the Miami Dolphins. The Bears dominated the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX, 46-10, played on Jan. 26, 1986, in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
Though somewhat small for a defensive lineman at 6 feet 2 inches and 270 pounds, McMichael possessed immense strength and slippery quickness. He starred on a defense that included three other future Hall of Famers: the defensive ends Hampton and Dent and the linebacker Mike Singletary. He played in 191 consecutive games for the Bears and 12 more in the playoffs, a franchise record.
'He was a defensive tackle taking on double teams and triple teams and leg whips and this and that,' Hampton told The Chicago Tribune for its obituary about McMichael. 'To then essentially defy the physical reality of it is mind-boggling.'
McMichael reveled in an exaggerated, untamed persona. His nicknames included Ming the Merciless, after the tyrant in 'Flash Gordon,' and Mongo, after the dimwitted ruffian who punches out a horse in the Mel Brooks comedy 'Blazing Saddles.'
In a 2019 speech recounted by The Associated Press in its obituary, McMichael joked that his brief and inconsequential stay with the Patriots, who had chosen him in the third round of the 1980 N.F.L. draft, ended after a season because he was considered 'the criminal element in the league.'
But the Bears readily accepted him in 1981. McMichael described walking into the office of the Bears' founder, George Halas, and being told: 'I've heard what kind of dirty rat you are in practice. Don't change, Steve.'
After a final N.F.L. season, with the Green Bay Packers in 1994, his blustery guise helped ease McMichael into five years as a professional wrestler, who used a pile-driver move on opponents as if they were footballs with the 'Mongo Spike.'
McMichael was born on Oct. 17, 1957, in Houston. His parents divorced when he was a year old. His mother, an English teacher born Betty Ruth Smalley, later married E.V. McMichael, an oil company executive. Steve, who took his stepfather's last name as a toddler, declined to discuss his surname at birth. His mother died of breast cancer in 2018, and his stepfather died after being shot in 1976.
In 1964, the family moved to tiny Freer, Texas, south of San Antonio. McMichael lettered in football, baseball, basketball, track, tennis and golf at Freer High School.
He played football at the University of Texas, where he was an All-American in 1979. In 2010, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. In the N.F.L., he was named All-Pro in 1985 and 1987.
He is survived by his wife, Misty (Davenport) McMichael; a daughter, Macy McMichael; two sisters, Kathy and Sharon McMichael; and a brother, Robert. His first marriage, to Debra Marshall in 1998, ended in divorce.
In 2020, McMichael began experiencing tingling in his arms. A year later, he was diagnosed with A.L.S. He kept his humor when he revealed his illness to The Chicago Tribune in April 2021, saying that it 'will sneak up on you like a cheap-shotting Green Bay Packer.'
As the disease progressed, McMichael lost the ability to move and to speak.
He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Aug. 3, 2024, but he was too ill to attend the ceremony. The bust and gold jacket awarded to inductees were presented to him earlier that day at his bedside at his home in Homer Glen, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where he was surrounded by former Bears teammates.
'It's a cruel irony that the Bears' Ironman succumbed to this dreaded disease,' George McCaskey, the Bears' chairman, said in a statement on Wednesday. 'Yet Steve showed us throughout his struggle that his real strength was internal, and he demonstrated on a daily basis his class, his dignity and his humanity.'
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