Of the hundreds of keepsakes Kathy McMichael has collected over the years from her older brother’s football career, the painted football in the front room of her Austin, Texas, home remains among the most meaningful. The ball sits on a wooden credenza shelf surrounded by framed photographs and with the script facing out.
Game ball presented to Steve McMichael
Bears – 44
Cowboys – 0
Almost three years ago, not very long after Steve McMichael was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he gave that football to his youngest sister knowing what that game meant to their family and understanding that, for Kathy, it was still a time machine back to an unforgettable November Sunday in 1985 to the very top of Texas Stadium to the moments she can still describe with great detail and fondness.
Kathy still can recall her family’s early arrival to the stadium. “We were in our seats before the concession stands opened.”
She can still see her brother, a starting defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears, striding to midfield hours before the game, stopping inside the giant blue star, turning in a circle and taking a moment to himself.
Throughout his 15-season NFL career, McMichael had a regular ritual at the 50-yard line, a crazed Bruce Banner-to-Incredible Hulk-like transformation that he went through to whip himself into a competitive frenzy. But on that afternoon, the routine was different.
Long before kickoff, wearing his uniform pants and a cutoff gray T-shirt, Steve clearly had reached a reflective state, a kid from Freer, Texas, who had gone on to an All-American college career as a Texas Longhorn and was now part of the posse in town to eliminate the Dallas Cowboys.
“Stevie looked like he was an inch tall from where we were sitting,” Kathy said. Still, she could tell her brother was having a moment.
Six seasons into his NFL career, McMichael had never beaten the team for which he had grown up rooting. The Bears hadn’t beaten the Cowboys since 1971 and hadn’t won in Dallas in 23 years. But the 1985 Bears were different.
Even before the first pass attempt, the first tackle, the first takeaway, Kathy McMichael had the sense it could become a milestone afternoon.
“You could tell it was all very poignant to Steve,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Oh, OK. Here we go.’ As I was watching him before the game, I turned to my mother and said, ‘He’s about to kick ass. And we’re going to the Super Bowl.’”
By afternoon’s end, the Bears didn’t just defeat the Cowboys in a CBS spotlight game with John Madden and Pat Summerall on the call. They obliterated the Cowboys with the final score — 44-0 — becoming the bright red stamp on the cover of the following week’s Sports Illustrated.
The Bears defense did just about whatever it wanted. Six sacks, five takeaways, two touchdowns.
Star running back Walter Payton contributed 132 rushing yards. Coach Mike Ditka bested his mentor, Tom Landry. Cowboys Pro Bowl running back Tony Dorsett ripped off 22 yards on his first carry, then managed just 22 more yards on his final 11 rushes.
McMichael punctuated the first half with a sack in the closing seconds, beating two Cowboys linemen and then smothering backup quarterback Gary Hogeboom for a loss of 9.
Said Kathy McMichael: “One of my lasting memories of that game is that Dallas never really had the ball. And when they did? They were almost scared. It was like, ‘I don’t want it. You take it.’ ”
Damn, did that kind of dominance feel good. That was exactly the kind of afternoon McMichael lived for, a full-intensity, full-throttle, full-team ass-kicking.
As always, McMichael was thrilled to do his part, a relentless in-the-trenches beast equally capable of making the big play or doing the dirty work to allow one of his talented teammates to do so.
Those qualities will be highlighted this weekend when the 66-year-old is enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, an honor for a Bears great who has longed forever for his contributions to one of the greatest units in NFL history to be fully recognized.
Still, as McMichael himself proudly told the Tribune in 2019, “It’s the journey that’s the reward, baby. It’s not the destination. The journey is what makes you who you are. The mountaintop is great. But how you got there is what you remember.”
Which is why that historic afternoon against the Cowboys still seems so remarkable, one of the many momentous stops within McMichael’s journey that feels indelible.
‘A signature win’
Hall of Fame week has offered another entry point to talk about so many of McMichael’s conquests with the Bears. There was the Monday night in 1991 when he ripped the football away from Jets running back Blair Thomas right before the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter to help deliver the Bears a no-way-in-hell comeback overtime victory at Soldier Field.
There were the consecutive sacks McMichael had on quarterback Don Maokowski in 1988 — the second one a safety — during a shutout home victory against the rival Green Bay Packers.
And yes, the Bears’ 46-10 destruction of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX still registers as the most meaningful achievement in franchise history.
Over 13 seasons with the Bears, McMichael played in 203 consecutive games, including the playoffs. He recorded 92½ sacks. But follow Kathy McMichael back to that 1985 Cowboys game for a moment and it’s almost as if she can feel her brother’s pounding heartbeat, the purpose in his every breath.
“I’m telling you,” Kathy said, “you could just tell there was extra meaning to that game. Our whole family was there. We could have hung from the ceiling with where we were sitting. And yet I guarantee everybody down on the field could hear us.”
To this day, that victory registers to so many members of the iconic ’85 Bears defense as arguably the peak performance within a historically dominant season.
“Winning that game in the way we did was such a signature win,” former safety Gary Fencik told the Tribune. “We all felt that. Everybody came back after that one and just said, ‘Hey, this is for real.’ This isn’t like we’re on some lucky streak right now. We just beat the Dallas Cowboys. And beat … them … up.”
The Bears delight was only enhanced by comments that Cowboys cornerback Everson Walls made leading up to the game, downplaying the Bears’ 10-0 record and arguing they hadn’t really played anybody yet. To which defensive end Dan Hampton exclaimed after the 44-point blowout, “We still haven’t played anybody!”
Try topping that amusement for a player as prideful and rambunctious as McMichael.
“You don’t put that (crap) out there before it happens,” he told the Tribune in 2019. “Everson Walls should have known a (bleeping) ass-whooping was coming!”
And come it did. Fencik recalls watching from the back end as the Bears defensive line and linebackers stampeded into the Cowboys backfield.
“The scheme was just working so well that you almost couldn’t believe it,” Fencik said. “There were guys coming from the left, from the right. It just seemed like everybody had a free lane.”
When there’s an opportunity to make a statement like that, you hammer that statement with an exclamation point.
That is what the Bears were looking to do that day in Texas. That was the mission they accomplished. That is what Fencik and McMichael talked about for years afterward, how that day in Dallas was probably the Bears’ biggest breakthrough on their rise to becoming champions.
“In so many ways,” Fencik said, “that really was the one where we went, ‘OK. We have an opportunity. This isn’t foolhardy. We really have an opportunity to win the Super Bowl.’”
Added Kathy McMichael: “That’s what I was telling my mother. Before the game, all these Cowboys fans were being rambunctious. Hollering. Yelling. Blah, blah, blah. And then it wasn’t even the end of the third quarter and half of them were already gone. Because of the embarrassment.”
‘I miss his voice’
For the past three years or so, Kathy McMichael has split her time between Texas and the Chicagoland area, doing her part to help take care of Steve. That cherished game ball from the Cowboys game was given to her when Steve could still speak.
The loss of that verbal back-and-forth has been among the most brutal blows of ALS.
“I miss his voice,” Kathy said.
Kathy misses all the phone calls with Steve greeting her with his always enthusiastic and sometimes startling baritone.
Katherine Denise! What the hell are you doing right now?
Kathy looks back now with a laugh at all the childhood chaos that ensued when their mother was away and their babysitter was lax.
“One time, Steve put my sister and me back to back, wrapped us in Christmas tree lights and plugged us in,” Kathy said. “My mom came home, asked ‘Where are the girls?’ And there we were. Blinking.”
Ranking the 100 best Bears players ever: No. 18, Steve McMichael
Kathy remembers the way Steve taught her how to placekick when she was a girl and still misses the predictable calls from her brother any time a University Texas or Bears kicker blew a critical field-goal attempt.
Katherine Denise, you could have made that goddamn kick!
Nowadays, most of Kathy and Steve’s time together comes watching television in his Homer Glen home. Episodes of “Bar Rescue.” Or “Two and a Half Men” — but only the episodes with Charlie Sheen. Late-night Western movies on Channels 522 and 523 have become a favorite as well.
“We watched ‘Two Mules for Sister Sara’ so many times I thought I was going to jump off the house,” Kathy said.
‘Toughest man I ever met’
Every day provides emotional challenges with Steve motionless, gaunt and confined to his bed.
“Sometimes I’ll look over at him out of the corner of my eye,” Kathy said, “and I can see him staring off into space. You just wonder what he is thinking. Is he thinking about dying? You ask yourself, ‘How can we make all this easier for him?’ ”
Like so many of those close to McMichael, Kathy is convinced Steve has fought ALS with all this might, in big part, because he wanted to live to witness his Hall of Fame enshrinement.
That, too, is a goal McMichael has nearly met. The official ceremony will take place Saturday in Canton, Ohio. McMichael will partake in his part of the festivities from his home.
“Three years ago everybody said, ‘You know, you need to brace yourself because he may be gone before Christmas,’” Kathy said. “I said, ‘You don’t know him. I know him.’ He’ll go when he’s ready. And he’s not ready yet.’
Kathy can still feel her older brother’s pride swell when old teammates come to visit. And she senses his amusement when those football fraternity brothers find their storytelling groove.
This summer, Hampton dropped by with former Bears teammate Glen Kozlowski in tow, embellished some favorite stories from the ’80s and cracked wise for as long as he could.
Hampton said he had seen a photo preview of McMichael’s Hall of Fame bust and was thoroughly impressed with how the sculptor had captured his likeness.
“It looks just like you, brother,” Hampton said. “In mine, I look like an idiot. I look like Ditka!”
McMichael’s eyes bugged with amusement.
Hampton then reminded McMichael that he was about to become the third defensive lineman from the 1985 Bears to enter the Hall of Fame, joining Hampton and Dent.
“Do you realize there’s no other team in the history of the NFL that has three linemen in the Hall of Fame?” Hampton told his buddy. “But now we do, baby.”
That reminded Kathy of Hampton’s own 2002 Hall of Fame enshrinement speech and how he singled McMichael out as “the toughest man I ever met.”
“For one special moment in time,” Hampton said that day, “we were about as good as good gets.”
That duo may have never been better than they were in 1985. And it’s arguable the ’85 Bears defense was never better than it was than on that November Sunday in Irving, Texas.
Kathy McMichael hates that her brother’s final chapter has been as heartbreaking and cruel as it has been.
“Seeing him like he is now is the hardest part,” she said. “Steve has always been my hero. And watching him suffer like this is difficult. This would be unfair for anybody. But it’s certainly not fair for him. He’s such a great person. And he had so much more life to live and enjoy.”
Still, the gratitude for how much McMichael lived and how much he accomplished never dissipates. All Kathy has to do to remember that is to pore over all of her keepsakes, including that painted game ball that sits on the shelf in her front room.
