Steve McMichael, a bruising defensive tackle who helped lead the 1985 Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl, taking down opposing quarterbacks with a hard-charging style that he later showcased in the ring with World Championship Wrestling, died April 23 at a hospice in Joliet, Illinois. He was 67.
His death was confirmed by Betsy Shepherd, a spokeswoman for the family. Mr. McMichael announced in 2021 that he had been diagnosed with the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Mr. McMichael played all but two of his 15 NFL seasons in Chicago, helping to anchor the defensive line on gritty 1980s teams that won six division titles and restored the Bears to greatness. He was slightly undersized at 6 feet 2 and 270 pounds, although he made up for it in speed and toughness, exploding off the line of scrimmage to swat down a pass, break up a play in the backfield or bury a quarterback in the turf.
His intensity was underscored by a pair of affectionate nicknames given by teammate Dan Hampton, a Hall of Fame defensive lineman: Mongo, after an outlaw who knocks out a horse with one punch in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles” (the character was played by former NFL defensive tackle Alex Karras), and Ming the Merciless, after a “Flash Gordon” villain.
“He epitomized what a Chicago Bear should be all about,” Mike Ditka once said. Interviewed by the Chicago Tribune in 2005, the Super Bowl-winning coach explained that “there was never a down where he didn’t go all out. You gotta love the guy; he played the game the way it should be played.”
Mr. McMichael was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in February 2024 and appeared on the video board, along with family members and former teammates gathered around his hospital bed, during the official enshrinement ceremony in Canton, Ohio, in August.
He made two Pro Bowl teams, was twice selected as a first-team all-pro, and recorded 10 or more sacks in three seasons. During the Bears’ championship-winning 1985 season, he was part of one of the greatest defenses in NFL history, playing alongside fellow Hall of Famers Hampton, Richard Dent and Mike Singletary. Chicago led the league that year in points allowed (12.38 per game), yards allowed (4,135) and takeaways (54), with Mr. McMichael often setting the tone before games.
On the eve of Super Bowl XX, Mr. McMichael was dismayed to hear Buddy Ryan, the Bears’ defensive coordinator, deliver a locker-room speech suggesting that he might be leaving the team at the end of the season.
“Guys were sniffling and crying. Real quiet,” said Ron Rivera, a backup linebacker who became an NFL coach, according to an account in the Bears book “Monsters,” by Rich Cohen. “Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, McMichael goes: ‘What a bunch of crybabies. We’re getting ready to play the most important game of our lives, and all you guys can do is whine about this?’ And he grabs a chair and throws it across the room and it sticks in the chalkboard.”
“The room erupted,” Mr. McMichael later said. The frenzy continued when Hampton smashed a projector, and the energy carried over onto the field the next day when the Bears routed the New England Patriots, 46-10, in what was then the most lopsided Super Bowl in history.
Although he grew up in a small town in South Texas, Mr. McMichael had the showmanship of a Hollywood leading man, growing his hair long and driving around Chicago in a red Rolls-Royce convertible with a Chihuahua in his lap. Before games, he would sometimes hype himself up by pounding his helmeted head against a bathroom wall, according to Sports Illustrated, shouting, “I feel nine or 10 sacks in this thing!”
Near the close of his playing career in the early 1990s, he moonlighted on a postgame show for Chicago’s NBC affiliate, which Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon described at the time as the nation’s “most out-of-control half-hour of quasi-sports television.”
In between conversations about football, Mr. McMichael would playfully terrorize his co-host, Mark Giangreco, mocking his analysis while cracking an egg on Giangreco’s forehead, spraying shaving cream on his blazer or smearing his face with lipstick. He once pulled out a foot-long knife to chop a Big Mac in two, to the dismay of an off-duty state trooper who called in to say, according to Wilbon, that the blade was “about four inches too long and illegal in the state of Illinois.”
Audiences tuned in, even as Mr. McMichael faced criticism after he referred to players’ wives as “the Kotex mafia” and repurposed an offensive term for people with Down syndrome. He was fired after trying to make light of HIV testing while wielding a fake syringe.
Friends said that Mr. McMichael had a sensitive, quieter side away from the spotlight, and that he leaned into his hell-raising Mongo persona while wearing football pads or appearing on television. It was also something he embraced for a few years in WCW, which he joined in 1995 as a color commentator before entering the ring as a wrestler, joining the Four Horsemen stable and finishing off opponents with a skull-crushing move known as the Tombstone piledriver.
Stephen Douglas McMichael — it was unclear what last name he was given at birth; he adopted his stepfather’s surname at a young age — was born in Houston on Oct. 17, 1957. He was a toddler when his father left the family. His mother, a schoolteacher, later married an oil-field worker whose job took the family to Freer, Texas, where Mr. McMichael began playing football in seventh grade.
Mr. McMichael played virtually every down for his high school team, coming onto the field as a kicker, tight end and middle linebacker. He also lettered in basketball, track, tennis, golf and baseball, catching for Jim Acker, a future major league pitcher, and his older brother Bill Acker, who would play defensive tackle in the NFL.
At the time, Mr. McMichael preferred baseball to football. But a scholarship offer from the University of Texas, and the chance to play for legendary football coach Darrell Royal, set him on a path to the NFL. He started his first game as a freshman on the day his stepfather died in Freer, reportedly of a heart attack after he was shot by a former employee who had barged into the family home.
“His death drew me to those neon lights,” said Mr. McMichael, who began spending late nights at bars and landed a job as a bouncer at a strip club. In his telling, his stepfather’s death also transformed his playing style, giving him a new rage-filled intensity.
Mr. McMichael was a consensus all-American his senior year, playing on a 9-3 Texas team that allowed fewer than nine points per game, and left college without finishing his degree, having been selected by the New England Patriots in the third round of the 1980 NFL draft.
As a rookie, he scarcely played. He frequented Boston’s “Combat Zone” nightlife district and sometimes showed up to practice without having slept. In a memoir, “Steve McMichael’s Tales From the Chicago Bears Sideline,” he wrote that he was released from the team in 1981 after being told that the Patriots believed he was “part of the criminal element in the league.”
Weeks later, when the Bears needed a backup defensive tackle midway through the season, they called Mr. McMichael, remembering his MVP-winning performance in the Hula Bowl, a college all-star game. Ditka joined the franchise the next season, and Mr. McMichael became a starter in 1983, learning to harness his intensity while playing alongside Hampton.
“They provided the heat and fire of that team,” Bears veteran Ed O’Bradovich, a retired defensive end who mentored the duo, told the Athletic in 2020. “There was nobody in the league who could block those two consistently. … I’ve been watching football since the 1950s, and they were the best one-two punch in the history of the game.”
Mr. McMichael, who had eight knee operations, became known for playing through injuries, and said he would numb the pain with alcohol, drinking a liter of Crown Royal with Hampton after games. He set a franchise record playing in 191 consecutive games, not counting the three games that he and his teammates sat out during the 1987 players’ strike.
When the Bears declined to pay his $1.2 million salary in 1994 — he was the oldest defensive tackle in the league at 36 — he joined the rival Green Bay Packers for one last season. He retired with career totals of 95 sacks, 838 tackles and 13 forced fumbles.
Mr. McMichael remained a Chicago fixture. He performed with some of his old teammates as a singer in a cover band, the Chicago 6, and made headlines in 1998 when he was kicked out of Wrigley Field — shortly after leading the crowd in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — for using the public address system to criticize an umpire’s call that went against the Cubs. He also coached an indoor football team, the Chicago Slaughter, and in 2013, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of suburban Romeoville, Illinois.
His first marriage, to Debra Marshall, ended in divorce soon after he started his wrestling career. His wife had accompanied him to matches before launching a pro wrestling career of her own, and later married and divorced the World Wrestling Federation star “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.
In 2001, Mr. McMichael married Misty Davenport, who became his caretaker as ALS caused his health to deteriorate. In addition to his wife, survivors include their daughter, Macy; two sisters; and a brother.
Mr. McMichael was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2009. Looking back on his career a few years earlier, he told the Tribune that for all the pain football caused him, he had tried to replicate the joys of the game long after he hung up his cleats.
“I looked at wrestling as a way to satiate that rush that came from football,” he said. “Just like in football, I got to walk out of tunnels and the people are screaming for me, against me. It doesn’t matter. It’s what’s in your heart that stimulates that rush — a mixture of fear, aggression and excitement. It’s a high like nothing else.”
