Dick Butkus, 1942-2023

Dick Butkus can't die. He never died. He killed, though. Well, no, he never actually killed anyone. But it sure seemed like it.

Richard Marvin Butkus was born on December 9, 1942 in the Roseland neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, the son of Lithuanian immigrants. When he grew up in the 1940s and '50s, the Chicago Cardinals shared Comiskey Park with baseball's White Sox on the South Side, and the Chicago Bears shared Wrigley Field with baseball's Cubs on the North Side. So the Butkus family were Cardinal fans. But the Cardinals didn't have enough fans, and they moved to St. Louis in 1960 (and later to Arizona in 1988).

Dick played high school football as a fullback, linebacker, punter and placekicker at Chicago Vocational High School. He averaged 5 yards per carry as a fullback, but preferred playing linebacker, where he made 70 percent of his team's tackles. In his 1st year on the varsity team, Chicago Vocational surrendered only 55 points in 8 games. In 1959, he was the 1st junior to be honored by the Chicago Sun-Times as the city's high school player of the year. Injuries limited his play as a senior, but he was still heavily recruited by colleges to play football.

He played center and linebacker at the University of Illinois, making him one of major college football's last two-way players. In the 1963 season, he helped the Fighting Illini win the Big Ten Conference Championship and the 1964 Rose Bowl. He won the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as the Big Ten's Most Valuable Player. Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, one of the all-time experts on college football, wrote at the time, "If every college football team had a linebacker like Dick Butkus of Illinois, all fullbacks soon would be three feet tall and sing soprano."

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In 1965, both he and Gale Sayers of the University of Kansas were drafted by the Chicago Bears. They arrived just as the Bears were ending a strong era. His playing career included the era in which the NFL, including the Bears in 1971, was switching to artificial turf, which wrecked his knees. As a result, he never played in so much as a Playoff game, and played his last game when he was only 31 years old.

Which makes his legendary reputation all the more remarkable. He played 9 seasons in the NFL, and was named to the Pro Bowl in 8 of them. He was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1969 and 1970, despite the Bears going just 7-21 over those seasons. The Bears were known as the Monsters of the Midway before Butkus was even born, and yet no player has ever been a greater personification of the name.

And with all the Bears' great running backs, from Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski in ye olden days to Willie Galimore just before Sayers got there (his 1964 car-crash death was probably the reason they drafted Sayers), to Walter Payton after Sayers, "the Kansas Comet" may still be the most talented running back ever. Da Bears got both of these men in the 1965 NFL Draft. That should have been a great stroke of luck.

And yet... "Never won a Super Bowl?" Butkus once said. "I never played in a Playoff game!" It's true: They barely even had winning seasons. In 1969, with Sayers in the backfield and Butkus marauding on D, the Bears went 1-13. How did that happen? Well, the franchise never had a franchise quarterback between Sid Luckman in the late 1940s and Jim McMahon in the mid-1980s. And teammate Brian Piccolo was dying of cancer, so they were kind of preoccupied.

Bad knees ended Sayers' career in 1971, and Butkus' 2 years later. Yet their legends remain: At 34, Sayers is the youngest athlete to be elected to a major sport's Hall of Fame while still alive, and Butkus, to this day, is, for many fans, football's definitive defensive player, more than Mean Joe Greene, Lawrence Taylor or Reggie White.

He was named to the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame, the NFL's 1960s and 1970s All-Decade Teams (he and Larry Wilson were the only men named to both), and the NFL's 75th Anniversary Team. Illinois retired his Number 50, and the Bears retired his Number 51.

The NCAA created the Butkus Award to honor the best linebacker of the season. In 1999, The Sporting News named him Number 9 on its list of the 100 Greatest Football Players, 2nd only to Lawrence Taylor among defensive players. On the CBS special honoring those players, NFL Today analyst and former coach Jerry Glanville, who specialized on defense, called him the greatest football player he ever saw. Not the greatest defender, the greatest player.

In 2008, ESPN ranked Butkus 19th on their list of the Top 25 College Football Players of All Time. In 2010, the NFL Network ranked him Number 10 on its list of the 100 Greatest Players, again trailing only Taylor on defense.

He remains, even more than L.T., Mean Joe Greene and Ray Lewis, the last word in mean, hard-hitting defensive football players, the definitive Chicago "Monster of the Midway." Sylvester Stallone named one of his dogs Butkus, and even cast the dog as Rocky Balboa's dog in Rocky, keeping the name "Butkus."

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All of which made it all the more fun when Dick Butkus became an actor, including starring alongside fellow defensive behemoth Bubba Smith in Miller Lite beer commercials. Deacon Jones, another contender for the titles of greatest and meanest defensive player ever, and who also did some Miller Lite commercials, said, "Dick was an animal. I called him a maniac. A stone maniac. He was a well-conditioned animal, and every time he hit you, he tried to put you in the cemetery, not the hospital."

He took his acting career seriously, taking lessons, practicing classic roles. And yet, he seemed to be cast mainly in exploitation films, including football-themed movies: In addition to being cast as himself in Brian's Song, the movie about the Sayers-Piccolo friendship, he was in the original The Longest Yard, Superdome, Necessary Roughness and Any Given Sunday. Still, he managed to get semi-regular roles in the TV shows Blue Thunder, My Two Dads and MacGyver, and starred as a high school basketball coach in Hang Time.

He went out of his way to show that he was different from the man he was on the field. People walked away from him knowing that, like a lot of professional wrestlers who had been cast as villains, he was actually a nice guy, and his Butkus Foundation helped a lot of people.

While at Illinois, he married his high school girlfriend, Helen Essenberg, and they had sons Ricky and Matt, and daughter Nikki. Matt was a defensive lineman at USC, and later worked at his father's charity; nephew Luke has been an assistant coach in college and in the pros, including currently with the Bears' arch-rivals, the Green Bay Packers; and grandson Ian Parish played volleyball at UCLA.

On October 31, 1994, the Bears played the Packers in the NFL's oldest, and perhaps nastiest, rivalry on Monday Night Football. An appropriate matchup for Halloween Night. Bear management decided to give the nationwide TV audience a look at a long-overdue ceremony: The retirements of the uniform numbers of Gale Sayers, 40; and Dick Butkus, 51. Kansas had already retired the 48 that Sayers wore there, and Illinois had already retired the 50 that Butkus wore.

But the weather was scarier than the holiday. It rained all night. And a cold wind came blasting in off Lake Michigan. This was not "Bear Weather," with frigid temperatures and perhaps snow: This was close to a hurricane. Walter Payton, now retired from a career as the next great Bears running back, stood on the sideline, all wrapped up in plastic, including his feet. During the ceremony, Helen Butkus was nearly injured when the wind inverted her umbrella.

Mike McCaskey, already unpopular among Bears fans, got booed. Butkus, Sayers, and, through Sayers' mention of him, the memory of Brian Piccolo all got cheered. When the ceremony was over, with the Bears still in the game at 14-0, a big chunk of the crowd, officially listed at just 47,381 due to the bad weather, left. They didn't miss much: The Packers went on to win 33-6.

Butkus would eventually receive an artificial knee, and leg surgery led to pain in his hips, back and nick. He eventually needed both hands to lift a coffee cup. And he needed quintuple bypass heart surgery. But for all his physical issues, he never blamed football for any of them, always extolling the sport's benefits. He did, however, speak out against steroid use, something he had nothing to do with, even though it was becoming a factor by the time he retired.

Michael Wilbon of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption lived in Chicago for the entirety of Butkus' career, which ended when Wilbon was 15. He mentioned that he had seen Butkus over the Summer of 2003, a few months after his 80th birthday, and that he looked well. But this past Thursday, October 5, he died in his sleep at his home in Malibu, California. For the man most often identified with violence in football, the end came peacefully.

Wilbon said this on yesterday's show, the 1st since Butkus' death was announced: "He personified us. We thought that. He personified Chicago. We care about our toughness -- or, at least, our perceived toughness. And Butkus took that seriously. And so did all the people who came after him."

NFL Films boss Steve Sabol had written a script, narrated by the great John Facenda, that said this of Dick Butkus: "His 9-year career stands apart as the single most sustained work of devastation ever committed on a football field, by anyone, anywhere, anytime."

The shadow of the ultimate "Monster of the Midway," a Teddy Bear in real life, will always loom over the game.