Bears fans mourn Mike Ditka, the man who unified city sports fans and ‘taught Chicago to hate Green Bay’

To Christopher Bartolini, Mike Ditka was the man who gathered his South Side neighborhood around his dad’s television in his family’s tiny living room — which had an antenna that still caught the Bears broadcast from Indiana stations when Chicago blacked out the games — every Sunday.

The morning Ditka’s death was announced, Bartolini said he was thinking back to when Bears legend Dan Hampton stopped in at his restaurant a few weeks earlier and spoke highly of Ditka’s coaching.

“[Ditka] was always very passionate, and I think it’s something more people could bring to their lives,” Bartolini said. “The way he commanded that team and was so fiery, his attitude, he didn’t back down to anything.”

Fans around the city mourned the loss of “Da Coach” Friday, just days before the Chicago Bears are set to take on the Green Bay Packers, an intense rivalry Ditka helped solidify as a player from 1961-1966 and then coach for a decade starting in 1982.

It was that fire, even a hatred of the Packers, that 50-year Bears fan Rob Raczyk will remember Ditka by. He said the NFL Hall of Famer, who coached the team to its only Super Bowl championship in 1985, “was the first guy who taught Chicago fans to hate Green Bay.”

Amid a contentious month of October playoff baseball, Raczyk credited Ditka with uniting the Chicago sports community under one banner not only with the team’s historic Super Bowl win, but the way he flamed the rivalry with Green Bay in one simple phrase: “F— the Packers.”

“Chicago hadn’t won before,” Raczyk said. “This was pre-Jordan and 2016 Cubs. He was bigger than life in a lot of regards. He transcended sports in Chicago. It doesn’t matter, you’re at Wrigley Field or Sox Park, and everyone chants it. Cubs and Sox fans don’t get along, but everyone hates the Packers. It’s our unifying factor.”

Los Angeles residents Andy Estrada and Johnny Montes, wearing Packers and Bears gear respectively, just happened to be driving by Soldier Field as they heard the news Friday morning from Estrada’s wife.

The father and son-in-law were in town as they prepared to go to the rival game Sunday in Green Bay, their first together after 15 years of planning to do so.

“Even though I’m a Packers fan, he’s legendary,” Estrada said. “Packers versus Bears is sort of like a holiday to us. The game’s gonna be a bit different Sunday. I think we’re all gonna be Packers fans.”

Montes’ office wall is graced by an autographed poster of the team lifting Ditka above their heads, his own holy grail. He said it’ll be different to see the poster once he’s home in California, especially reflecting on the win depicted in the photo, which he witnessed live at 11 years old.

“When you think of the NFL, you think Mike Ditka,” Montes, 52, said

Don Wachter, better known as Bearman, has a vast assortment of Bears memorabilia. But one of his “prized possessions” is a wood-cut Chicago Bears sign that once graced Ditka’s desk and now sits on his own. Wachter said he bought it from a friend of the coach when he moved to New Orleans. He also has what he calls the “Ditka Collection,” pieces of vintage clothing that match iconic Ditka sideline outfits.

He said he met Ditka on two separate occasions, in which the Hall of Fame tight end and coach was more than happy to engage with fans despite his intense on-field demeanor.

“I was too young to see George Halas coach, and we never had a coach that was that intense and fiery, so it’s what I loved about him,” Wachter said Friday. “He made himself approachable to fans. … But he never held back who he was.”

Wachter said there’s no doubt Ditka is on the Bears’ Mt. Rushmore — along with George Halas, Dick Butkus and Walter Payton.

“He epitomized Chicago,” he said. “There’s nobody else but Da Coach.”

ellow fan Eddy Bastardo also happened to be by the stadium Friday morning for a conference, where he stopped for a picture with friends.

He sees the future as bright for the current Monsters of the Midway as he did previous teams. He said Ben Johnson feels like the first Bears coach since Ditka who has even a hint of the spark that made the sweater-vest donning coach so iconic.

Going into Sunday to face the Packers feels like poetry, Bastardo said, as a repeat of the Bears’ faceoff against their rivals just six days after Walter Payton died from cancer in 1999. In that game, the Bears defeated the Packers 14-13.

“It’s great for a Bears fan to see a coach buy into the rivalry like that,” Bastardo said of Ben Johnson. “[So] we’re gonna do this one for Ditka