Mike Ditka Wore the F*ck Out of That Sweater Vest

Mike Ditka has to be the most famous sweater-vest wearer in history. In fact, I can’t even think of anyone who even comes close. He wore his signature blue “Bears” sweater vest the way Mister Rogers wore a cardigan or a toucan its colorful beak—as an unmistakable identifying visual flourish.

Ditka passed away last Friday at the age of 86, and while his legacy is mostly defined by his accomplishments with the Bears, he’s as inextricably linked to one single garment as he is to leading football teams to victory. When Saturday Night Live parodied Chicago’s fans in “Da Bears,” Mike Myers wore the coach’s favorite piece of clothing. And when Ditka appeared in the Will Ferrell movie Kicking and Screaming, he wore a sweater vest, too. Even four decades after Ditka’s apex as coach, fans of the team still attend games dressed in the coach’s signature look. After his passing on Friday, some Bears fans called for current Chicago coach Ben Johnson to don da vest; the garment as Excalibur.

In the most immortal images of Ditka—hoisted atop his player’s shoulders after the 1986 Super Bowl, for example—the sweater vest is never far. Half-sweater, half-tank top, like the gazebo of garments.

The sweater vest has become so closely associated with Ditka that the one he wore during the ‘86 SB came up for auction earlier this year and sold for $183,000. (Shockingly, that isn’t the most expensive sweater vest ever sold. That would be the brown-and-black one Matthew Broderick twist-and-shouted in as Ferris Bueller, which went for $279,400 last summer.)

Ditka wore an XXL version that I didn’t truly appreciate until giving it my full attention. The knitted letters are blocky, resembling the graphics of an Atari video game, and each has its own special flavor. The “B” and “E” are ursine, like a claw grabbing a piece of salmon out of a river. In the bulbous, uppermost part of the “R” isa tiny, off-center porthole. The fact that it looks like it was knitted by the grandmother of the world’s biggest Bears fan only adds to the charm and the paradox of Ditka wearing it. The former tight end was a notorious hardass—harsh on his players and as a no-nonsense media personality. Ditka turning a cozy sweater vest into his signature look, and making it look this cool in the process, seems to only bolster his hard-boiled stripe of machismo.

Ditka’s sweater vest is even more notable in context. NFL coaches in the 1980s were still following the tree of fedora loyalist Tom Landry and the always-suited Vince Lombardi. Ditka’s sweater vest was an unlikely sartorial bridge. He still had on the suit and button-up of previous eras, but the Bears-branded sweater vest seems to belong more to the current generation of coaches who appear to have been forced at gunpoint to wear team apparel. Finding the in-between was apparently important to Ditka, who said this of his fashion choices on an episode of Sunday NFL Countdown: “[Suits] look a lot better than some gray hooded sweatshirt, because that looks like crap. That looks like you're a coach in junior high."

Ditka was conscious not just of appearance but of optics in general. In the lead-up to the ‘86 Super Bowl, he painted his Bears as the hard-nosed underdogs. “Some teams are fair-haired. Some aren't. Some teams are a Smith. Some are a Grabowski,” he said. “We're a Grabowski.” All this became synonymous in the eyes of the public. “Ditka is a Back to the Future sort of guy,” Ray Buck wrote for The Houston Post in January 1986. “Today’s super genius in sweater vests, Papa Grabowski, as he likes to describe the blue-collar heritage of his world champion Chicago Bears.”

That Ditka was aware of this perception makes me believe the sweater vest was a considered choice, like calling a run or a pass. It may have been the uniform of insurance salesmen and substitute teachers before him, but on the former tight end’s XXL frame it became a heroic symbol of a tough blue-collar city.