A Huge Upgrade And Shocking News: Bears Head Coach Has Lands With….
MISTY McMICHAEL KNEW what she was supposed to do. They had talked about this. They’d talked about this exact situation.
How could they not? Misty’s husband, Steve McMichael, was diagnosed with ALS in 2021. The paralysis of the disease steadily, agonizingly, took hold. Steve was at the heart of the legendary 1985 Chicago Bears defense, a beloved rebel who hunted rattlesnakes and had a second act as a professional wrestler and spent most days bopping and bouncing and talking and laughing. But by August of 2023 he was confined to a bed, unable to move or speak.
Steve made clear he didn’t want to be in hospitals. He didn’t want it and neither did Misty. If things got bad, Steve, who is 66, wanted to be at home — snuggled under his Bears sheets and looking at the pictures in his room: Steve at the Super Bowl or Steve with the wrestling legend Ric Flair or Steve with his daughter, Macy. Steve didn’t want to go to a hospital because that meant he might die at a hospital, and, well, in the middle of an experience in which you literally lose control of everything, he wasn’t losing control of that.
Misty and a group of nurses took care of him. They checked his breathing tube and his feeding tube. They sat him up and laid him back. They talked to him. They listened when he would use a computer to communicate, a robotic voice droning phrases like, “I need drugs” or “Everybody out of my room” or “I want ice cream” (vanilla Häagen-Dazs, preferably).
But one day last summer, Misty could tell something wasn’t right. It happened so fast. Steve was feverish. The mucus in his breathing tube was a swirl of colors and darker than usual. He was having trouble staying awake. A doctor came to the house. It was pneumonia, the doctor said.
Misty knew what that meant. And she knew that the DNR, the “do not resuscitate” form she and Steve had signed months earlier, meant she wasn’t supposed to call an ambulance. Because Steve absolutely, positively wasn’t going to a hospital.
Except …
Except they’d gotten a telephone call a few days earlier.
Misty went to Steve. She held his hand. She looked at him and said, “Honey, the Hall of Fame called, do you remember?”
She said, “You’ve been waiting so long … And if you get in, I want you to be here. I want you to see it.”
Misty knew she couldn’t promise anything. The Hall had said Steve was one of 12 Senior semifinalists for the 2024 class. Steve had been nominated for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the past, and there was no way to predict if this would be just another instance of building up hope only to be let down. She also didn’t know if Steve even had the strength to make it a few more days, let alone months. But in that moment, the only thing Misty did know for sure was that the man she loves was closer than he had ever been to this thing he wanted so much. And so she thought that he might want to try.
“Do you want to see it happen, honey?” she asked, and Steve’s head shifted. His eyelids had been fluttering, but suddenly they steadied. He was staring at her. Misty locked her gaze on Steve’s face.
“Do you want me to rip up the DNR?” she asked. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
Misty held her breath as Steve looked up at her. He blinked once.
THE OBVIOUS QUESTION, the question everyone asks, is the simplest one: Why?
Why do it? Why hurt even longer? ALS is a terminal disease with no cure, a disease that ravages a person’s muscles and has a mean survival time of 2-5 years after diagnosis. The McMichaels considered the totality of the situation when they made their initial choice to sign the DNR, so why change their minds and extend an excruciating inevitability on the chance that a bunch of men in a room somewhere might decide that a version of Steve from decades ago was now, suddenly, outstanding?
The short answer is plain: “When you’re from Texas,” Misty says, “football is all you do.”
It’s a joke, but it isn’t. In high school in Freer, a small town in South Texas, Steve lettered in six sports, one of those athletes who could do it all. He committed to football, though, and once he did, it made him.
He was an extraordinary lineman, a jackhammer slamming through his opponents over and over and over. He was a college All-American at Texas. He won a Super Bowl in Chicago. He had 95 NFL sacks, third most in history by a player lined up as a defensive tackle. He wasn’t a national name with the Bears because he played on a team full of them, but football analysts — both then and now — say the same thing: Steve’s work on the defensive line set up the other rushers, including the legendary Mike Singletary, to wreak the havoc that they did.
