When last I visited Steve McMichael in the spring of 2022, he was lying just like this.
That is, on his back, hands at his sides, his head supported by pillows, a feeding tube and a ventilator tube in his neck, immobile. Nothing much changes when you have late-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Your muscles and nerves steadily degenerate until you lose the ability to do almost anything but think and move your eyes. In time, ALS will kill you. Or its effects, such as pneumonia or choking, will. And there is no cure.
It’s a cruel — no, possibly the cruelest — way for a once-active person to make his or her exit down that long hallway we’ve been traveling since the day we were born.
Talk about active? Who was more active than ‘‘Mongo’’ McMichael, the relentless defensive tackle for the Super Bowl champion Bears, the wild rattlesnake hunter from Texas who took his oversized, say-anything personality to the World Championship Wrestling circuit, feuding with the likes of Bobby ‘‘The Brain’’ Heenan and other evil creatures. Briefcases to the head and chairs to the spine were the norm.
Mongo was the head coach of the Chicago Slaughter of the Indoor Football League for six years and Jeff Dickerson’s sidekick on their riotous, must-listen Bears pregame show on ESPN 1000 (with poor host Dickerson just trying to keep things from going completely off the rails). He also garnered almost 40% of the vote when he ran for mayor of suburban Romeoville in 2013.
Then came 2021 and the ALS. Followed swiftly by the bed, the tubes, the drugs, the stasis.
And, yes, the waiting. Two to five years is the average life expectancy after diagnosis with ALS. But there are outliers. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking is one of the most amazing examples, having lived for more than 50 years with the disease, eventually using eye blinks to communicate via computer.
But Hawking was diagnosed in his early-20s. Mongo’s ALS came on in his 60s. He’s now 65. The clock ticks faster each day. He no longer can speak, except to move his lips slowly and silently. You don’t know what he’s saying, but he’s there. He’s in there — that wild, life-loving man.
When first bedridden two years ago, he said in a TV interview: ‘‘Look at me. ... This is not the legacy I wanted to leave.’’
But then he had added, with something like a grin: ‘‘Do not go gently into that good night. Rage against the dying of the light.’’
He was quoting Dylan Thomas, but he was preaching pure Mongo. As his wife, Misty, has told me again and again, ‘‘He wants to live.’’ He said it to her until he couldn’t, but his lips still halfway form it whenever she asks.
He is recessing deeper and deeper into a solitude we only can guess at, but he’s not beyond his connection to our world, to hijinks. One of his round-the-clock caretakers, Michelle Foster, looks on from the foot of his bed. She mentions the time he wanted more Haagen-Dazs ice cream than his withered stomach could digest. He started crying when she said no. Touched, she relented. Then he slowly, slowly smiled.
‘‘He was fake crying,’’ she says now, chuckling.
One thing that keeps McMichael going is the hope of being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He made it from 100 candidates in the senior pool down to the cut of 31 this year. He’s a semifinalist, a grand achievement in itself. The next cut — down to 12 — will be revealed soon. Only three can make it all the way.
Sportswriter Dan Pompei is one of the voters, an NFL expert, and he’s a believer in McMichael, even as he knows how few of the greats can be selected.
‘‘I’ll say this: He’s as quality a candidate as there is in the senior pool,’’ Pompei says.
Names such as Tommy Nobis, Sterling Sharpe, Bob Kuechenberg, Jim Marshall and Kenny Anderson are in there. It’s a tough crowd.
But there’s that sympathy element, for what football itself might have done to McMichael. It might be a voting factor.
Misty says: ‘‘If they put him in after he’s dead, I will give a speech in Canton, saying, ‘You [expletives]. [Expletive] you for doing this!’ ’’
In other words, do it now if it’s going to be done.
She’s Texas-tough. And so is he.
I whisper to him about offensive linemen being wimps, unworthy of any Hall talk.
Nothing at first, then slowly his lower jaw drops into a nasty, huge smile. It’s Mongo time, baby.
Steve McMichael ALS Fundraiser
6 Wednesday at Bridges’ Scoreboard Bar
121 N. Griffith Blvd.
Griffith, IN 46319
