Thirty-nine years ago, Bears scout Jim Parmer asked defensive lineman Dan Hampton for a favor. Could he pick up a free agent from the airport who was coming in for a tryout?
Hampton found Steve McMichael curbside at O’Hare.
By this time Hampton already had been an All-Pro after the Bears chose him with the fourth pick of the 1979 draft. He knew of McMichael but never met him. McMichael had been a third-round pick in New England who was cut because of nonconformity.
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Hampton’s Bears teammate Brad Shearer had given him some background information. Shearer played with McMichael at the University of Texas and they met in a stairway in an Austin watering hole when Shearer was the big man on campus and McMichael was an incoming freshman. McMichael, on the step below Shearer, looked up at him and said, “I’m taking your job.”
Shearer and McMichael ended up playing next to one another and becoming allies. Shearer later named him the godfather to his daughter.
In the car, Hampton and McMichael talked about their mutual friend. Instead of dropping off McMichael at his hotel, Hampton drove to a bar in Highwood, The Screen Door.
There, they discovered they had much in common. Both were country boys from the south. Hampton had lost his father when he was 13. McMichael lost his stepfather, the only father he ever knew, when he was 19. Both had Native American blood in them. They both played in the Southwest Conference. Hampton was named the conference’s defensive player of the year in 1978 by the Houston Post while playing for Arkansas. McMichael won the award from David Campbell’s Texas Football Magazine in 1979.
They hung out all afternoon, and that night they went to a charity event at Lou Malnati’s. That’s where Hampton saw McMichael chug a pitcher of beer for the first time.
“I’m thinking, ‘Well, looks like he’s found the right spot,’” Hampton said.
Alone, each had been accomplished. They were college All-Americans who played on some of the best teams in the nation.
Together, though, they could become something more, something that no one had ever seen, and something no one has seen since.
“The King,” they called Hampton. Like Elvis.
“Ming the Merciless,” is the name Hampton gave McMichael, after the tyrant from Flash Gordon who ruled ruthlessly and without remorse.
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If one image told the story of the Bears of the 1980s, it was the King and Ming, hands on hips, staring down offensive opponents between a play. They stood there regally, brothers in arms, bare arms, the twin pillars on which the great Bears teams of the 1980s were built.
They were mythic figures as much as football players — hell-raisers, gatekeepers, tone setters, torchbearers and vanquishers.
Hampton wore a neck roll and was all arms, legs and attitude. His wrists, hands and fingers were wrapped in white tape.
McMichael’s jersey stretched so tight across his chest that it looked like a number was missing between the 7 and 6. He hiked up his pants just below his nipples and was forever tightening his belt. The pant legs reached only to the top of his knees, and he pulled his socks as high as possible so not all of the stripes were visible.
“It was to make my legs look as long as his,” McMichael said. “He looked like the dining room table, and I looked like the coffee table.”
At 6-foot-5, Hampton had three inches on McMichael. He was part defensive end, part defensive tackle. McMichael was pure defensive tackle.
Explosive strength was their calling card. Both could power clean 400 pounds, rare even in today’s game.
The King and Ming both were ferocious, relentless competitors. Hampton recalls a game in the early 1980s when the Lions were driving on the Bears. The runner was stopped in a pileup. Then he heard screaming. McMichael came out with the football. As Hampton patted McMichael on the back, the man he called Ming said, “I knew he’d let go when I grabbed his nuts.”
Even though they led a defense that literally barked, the King and Ming were all about discipline, technique and savvy. After every game, Hampton played back the tape of each play to find out what teammates did, but he never had to watch McMichael. He knew he was doing just what he was supposed to do.
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They took as much pride in never allowing a “jump through” block to reach a linebacker as they did in putting a quarterback in the dirt. They embraced self-sacrifice, and then made sure the beneficiaries knew about it.
After every road game, the King and Ming took the exit row on the team charter. Everybody knew not to sit in the row in front of them, because they pushed those seats forward and created a man cave at 36,000 feet. They iced their knees, played bourré and blackjack, blasted Hank Williams, and enjoyed the liter of Crown Royal that always had a place in their carry-on.
A few rows in front of them sat middle linebacker Mike Singletary, known as Samurai. The banter went something like this.
McMichael: “Hey Samurai, looky here.”
Singletary: “Yes?”
McMichael: “You know why we have this ice on our knees, Hamp?”
Hampton: “Hey, you got to hold the jump through.”
McMichael: “Yeah, Singletary on the tackle. Singletary with another tackle. And another.”
Hampton: “Did they call your name Ming?”
McMichael: “Nope.”
Hampton: “Didn’t call mine either. But Singletary’s? Isn’t he wonderful? Look at those eyes.”
Even though they both did dirty work, they could rush the passer and they both did it similarly. They fired out with an arm under rip and then progressed with a slap counter.
The way they ran stunts gave them advantages that seemed almost cruel.
“Most guys, the ball is coming up to the line of scrimmage and you want to run a line stunt, you gotta look at ’em and use some fake word the offensive line doesn’t understand,” McMichael said. “Me and him just looked at each other. We got a symbiotic thing.”
In 1984 and ’88, Hampton played defensive tackle exclusively next to McMichael. Between them, they had 41 1/2 sacks.
“No two defensive tackles ever played it like that,” McMichael said.
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Together, they helped the Bears set NFL records for sacks (72 in 1984), fewest yards allowed (3,863 in 1984), and fewest points allowed (187 in 1986). During the 10-year reign of the King and Ming, the Bears defense led the league in fewest yards allowed and fewest rushing yards allowed.
“Those two guys at the point of attack were as good as anything I’ve ever been around coaching or playing,” former teammate and current Redskins coach Ron Rivera said.
Dan Hampton (99) and Steve McMichael (76) during the 1985 Super Bowl. (Courtesy Chicago Bears archives)Ed O’Bradovich, the great Bears defensive lineman from the 1960s, became a mentor to the duo. After games, the three of them often had dinner along with former Bears legend Dick Butkus. O’Bradovich understood them like few others.
“They provided the heat and fire of that team,” he said. “There was nobody in the league who could block those two consistently. There is nobody in the league today like those two. I’ve been watching football since the 1950s, and they were the best one-two punch in the history of the game.”
Anyone who wanted to be a Bear in the 1980s had to do more than impress coach Mike Ditka. He had to impress the King and Ming.
In Neal Anderson’s rookie training camp in 1986, McMichael gave the first-round running back a hard time, yapping at him, tackling him more violently than he was supposed to, and giving him a little extra after the whistle. Anderson protested. Eventually, Anderson had enough and took a swing at him, hitting him in the side of his helmet. The practice came to a halt, and everyone nervously waited for McMichael’s response.
McMichael stood there for a second eyeing Anderson.
“That’s what I wanted to know,” he said. “He’s not just gonna bark, he’s gonna bite. You’re gonna be all right, kid.”
It wasn’t just rookies who were tweaked by the King and Ming. Singletary said of all the players he called teammates, only Hampton challenged him. He did it all the time, and Singletary subsequently didn’t care for him during their careers. But when Singletary got the call telling him he had been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the first teammate he shared the news with was Hampton.
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Hampton thought quarterback Jim McMahon was soft. He told him as much, and he shared the opinion with the media.
When death threats were made against McMahon after he had been accused of calling the women of New Orleans “sluts,” most of his teammates kept their distance from him during an outdoor practice leading up to the Super Bowl. The King and Ming did not.
“Don’t worry about that death threat,” Hampton told him. “But if you don’t play well on Sunday, the two of us will kill you.”
When Rivera ran out to the field for his first start in 1986, he was a bit over-enthused. Jumping up and down, he tried to get his teammates fired up while they waited for the snap. Then Rivera noticed Hampton and McMichael paying no attention to him, calmly talking to each other. When he asked them what was up, he found their discussion was about a brunette and a blonde, but the point they were trying to make was about composure.
“Chico,” McMichael said, “the game ain’t even started. Calm the fuck down, son.”
He did as he was told.
“You had to be accepted by them,” he said. “You had to earn their respect. Everything went through them.”
Said Hampton, “He and I were the arbiters of who on the defense was able to join our club. That’s the way we ran the deal. It took a while for Richard (Dent) to get in, this guy, that guy.”
They ran the show from their locker suites at the end of the row at Halas Hall. They were given two lockers each, directly across from one another.
Outsiders didn’t get a pass either. When an NFL security man came to Halas Hall to address the team, he ranted about staying away from gambling, bars, and groupies. If they didn’t, he warned them, “Your ass is grass, and I’m the lawnmower.” Hampton heard enough, stood up from his seat in the front row, asked him who the hell he thought he was. No one, he said, would talk to the Bears that way.
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“Come on guys,” he said, leading them out, “we’re not listening to this shit.”
It was the King and Ming who invented the Gatorade bath, dousing Ditka after the team won the NFC Central in 1984. It was McMichael who impaled a chair into a blackboard, and Hampton who smashed a projector the night before Super Bowl XX to put the Bears in a frenzy.
It was the two of them who arranged for both Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan to be carried off the Superdome field after the game. And it was the two of them who raided Ditka’s private stash of cigars, wine and cognac when he was on medical leave with a heart attack after they heard his doctor say the coach should not smoke or drink.
Bears offensive linemen sometimes resented the two because they practiced harder than protocol suggests. What they didn’t know was offensive line coach Dick Stanfel often prodded them to “get after their asses today.” When the blockers complained to coaches, Ditka amped it up another notch, yelling, “OK then, make it all live!”
https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/06/15134902/Play-it-All-Live-.mp3Years later, Hampton wrote a song called “Make It All Live,” that he, McMichael and Otis Wilson perform with their band, The Chicago 6.
The pinky on his left hand is permanently curved like a banana. The middle finger is a dogleg right. On the other hand, the middle finger is hunched over, like the spine of an old man. The right pinky is shaped like a field hockey stick. None of them are as misshapen as the right ring finger, an ugly carrot even in this bunch.
Each of Hampton’s fingers was broken, torn apart and dislocated except one — the ring finger on his left hand. It is that finger which is the most important for a right-handed bass player. “The good Lord has been wonderfully judicious,” said Hampton, whose guitar is his passion. “On my right hand, all I need is my thumb.”
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The exalted status that Hampton and McMichael enjoyed in the Bears locker room was neither given nor taken. It was earned. Painfully earned.
Hampton had 16 knee surgeries. Eighteen if you count two knee replacements. Every offseason from 1984 through the end of his career, he had one or two operations that left him on crutches for three months. There were several hand and finger surgeries. He played with a fractured vertebra, a fractured sternum and a left wrist that was broken five times.
“You gotta put more tape on it,” he said.
McMichael had eight knee surgeries. Neck surgery is coming. Between three bulging discs, torn ligaments in his right shoulder and elbow, and hand and finger injuries, the right side of his body is pretty useless these days.
“If he needed knee surgery and played on it, you think I’m gonna sit that game out because I needed surgery?” he said.
Those who were there never will forget the sight of the two of them side by side on training tables with furrowed brows, still fresh from the battle with dried blood on their torsos and helmet marks on the foreheads, wearing bags of ice like sacks of potatoes on all four knees. The aroma of victory cigars mixed with the smell of sweat, beer and Brown’s chicken, making everything right.
McMichael remembers Hampton being pinned at the bottom of a pile when the football came loose. All he could do was extend his arm to try to bring in the ball. “Do you reach your arm out there knowing it will get crushed?” McMichael said. “He did it. That takes some fuckin’ will, baby.”
McMichael once tried to enliven a listless locker room before a game by smashing his helmet into his face.
“The blood was trickling down,” Rivera said. “He licked it off, then said, ‘That’s right boys, I’m ready to play football.’”
Jim Steiner, who was the agent for both players, recalls a phone conversation with Hampton during his last training camp in which he sounded as if he were in so much pain that he wouldn’t be able to make it to the first game of the season, let alone the last. But counting the playoffs, he played 16 games that year.
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Survival and supremacy rarely have blended as well. Hampton is one of only four Bears in team history who played games in three decades. McMichael played in 191 games for the Bears, a franchise record at the time.
They had their ways to get through it. The night before every game, the King and Ming met in the hotel bar for two Crown and Sevens. “We could get opioids, but I was never a big pill head, and neither was Dan,” McMichael said. “So a couple of drinks the night before the game was a pain killer, something to help you sleep.”
Then the next morning, each had their own pot of coffee at the team breakfast, and all they left were the grounds.
“Those guys were two of the toughest, grittiest guys I’ve ever been around,” Rivera said. “They had grit, true grit.”
Dan Hampton, Richard Dent and Steve McMichael at a 2019 Bears game. (Courtesy Chicago Bears archives)When Hampton was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002, he quoted John Wayne’s character in the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” when talking about McMichael. “He’s the toughest man I ever met south of the Picketwire … next to me,” he said.
McMichael points to Hampton as the King walks in the door at Mongo McMichael’s in Romeoville.
“Look at him,” he said. “The older he gets, the more he looks like John Wayne.”
Or one of Wayne’s nemeses. Hampton is part Cherokee. His great, great, great grandfather George Washington Russell walked the Trail of Tears and settled in Oklahoma City, where he was born. McMichael says he has a tinge of Blackfoot blood in him.
“We both come from people who could live on the desert without water for days at a time,” Hampton said. “I do believe a lot of my ability to play through pain and injury, I was kind of equipped with that.”
They came off the snap like wild dogs on the scent of rabbit. But they didn’t stop when the quarterback lay bleeding. They kept going, to Mother’s on Division St., to Donisi’s in Platteville, to Pat O’Brien’s on Bourbon St., and points beyond.
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“They both had a wild side to them which made them what they are,” Shearer said. “It was their edge.”
That edge was evident whether they were wearing spatted cleats or black ostrich-skin cowboy boots. Neither All-Pro blockers nor last calls could slow them.
McMichael rented a house a block from Halas Hall. He threw some memorable parties there that no one can clearly remember. After one such all-nighter, the two of them showed up to practice looking somewhat worn. That’s when Ditka started calling them “The Night Riders.”
One night as they rode from Chicago to Arkansas, McMichael pulled out a .44 Magnum and began shooting signs along the road.
WELCOME TO ARKANSAS
THE NATURAL STATE
Boom!
On one Fourth of July in Arkansas, McMichael used Hampton’s diving board as a launch for skyrockets and other fireworks. The next day, the board had the consistency, color and smell of burnt toast.
On another night, Hampton was invited to get together with some good old boys in Arkansas. McMichael, who didn’t know anyone, came along. They got a few looks when McMichael stepped out of the Hampton’s Dually truck with a gallon of Crown Royal and a .45 in a holster.
“I’m a Longhorn,” he said. “Without him with me, I would have heard the banjo start playing.”
The King and Ming will tell you they never were in a bar fight. Most of their physical confrontations were of the boys-will-be-boys variety. Shearer and the King once used the hood of the King’s BMW as a wrestling mat. Steiner remembers them dangling him upside down by his ankles late one night.
They took particular delight in tormenting safety Gary Fencik. On more than one occasion, Fencik recalls being body slammed.
“One time Dan picked me up and threw me and I hit the wood floor pretty hard,” Fencik said. “Steve helped me up and turned to Dan and said, ‘Hey Hamp, you’re gonna hurt the little guy.’”
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At about 2 one morning at the Silver Dollar in Highwood, Fencik pointed out that if he were as big as those two, he would be capable of doing to them what they had done to him in the past. With that, they dragged him by his feet out of the bar and around the asphalt parking lot until he was a bloody mess.
“You learned not to shoot your mouth off too often with those guys,” Fencik said.
When Rivera was a rookie, Ryan told him he was in charge of his elder Hampton, who Ryan called “Big Rook.”
“He said, ‘Chico, when you go out with Big Rook, you’re in charge,’” Rivera said. “‘If I find out he got in trouble and you were there, it’s gonna be your ass.’ So whenever I was with him, I kept one eye on him.”
It was almost impossible not to keep an eye on him.
“Dan’s energy would sweep up everybody,” former Bears defensive end Trace Armstrong said. “If you went out with Dan, it was going to be a big night. Everybody in the city knew who he was. He was a giant, good-looking guy with charisma and a ton of presence.”
Curfews could present more significant challenges than many offensive linemen for the duo. Once during training camp at Lake Forest College, they headed to The Lantern after their meeting ended at 9:15 p.m. They raced back to make the 11 p.m. curfew. Hampton decided to take a shortcut on campus and drive off the street and onto walking and biking paths. As they tore through the college, they saw Stanfel with a flashlight. The King steered straight at the old offensive lineman, who shuffled his feet and lunged left and right like a good blocker would.
The Chicago 6 play at the Bears block party in August 2019. (Courtesy Chicago Bears archives)The next day at practice, they complimented him on his quickness and technique, which might have influenced Stanfel’s decision to let them get away with their tardiness.
It was the Chicago version of North Dallas Forty.
The King and Ming were many things to the other — battle buddies, running partners, co-conspirators, soul mates.
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As is the case with most relationships, theirs had ebbs and flows.
When he came to the Bears, McMichael was just trying to prove he belonged. By the post-Super Bowl years, he had established himself as one of the best defensive linemen in the game, a man who should have taken a back seat to no one.
He had 95 sacks in his career. The only pure defensive tackles in history with more are Hall of Famers John Randle with 137 1/2 and Warren Sapp with 96 1/2. Neither Randle nor Sapp ever had to concern themselves with keeping blockers off linebackers. Armstrong, who was teammates with nine Hall of Famers in his career, considers McMichael the best player and pro he ever lined up with.
The King, however, usually stood between Ming and the spotlight.
Early on, McMichael had hired Steiner as his agent on Hampton’s recommendation. But he cut ties with Steiner in the late ’80s. Steiner said it was partially because McMichael thought he spent too much time with Hampton.
“Steve had grown,” Hampton said. “For a while, people kind of considered him as Robin and I was Batman. Now he thought he was Superman. He didn’t want to be known as the sidekick. He wanted to be his own guy. The bottom line is we still played excellent football together side by side. We knew that together we had more power and ability to affect things positively.”
When the team honored Hampton before his final regular-season practice, it was McMichael who gave the speech.
“I don’t know why we’re doing this, but this is for you,” he said with his trademark sarcasm as Ditka drove up in an orange and blue golf cart with Hampton’s number 99 on the hood. The King choked up.
After football, McMichael reached the height of his celebrity traveling the country hitting oily men on their platinum blonde heads with a steel briefcase. He even had his own action figure.
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When wrestling ran its course, he returned to the southwest suburbs of Chicago, a short drive from where Hampton lived.
Seven years ago, Hampton wanted to bring back a new version of The Chicago 6, which had its first run in the late ’80s.
“The first person I thought of was Steve because he’s got a good baritone voice,” he said.
The King and Ming first sang together publicly in the late 1980s at the town fair in Platteville during training camp.
“The band was so shitty we had to get up there and do something about it,” McMichael said. They livened up the fair with, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.”
https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/06/15134843/BADDEST-TEAM-ALIVE-Chicago-6.mp3These days, the duo harmonize on songs like “Suspicious Minds,” “Gimme Three Steps,” and “Courtesy Of The Red White And Blue.”
“You have to work on it and develop harmony,” Hampton said. “It’s just like back in the day, we do it over and over and over again.”
They have played about 120 gigs together. Not long ago, they practiced in Hampton’s driveway, mixing work with laughs and cold beverages.
What remains after all the songs, the sacks, the triumphs, the losses, the ice bags, the empties, and the roguery? Appreciation, respect, and gratitude.
“Do you remember what Brad Pitt said to Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars when he won for best supporting actor earlier this year?” McMichael said. “I’ll ride your coattails anytime, pal. If I was on a team without him, I would have sucked on that double team every play.”
McMichael, of course, drew his share of double teams as well.
The King and Ming. They completed one other.
McMichael punctuates many of his statements with the word “brother.” But it means something different when he is talking to Hampton. In his book “Steve McMichael’s Tales from the Chicago Bears Sideline,” he called Hampton his big brother and his best friend in the game.
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“He still is like my big brother,” he said. “You might have problems like any family. But it’s been like having a big brother in the school ground, helping you, directing you, watching out for you.”
Hampton, who is less than one month older than McMichael at 62, never saw him as his little brother.
“It was like we were contemporaries,” he said. “That’s the kind of respect I had for him. That’s why I said he’s the toughest man south of the Picketwire next to me. What John Wayne was saying about Liberty Valance was they were two of a kind.”
Like many blood brothers, they have an unconditional, enduring commitment. They understand one another in a way few others could. They speak each other’s language.
And that’s what made them more than just two defensive linemen who lined up next to one another. “If you look at a guy like he’s your brother and you will sacrifice yourself for him, that’s when everything works,” McMichael said.
With the King and Ming, it’s always been about the power of two.
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