Mike Ditka's American Idol

"Iron" Mike Ditka's accomplishments as a NFL coach are without question. Well, with the Bears, anyway.* The 1985 Chicago Bears routinely make the Top 10 lists of the greatest pro football teams of all time. And with good reason. They lost exactly one game in their season that year, defeated their opponents by an average of 18 points per game, steamrolled their three postseason opponents for a combined score of 91-10, then went on to eviscerate the hapless New England Patriots, 46-10, in Super Bowl XX.

Let's dwell on that for a moment. The Bears stomping the shit out of the Patriots. It was a different time.

Clearly, this was Ditka's moment in the sun. But as with so many heroes, the seeds of Mike's greatest tragedy were planted during his greatest victory. During the season, former Jovan executive and major Bears fan Richard "Dick" Meyer decided to increase the already-potent momentum of his team by writing and filming a theme song for the '85 Bears: it being the mid-Eighties, absolutely everything of note (and quite a few things not of note) just had to come with a video, or no one was interested.

The result was, as you probably know, the famous Super Bowl Shuffle. It was a huge hit, for a novelty video about an NFL team, meaning it almost cracked the Top 40. It sold a cool half million copies. It was nominated for a Grammy. That's right, people listened to this on the radio at work and play. Check it.




Naturally, a host of imitators were spawned, including an answer song from the Patriots that must have enraged bookies across this fine nation. Who was gonna bet on a team that had this for a calling card?

But Ditka, not willing to be out-cheesed, decided he was a kingmaker, and furthermore, that he could take any group of Chicago fans off the street and do the same thing for them he'd done for da Bears.

The result is The Grabowski Shuffle. ("Grabowski" is apparently a Chicago term for an ordinary urban lunchpail type, like "Yat" is in New Orleans and "Good Ol' Boy" is in the rest of the South.) I first came across this phenomecrap as an actual video for rent way back in my retail days, and since it was gathering dust, I took it under my wing and gave it a home.

The idea behind it went something like this:

1. Assemble a team of hardworking blue-collar joes from Chicago.
2. Teach them to sing, rap, and dance. 
3. ?????
4. PROFIT!!!!

It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and it does not disappoint. The extended half-hour video functions as a "making-of" documentary, and it's beyond sad: these five schmucks -- more like a straight Village People without talent than the all-singing, all-dancing Joe The Plumber revue it was meant as -- are all practically crying tears of gratitude at the fact that God has clearly seen fit to bestow this, Their Big Break, upon them. Seriously. They seem convinced they're about to be on MTV in heavy rotation. You can practically hear the empty lottery dreams rattling around in their heads... funny how only a real working-class joe can be so desperate to get the fuck out of his job, which he loves, don't get him wrong, because he's the backbone of the country, blah blah blah.

Here's a short clip of the "making of," in which Ditka or whoever decides to parody the audition scenes from A Chorus Line. Because if there's one thing Chicago football fans love, it's musical theatre.

The result of all this hard work can be seen below, shorn of its documentary surroundings. The five people produced by the casting call -- yes, there was a casting call -- are likable enough: waitress, bodybuilder, construction worker, cop, and mover. (Guess which one is the black guy.) But they can't sing, rap, or dance, and Ditka himself is no better, even though the cover of the video's box promises, in garbled
Grabowskish, that he "raps and zaps, has smokin' feet and fun." (For those of you not in the know, "zapping" is part of that great Chicago youth culture movement known as "zip-zop," which involves eating brats, cutting beer farts, and asserting one's heterosexuality at all costs.)

For those unable to sit through this entire travesty, I direct your attention straight to 3:06, where "the Grabowski gal," Valerie, is forced to do a verse -- written or otherwise orchestrated by Ditka -- about how much she wants to fuck him.

No, really. Again, it was a different time.

Curtain!

(Singing this all day tomorrow in your head at work? Oh, no need to thank me.)

(*As a lifelong Saints fan, I feel I have every right to disparage Ditka. Two words: Ricky Fucking Williams. I'd like to rip off Iron Mike's little Ned Flanders mustache and use it to plug up his steak-bloated colon.)