The ring is the thing for the 1985 champions
The legend of the champion 1985 Bears lives on with their Super Bowl jewelry
The legend of the 1985 Bears lives on in their Super Bowl rings. Former coach Mike Ditka: “The more I think about it, I think I’m going to wear it all the time now. Why wouldn’t I? It’s the thing I’m most proud of.” Ditka and other Super Bowl champs on what their rings mean to them.
Through 100 seasons of Bears football, there is only one Super Bowl championship ring. One version of that highly sought symbol of football immortality. It is almost 34 years old but as brilliant as ever. On May 23, 1986, members of the Super Bowl XX champions received their rings during a boisterous dinner at a suburban hotel. Over time, the mementos have, in a sense, taken on lives of their own. For one thing, their increasing rarity in team annals makes them even more special. And in some instances, that value has perpetuated their colorful existences.
Like how a college student famously found Walter Payton’s lost Super Bowl ring in his hand-me-down sofa in 2001.
Or how a Bears scout needed less than a year to lose his ring at the bottom of a Texas lake and recovered it with the help of a scuba diver.
William “Refrigerator” Perry’s size-23 ring — about the size of a half-dollar — was the largest Jostens ever made. (The average man wears a 10.) In August 1986, the Tribune reported that Perry left his ring as collateral at a BMW dealer in Lake Forest to return home to grab his checkbook, which he had forgotten.
Fridge’s ring fetched $170,000 at auction in 2015. Now anyone can buy a replica on Amazon for $29.90.
As the NFL’s 100th season climaxes with the 49ers and Chiefs meeting in Super Bowl LIV, players on both teams are training their crosshairs on the ring. Meanwhile, the Tribune spoke to members of the ’85 Bears about what their rings mean to them, how such prized keepsakes have endured and, apparently, how Hall of Fame Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino is the team’s greatest troll.
Mike Ditka Coach (Hall of Fame Class of 1988)
“I’m very proud of my Super Bowl ring,” Ditka said. “I wear it. I don’t have it on all the time, but I wear it a lot. The more I think about it, I think I’m going to wear it all the time now. Why wouldn’t I? It’s the thing I’m most proud of, that I was with all those guys and we came together that one year and made something special happen.”
When several players designed the ring early in 1986, Ditka insisted the words “TEAM” and “ATTITUDE” be inscribed on it.
“When I speak (publicly), I talk about being an ace with attitude, character and enthusiasm,” he said.
“Those three things are important to develop as a person. Your attitude determines who you’re going to be. If you’ve got a bad attitude, I don’t care what kind of a person you are, you’re not going to be very good.
“I played for pretty good coaches in Coach (George) Halas and Coach (Tom) Landry. That’s something I learned from them too. If you have a bad attitude, it’s hard to do anything good. If you have a positive attitude and you’re willing to pay the price of work and to discipline yourself, then you’ve got a chance. That’s why those words were so important to me.”
Jimbo Covert Left tackle (Hall of Fame Class of 2020)
“It really hit when they had the Super Bowl ring ceremony and we all got our rings,” Covert said. “I was on the committee to help design it, so we saw a couple mock-ups. But until you get it on your finger, it’s a completely different perspective when it has your name on the side of it. It’s pretty cool.”
Covert explained that team captains received an inscription on the inner part of the ring that has the player’s name, jersey number and the words “Captain” and “Louisiana Superdome January 26.”
“One little funny thing is Dan Marino and I are best friends,” Covert said, noting he and Marino were college roommates at Pittsburgh. “When they beat us (in the 1985 season), that’s a huge deal in Miami. That’s up there with their ’72 team. That’s all they talk about.
“On the ring, under your name, it has the record: 18-1. We were out having a couple cocktails one time, and people were around. Dan goes: ‘See that ring? That ‘1’ is mine.’ I said: ‘Well, what would you rather have, bro? The ‘1’ or the ring?’ And that was the end of it.”
Dan Hampton Defensive end (Hall of Fame Class of 2002)
Hampton, like most players, doesn’t wear his ring often. “I’ve got beat-up fingers that I really don’t need to draw attention to,” he said. “It means a lot to me. It does. But it’s like a trophy. It goes in a case. I’m looking at it right now. It’s up on a shelf and it’s in the little wooden box that the Bears presented it to us in.
“Still, at the end of the day, in my heart, I know what we were. I know who we were. But also, my deal is we should have had three of them. Or four. We should have had three or four. So in a way, to me, it’s kind of an unfortunate reminder that we didn’t get it done the next year or the next year or the next year. There were reasons, and I’m still bothered by it. Obviously it’s good to have. But I wanted four of them.”
Mike Singletary Linebacker (Hall of Fame Class of 1998)
“The strongest memory I get from wearing it is realizing what it took to get it,” Singletary said. “It’s a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifice, and it was really a process. It was pretty amazing. When I first got to the Bears and realized where we were, just a lot of guys playing a game, and we really formed ourselves into a team that was so much more than that.
“A lot of that was because of Coach Ditka and his vision and his dream of what it really meant to be a part of something. He always said nothing ever really matters unless you win a Super Bowl. In many, many ways, he’s right.”
Steve McMichael Defensive tackle
“Many years ago, Ditka was at his restaurant with Dan Marino, and he called me up, telling me, ‘Get your ass over here,’ ” McMichael recalled. “And I said, ‘What do you need from me, Tight End?’ But I went down there and sat down with those guys, and the first thing Marino did was he grabbed my hand and pointed at my ring.
“‘Right here (on the side) where it says 18-1?’ he said. ‘You see that 1 right there? That’s me!’ I told him I would take his ass out right then. I told him he was lucky I never put a bounty out on him. Sure, he never won a Super Bowl. But he gets to brag that he beat what everybody considered to be the best team of all time. In their heyday.
“You understand why that’s important to him? Personally, I’d rather have this ring. But that one game, man. … That one game.”
Jim McMahon Quarterback
Never one to miss a chance to crack wise, McMahon publicly needled Bears ownership in 1986 about potentially skimping on the championship rings.
At the Pro Bowl on Feb. 2 of that year, the Tribune quoted him as saying: “Hope management does it right. You know the Bears. We might get things like you find in the bottom of those Cracker Jack boxes.”
Then, the day before the ring presentation dinner, McMahon was quoted as saying: “If we get them Friday night, then we can take them to be appraised Saturday morning.”
At the Bears100 convention in June, McMahon said he still has his ring but isn’t sure where it is. He wondered aloud if it’s in a safe or in a drawer at home.
“I’m not big on jewelry,” he said. He was wearing an earring at the time.
Tom Thayer Right guard
“The Super Bowl ring is not about the value, it’s about its worth,” Thayer said. “If you look at the value of the ring, there’s value to everything out there. It’s really irrelevant in the big picture. It’s what did it take to get the opportunity to get that ring? The value of that, the worth of that throughout your lifetime and how it stretches out to your family.
“My brother started playing football, and I just wanted to be like him. And then when I found out that I really did love football, what I always wanted it to be in my life, you think of the worth of that. The weightlifting sessions. The people that were so instrumental in your development over the course of life.”
Thayer almost never wears his ring, instead keeping it in a safe deposit box. “You know what’s funny about it?” he said.
“You get fitted for your ring within a couple weeks of winning the Super Bowl, and you’re 300 pounds. Now it spins around my finger like a high school girl wearing her boyfriend’s ring. You are cognizant that when you do have an event or when you’re going to go out, have it handy and bring it with you because it’s really neat for people to see. But wearing it on an everyday basis, it wouldn’t be fitting because it just doesn’t fit.”
George McCaskey Current chairman
McCaskey once lost his ring on a trip to a preseason game in Cincinnati in the early 1990s.
“At some point on the return flight, I realized that I didn’t have my ring with me, and I was sick to my stomach,” McCaskey recalled in March.
“Bob Laskowski, who at the time was our United Airlines rep and since came to work for the Bears and has been with us for many, many years, tore the plane apart for me. I was very embarrassed, and our doctors were looking under their seats and the overhead bins and the seat backs and the pockets. It couldn’t be found anywhere. The fact of the matter was it wasn’t on the plane, and I thought it was hopelessly lost.
“I don’t remember how much time passed, but I got a call from a firefighter with whatever the local fire department is that services that airport, and he said: ‘Hey, I was on a vehicle on the jetway, and we’re trained to look for debris on the tarmacs that could be sucked into a jet engine. And I’ve got your ring.’
“He returned the ring. He didn’t want any money, didn’t want any reward. He wound up coming to a Bears game. The ring was smashed. It had gotten run over by one of the airport vehicles. So since then, I don’t wear it all the time. And I’ve got my dad’s ring from 1963, so they’re both in a safe place.”
Gary Fencik Safety
“It’s your lifelong dream, but it’s the ultimate team accomplishment,” Fencik said. “Every individual went up to get their ring, and when you opened it up, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is the physical identity of what we all wanted and hoped we could get to.’
“You think about the games that led up to it. Like the NFC championship that we lost the year before. I had two interceptions against (49ers quarterback Joe) Montana in the first half. I was like, ‘Oh, I own this guy.’ And (then) we were crying in the locker room like kids. You think of all of that as you look back and go, ‘Wow.’ That wasn’t just a season. It’s really a process, and it goes beyond a season.
“I think how devastating it must be to lose a Super Bowl. You’re so close, and then nobody says: ‘Hey, let’s see your AFC championship ring. Can you wear the AFC or NFC championship ring?’ It’s like, ‘Uh, so, I guess you didn’t win, huh?’ ” Fencik’s ring once disappeared from his home but was returned anonymously.
“It was after, ‘Hey, who has got beer at their place?’ when they closed down the bar,” he recalled. “I was out of football at the time. The next day I looked, and I couldn’t find that ring. I had put it on my kitchen table in my condo. You have a really tough decision to make. Either someone is going to bring it back, or not.
“I called up a friend of mine, an undercover cop. I said: ‘Look, I don’t want to press charges. I don’t care who it is. I just want that ring back.’ I got to know the detective squad a little bit better than I should have. It was one of things, hey, maybe somebody just had too many drinks, they were looking at it and stuck it in their pocket and forgot. But you can’t wait too long on that because they had to pull people in.
“I go, look, I have five people I know didn’t take it. But there were people I didn’t know. So you had to just bring them in, and some people were really ticked. But I said, hey, I’m ticked too. So I got it back. I’m much more careful.”
The Bears granted Fencik permission to have a second ring made so he could display it in a glass globe that magnifies it to make it appear like the gigantic championship rings modern teams get. “I would want that big bling thing,” Fencik said.
“I want it as big as a pro wrestler’s belt.”
“I think how devastating it must be to lose a Super Bowl. You’re so close, and then nobody says: ‘Hey, let’s see your AFC championship ring. Can you wear the AFC or NFC championship ring?’ It’s like, ‘Uh, so, I guess you didn’t win, huh?’ ” — Gary Fencik, whose ring is shown from four different perspectives above