‘‘Mongo’’ lies in wait.
His eyes slowly move back and forth, watching the cameramen setting up their equipment, people laying out pastries, checking champagne bottles.
In time, everything is ready for the TV ceremony to start, for the presentation to Steve McMichael of his Pro Football Hall of Fame bust.
But there is time to kill. So the former Bears defensive tackle with 92.5 sacks, two first-team All-Pro selections, one Super Bowl championship and now a spot in the Hall of Fame, bides his time.
He can’t move. He can’t speak. He only can blink his eyelids — once for yes, twice for no. He is a captive of the neurodegenerative disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the first tinglings of which he felt seven years ago and the final wastings of which will signal his death.
When that day will be, no one knows. Sometimes ALS gets you fast, in mere months after diagnosis. Other times it leads you on for years. Physicist Stephen Hawking famously lived 55 years after being diagnosed with ALS at 21. As incapacitated as McMichael is, his every moment of living is a blessing. Or, as some might say, a curse.
McMichael’s longtime nurse, Michelle, wipes his eyelids. Clad in an orange-and-blue Bears shirt and orange-and-blue sneakers, Michelle is the person who makes sure his breathing tube is always clear, the power is always on for his machinery, the TV channel is always tuned to the cowboy movies he loves.
In time, she is done with her cleanup duties and McMichael is basically alone in the living room where his bed has been wheeled. No one looks at him. There is no one to talk to him.
There is activity in the other rooms of McMichael’s house in south suburban Homer Glen. But wife Misty, sister Kathy, PR coordinator Betsy Shepherd, the security workers and the other helpers are busy doing other things.
And ‘‘Mongo’’ lies there.
You wonder about all this. You wonder about such a great honor for being physically dominant and aggressive in a noisy, violent game being awarded to a man who lies day after day as passive and quiet as a paving stone.
‘‘He wants to live,’’ Misty will tell me. ‘‘He does.’’
So you think, ‘‘Why not?’’
McMichael is the guy who made every radio show he was on an adventure in near-censorship. He’s the Texas outlaw who carried a hunting knife and brandished it while working on TV with Mark Giangreco. He’s the guy who told one interviewer, ‘‘I’m not loud, I’m just obnoxious.’’ He warned that people feared ‘‘one day my last brain cell is going to pop, and I’m going to go off the edge. And they don’t want to miss it.’’’
And he said all this with a wry grin that made you think he was joking or crazy. Or both.
In time, he is surrounded by his old teammates, quietly gathered, and the patched-in video from Canton, Ohio, announces that he is now a member of the Hall of Fame. You notice that ‘‘Mongo’’ actually is wearing the gold jacket all Hall members get, the same one teammates Mike Singletary, Jim Covert and Richard Dent are wearing. How it was slipped on him, you know not.
Misty talks to her husband, hand on his arm, and unveils the bust at his side. Dent, who played on the defensive line with McMichael and Hall of Famer Dan Hampton, says to his motionless teammate: ‘‘Welcome home, Steve. You’re in football heaven.’’
Misty has moved McMichael’s head so he can see the bust, and what he thinks of the epic, hair-flowing bronze sculpture is unknowable. But the likeness shows a young man in full glory, with a slight smile that can be read as great confidence or a cosmic chuckle, a laugh at the world of propriety, order and, yes, even awards.
What kind of giant joke is it, after all, that this man who once reveled in extreme mischief, pro-wrestling nonsense and the nasty theater of the violent and absurd is now less threatening than the tiny, old dog wandering the house at its leisure?
Former Bears Gary Fencik, Ron Rivera, Emery Moorehead, Jim Morrissey, Tom Thayer, Trace Armstrong, Tyrone Keys, Jim Osborne and others look on. Their bond is strong.
This is one of their guys. And now he’s in.
Football heaven.
