CHICAGO — Mike Ditka imagined there was a life plan for him, a vision or a calling that he was meant to do one thing.

“I believe that everyone has a destiny in life, and mine is with the Chicago Bears,” he said when he was hired as the 10th head coach in franchise history Jan. 20, 1982. “I’m going to give Chicago a winning football team, an interesting football team and a football team that everybody is going to be proud of.”

Ditka proved to be prophetic. He quickly restored glory to the organization. The Super Bowl XX champions — 40 years later — remain the measuring stick for everything the club does. A record-setting and Hall of Fame tight end drafted with the No. 5 pick in 1961, Ditka died Friday in Chicago, the city that adopted a guy from Western Pennsylvania as its own because of his unyielding toughness, intense determination and ability to connect with the Grabowskis. He was 86.

The Bears won the NFC Central six times during Ditka’s run as head coach between 1982 and 1992, compiling a 106-62 record in the regular season and 6-6 in the postseason, including the magnificent march to a title in January 1986.

The Bears retired his No. 89 in December 2013, the 14th and final number the team retired, according to Chairman George McCaskey. A star for the 1963 NFL championship team, Ditka was a pitch man for everything product and service you can imagine.

Michael Jordan may be the greatest cultural sports icon across the globe, but Ditka — decades removed from his coaching career and more than a half-century since he was a player — remained the sporting icon of Chicago, the largest personality from a team that was full of swashbuckling, sometimes-rogue characters. In a very big way, that’s perhaps one reason it all worked — because Ditka showed how to walk the walk.

“There’s been a lot of big-time names and big-time celebrities, but nobody has surpassed Mike’s status,” Hall of Fame defensive lineman Dan Hampton said. “Jordan was a great player for the Bulls, but Ditka was kind of like the city’s pope in a way where everybody deferred to him that he was the great leader. The Bears won one in ’63, but it was before the Super Bowl. Once the Super Bowl started, pro football took on a new persona, and for 20 years, the Bears were lost in the wilderness.

“Mike Ditka came and led us out to the promised land. He was the Moses of Chicago. No longer were we the Second City. Now, the Bulls started winning and then the White Sox, the Blackhawks and the Cubs. The point being is Ditka was an iconic leader that took on the Moses persona to lead us out of the wilderness. You can’t make that up and you can’t duplicate that today because everything is different. At that time and place, he was the guy with the lamp leading us to victory.”

Gary Fencik didn’t know what to expect when George Halas made the decision to hire Ditka, at the time a special teams coach for the Dallas Cowboys. It was Fencik, a safety, who wrote a letter to Halas imploring him to keep defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. “Covering my butt,” he said, asking the rest of the defensive players to sign it.

“We were a young, inexperienced group that really needed discipline, and I think Mike pretty much set it up from Day 1,” Fencik said. “Here’s the goals of the organization. Here’s what I expect. So it’s, ‘OK, we’ll see how this plays out. We’ll see if he really lives up to what he says.’ And we found out that, yes, he did exactly what he said he was going to do.”

As Fencik recalled, Ditka laid out the goals for the organization at the first meeting.

“I am paraphrasing, but he said our goal is to win the NFC Central and get to and win the Super Bowl,” Fencik said. “Every coach will say that. Well, you know what, he stated it and he said, ‘But I am looking at you guys and half of you won’t be here when we get there.’ It was kind of chilling. I look at that Super Bowl roster, only half of those people that heard the speech made it to the Super Bowl. He was very open about what his measurement was going to be and what his standard was going to be. It never wavered.”

After an initial 3-6 record in the strike-shortened 1982 season and an 8-8 mark the following year, the Bears went 10-6 in 1984 before bowing out to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC championship game.

“I remember how emotional all of us were losing at San Francisco, and the next meeting we had in the spring, Mike said we had a good season last year but second-best isn’t good enough,” Fencik said. “I think that locked everybody in. It’s a simple phrase, but it’s how everyone felt.”

The Bears chased perfection the following season, recorded the “Super Bowl Shuffle” and mowed through the NFL en route to a 15-1 season and championship as Ditka found ways to co-exist with Ryan. Along the way, the team captured the imagination of fans across the country.

Here is how legendary Tribune sports writer Don Pierson encapsulated the pièce de résistance, the triumph in Super Bowl XX:

“This is as good as it gets,” Pierson wrote. “The Bears won the Super Bowl 46-10 in an awesome display of football encompassing all the joy and fury of an awesome season. Their destruction of the Patriots was so complete it went beyond Super Bowl proportions and recalled only their record 73-0 victory by the Bears in the 1940 NFL championship game. The Bears have a tradition that transcends Super Bowls and Sunday they ended years of frustration for their city and themselves and showed a nation they play better than they talk or sing.”

Said Hampton: “Everybody asks, ‘What did Ditka mean to the ’85 Bears?’ I just shake my head and say, ‘It would have never happened without him.’ Despite the fact we were in the process of Jim Finks building an amazing team, a collection of talent where there was a lightning strike, it’s hard to say, ‘Well, this is going to happen.’

“It wouldn’t have happened without Ditka. He was our general, our leader. As much as we loved Buddy and as much as Buddy meant to the team and the defense, Ditka was the one laying the master plan. Even Finks deferred to him in so many ways when we were making that run. He did so much for us and he fought (then-team Chairman) Mike McCaskey about everything.”

Ditka became so immensely popular that had he waded into politics, “Ditka for Mayor” would have been much more than a joke.

“Women loved Mike Ditka,” Fencik said. “For all the things you hear about Mike being brusque, he would be so nice to everybody. I thought he was kind of a harsh, cigar-chomping guy, and he was just so nice to all of the fans. There was some connection to his pride of being a Chicago Bear that I think it really kind of polished the image and the reputation of the Bears when you had Mike who personified what it was about.

“He was really open about having pride in being a Chicago Bear. He raised the bar. I am not sure how I would define the bar, but whatever it was, he surpassed it and made so many fans take pride in being a Bears fan again.”

Former players visited Ditka regularly in the last year-plus, popping in to offer support, pay respect but also to reminisce about some of the greatest times of their lives. It was a pilgrimage for some, including wide receiver Ken Margerum, who avoids airline travel if at all possible.

Fencik convinced Margerum to make a trip from California in September for alumni weekend. Margerum was hanging out with Jim McMahon when the former quarterback suggested they drop in on Ditka. Poof, in an instant they were out the door from an alumni gathering and at Ditka’s.

Margerum walked in and the first thing he said was, “Coach, Aliquippa, Pa., you remember my mom, Agnes Mihalik?”

A big smile spread across Ditka’s face — he had gone to high school with Margerum’s mother. The former players visited with their coach for a couple of hours, recounting tales of gridiron exploits. Margerum and McMahon tried to coax Ditka into attending the Monday night game against the Minnesota Vikings, hatching a plan to drive him out onto the field at halftime on a golf cart.

“We gave it our best shot,” Margerum said. “It was close. For the last half-hour, ‘Come on, Coach.’ He almost, almost committed. We had such a great time.

“He was the main reason we won the Super Bowl. He allowed us to be the personalities we were and didn’t try to change anyone. He put everyone in a big basket and said, ‘You guys have what it takes.'”

Former wide receiver Tom Waddle credits Ditka for cracking a door to the NFL open for him.

“Oh, my God, I don’t have a career without him,” Waddle said. “I would have been launched. I was just a fringe guy and I think he appreciated how hard I worked. He inspired me to do everything I could to become a better athlete. Now there was a ceiling on that, but he appreciated how I played the game. I just got lucky.

“Mike Ditka demanded two things — honesty and loyalty. If you gave it, you got it in return.”

For more than a decade, Waddle was a host of a weekly show with Ditka on WMVP-AM 1000 during the season that took place at one of Ditka’s restaurants. Through thick and thin, everyone wanted to hear Ditka’s thoughts on the team.

“Those shows were packed,” Waddle said. “You couldn’t get a table. It was pure theater. He’d give you kind of a gruff response and if it was during golf season, he’d be a little itchy and scratchy and want to get out of there. But once he got going, he loved it. He was great. We had so much interaction with him. The fans loved him, and he was good to them.

“He identified with the city. He wanted to be part of the fabric of the city because I think people don’t realize how much … everyone saw Mike as this boisterous guy with a healthy ego, but from my perspective he wanted so badly to just be part of the community because he loved it so much.”

“I never saw him kind of turn away and disregard a fan. Not when we were doing shows. Whenever he had a chance, he was still trying to raise money for important causes in the city and in the area.”

Ditka’s standing in the NFL — as a player and coach — remains with the greats. It took 63 years for the Las Vegas Raiders’ Brock Bowers to break Ditka’s record for receiving yards by a tight end. A five-time Pro Bowl selection, Ditka averaged 19.2 yards per catch in 1961, a figure topped only once — by Jackie Smith (21.5) in 1967 for the St. Louis Cardinals. No one has come close since.

The 1985 championship team, with the collection of stars, stories and bravado that has stood the test of time, remains one of the greatest champions in not just the NFL but all of professional sports.

“That’s part of the reason, I don’t want to say everyone is sick of the ’85 Bears, but we’re still talking about them,” Hampton said. “It’s the last Super Bowl winner, it changed the sporting landscape of the city of Chicago and gave us that championship demeanor that we had not had.

“Ditka was the guy that was responsible for it. Like he used to say, to the victor goes the spoils. Justifiably so, he got a lot of spoils.”

When Ditka was fired in January 1993, he went out with class.

“Scripture tells you that all things shall pass,” he said. “This, too, shall pass.”

His perch atop the city’s sporting landscape, however, has not been overtaken.

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