When Mike Ditka died and the tributes poured in, we heard, as we often do, that Ditka was “the NFL’s first tight end.” That’s not quite right. In a sense, he wasn’t even the first Bears tight end.
Ditka is credited as the first tight end in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That is true. He is also the first tight end with a 1,000-yard season. But to understand why Ditka was the first tight end in Canton, you should understand the most notable “NFL first” for Iron Mike: he was the tight end who played
the position so well that All Pro voting bodies added a slot just for tight end.
Yesterday was the ninth annual National Tight Ends Day, founded in 2018 by two childhood Bears fans: George Kittle and Jimmy Garoppolo. It makes sense that a pair of Bears fans saw the power of tight end. Here is the story of how Mike Ditka changed NFL history and made “tight end” its own position.
From “end” to end lined up tight to “tight end” — introducing Bears’ end Willard Dewveall
If you search Pro Football Reference to determine the first Bears tight end, Mike Ditka’s name comes up second.
Willard Dewveall comes up first.
The Bears drafted Dewveall (rhymes with “ball”) in 1958, and he joined the team in ‘59 after one year in the CFL. He was an “offensive end”; the 1959 media guide listed him as an “end,” along with all other players who today we would consider either a tight end or a wide receiver.
In the two-way era, before 1950, football had three buckets of positions: line, back, end. The names of the positions were generally the same on offense and defense: the starting lineups would simply list the line (same positions as today) the backs (a mix of quarterback, halfback — sometimes LHB/RHB for “left” and “right” — and fullback) and the ends: right end and left end, or RE and LE.
As the passing game developed, teams began changing the formations of their backs and ends. The great NFL historian Timothy Brown outlines several key years in the evolution of the end position:
- Late 1920s: Teams start splitting an end one or two yards wider than usual
- 1938: The famed Amos Alonzo Stagg, then head coach at University of the Pacific, starts specifically using the term “split end”
- 1940s: The proliferation of Clark Shaughnessy’s modern T-formation leads to more teams in both college and the pros sending one end wide to spread the defense
- 1956: NFL teams start placing a halfback between the split end and offensive tackle to create the slotback
- 1957: Texas Tech officially names the end tied to the line as the “tight end” to distinguish it from the split end
“The distinction caught on,” Brown writes. “By 1959, numerous NFL and college teams made the same distinction.” Nineteen fifty-nine, you will recall, was the year the Bears signed Dewveall. Teams might have ends more focused on blocking and others more focused on receiving, and the terms “tight end” vs. “split end” grew more common.
But the position was still “end.” “Tight” and “split” were really just adjectives, not official position designations. Remember in Seinfeld when Jerry and Kramer accidentally toss a Junior Mint into the body of a patient during surgery, and Jerry recounts the story to George, and George is stunned that doctors didn’t notice the mint?
“How could they not notice it?” George shouts.
“Because it’s a little mint!” Jerry explains. And then he adds: “It’s a junior mint.”
When I hear him say that, I don’t hear someone saying a brand name. I hear someone literally saying “junior” mint. That was the tight end position before Mike Ditka. Willard Dewveall didn’t play Tight End™. He played “tight” end. One newspaper in the 1959 preseason described Dewveall as playing “a tight end,” in the same way we might today call someone “a slot corner.” If Jerry and George were around in 1959, that’s how Jerry would have explained Willard Dewveall: “He’s a tight end.”
“Football changes are not like an on-and-off light switch,” John Turney, another premier NFL historian, wrote upon Ditka’s death. “Changes in schemes or personnel are more like a dimmer switch, going from off gradually to on.”
In January of 1961, Dewveall made a bit of fairly niche pro football history himself: he became the first player to jump leagues from the NFL to the new AFL, which had just finished its first season. Dewveall, George Halas said, “would not be missed too much.” Two weeks earlier, they had drafted his replacement.
Mike Ditka: the first All Pro tight end
With the #5 pick in the 1961 NFL draft, the Bears chose offensive end Mike Ditka from Pittsburgh. Just as with Dewveall, the Bears media guide listed Ditka’s position as “end.” But in George Halas’s explanation of Ditka’s value, we can once again see how the term “tight end” prior to Ditka was really just an adjective and a noun.
“(Ditka) will play the closed end,” Halas said upon signing Ditka. “We’re counting on his rugged blocking to give our running a big lift.”
Bears publicity man Dan Desmond echoed the term during the preseason.
“We got a big guy at our closed end position, Mike Ditka,” Desmond said. “For his size, Mike’s speed amazes everybody.”
This is where the All Pro definitions come in.
The Newspaper Enterprise Association, or NEA, was one of many outlets that selected an All Pro team, though the NEA was different than the AP or UPI or others, because the NEA’s team was voted on by players. In 1960, the AP and NEA had the same first-team All Pro skill position designations on offense: two halfbacks, one fullback, two ends. The All Pro ends were players who today we would consider wide receivers: Raymond Berry (6’2, 187 pounds) for both outlets, with Sonny Randle (6’2, 189 pounds) for the AP and Tommy McDonald (5’9, 178 pounds) for the NEA.
Then came the rookie Ditka. In his first game, the Bears listed him in the starting lineup at right end, while Johnny Morris, who we commonly think of as a wide receiver, was listed at “RH” or right halfback. The “LH” — left halfback — was Willie Galimore. Rick Casares was the fullback and Angela Coia was the left end.
The Bears were already stretching the possibilities of the tight end position: through 1960, at least using Stathead’s positional designations, only one tight end had ever had a 100-yard game, and that was Dewveall, who had two such games, both in 1960. The great Packers tight end Ron Kramer (6’3, 234 pounds), known more for his blocking — and also listed as an “end” in the Packers media guide — never even had 90 yards receiving.
In Ditka’s second game, he led the Bears with 130 receiving yards and a touchdown. He would have four more 100-yard games, including a then-NFL TE record 190 yards, with three TDs, against the Packers. Ditka ended the year as the team’s leading receiver and finished in the top 5 in the NFL in receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns, easily the best season ever to that point for a tight end.
When the 1961 All Pro teams arrived, the AP stuck with the same positions: one fullback, two halfbacks and two WR-style ends: Del Shofner (6’3, 186 pounds) and Red Phillips (6’1, 197 pounds).
But the player-led NEA and sportswriter and cartoonist Murray Olderman saw that football was changing. They had three backs, with Jim Taylor, Lenny Moore as “flanker back” and Jim Brown at fullback, and two ends: Shofner at “split end” and the 6’3, 230-pound Ditka at “tight end.”
“Mike is the tight end of the Chicago Bears and signifies an up-dating in the voting method,” Olderman explained. “For the first time, ends were designated as ‘tight’ and ‘split.’”
This made Mike Ditka the first All Pro tight end.
“Mike Ditka and a few like him introduced a new element into the concept of an all-pro team,” Olderman wrote in December of 1962 to explain Ditka’s impact. Ditka, along with Green Bay’s Kramer, “represent a unique species gaining accreditation in pro football — the tight end.”
Olderman noted that Ditka and Kramer had the size to block Big Daddy Lipscomb, while Ditka also had the receiving ability that placed him among the league leaders in 1961.
“The special quality that sets them apart is agility,” Olderman wrote. “When it’s third down and eight to go and a passing situation is apparent, the tight end takes on significance. He doesn’t have the speed to prance on fly patterns that take him past the safety man. But he’s big enough to shrug off a linebacker’s forearm shiver and agile enough to run a pattern that will shake him loose for the pass that means a first down and a vital possession.”
Ditka’s ability was so immediately valuable that he apparently was the inspiration for 12 personnel.
“The success of Ditka and ilk so influenced pro thinking that Dallas of the American Football League has introduced a system with two tight ends,” Olderman wrote. “Now mandatory for a bonafide all-pro team is a tight end designation.”
Indeed it was! And in 1962, the AP followed the NEA and added the tight end designation. In a horrible oversight, the AP gave its first ever tight end All Pro slot not to Ditka, but to Kramer. An outrage! They gave Ditka second team, and brought him up to first team in 1963, where he belonged. That same year, the Baltimore Colts drafted John Mackey and immediately referred to him as “tight end.”
In 1988, Mike Ditka was elected as the first tight end in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Some say Mackey should have gone in first. That’s a matter of debate. But Ditka was a fitting choice as the first in Canton, because he was the first player who made the NFL realize that “tight end” deserved its own position and its own All Pro slot. Rest in Peace to #89, and as he proudly proclaimed, Go Bears!
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Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s Sports Historian, Bears historian at Windy City Gridiron, a Pro Football Hall of Fame analyst and author of WHY WE ROOT: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan. Follow his 90s Chicago Bulls book research at readjack.substack.com.
And one more time, wishing Cole Kmet all the best. Rest well, 85!
