Mike Ditka: I wouldn't want my kid playing football.

This short article is part of Peter King's regular Monday Morning QuarterBack column, the Taj Mahal of NFL weekly writing, on SI.com. If you don't read it weekly during the season, you can't really call yourself an NFL fan. 

We've touched on the dangers of concussions quite a lot here at Following Football, but this HBO feature includes some items on the famous 1985 Chicago Bears team that are downright frightening...

The Ditka stuff on HBO might surprise you.

On Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern Time, HBO’s “Real Sports” with Bryant Gumbel will air a segment on the 1985 Chicago Bears, and in particular how several of the players from that team have suffered (and are suffering) from cognitive problems after their starry football careers. Quarterback Jim McMahon, whose head-trauma problems have been well-documented, gives this harrowing account about his current life with his live-in girlfriend: “The forgetfulness … I’d leave the bedroom, tell her I was going to the store, get a dip or something, and she’d come in there a half hour later, and I’m still standing there, wondering what I was going to do. And she said, ‘You were going to go to the store.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’  So I’ll go to the store, and then I’ll have to call her and say, ‘I don’t know how to get back home.’”

Ditka (Brian D. Kersey/Getty Images)

The Bears lost a safety from that era, Dave Duerson, to a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2011, and an autopsy showed “moderately advanced” CTE, the brain malady that scores of deceased football players have been found to have. The coach of that team, Mike Ditka, has been outspoken that the league should be doing more—even more than the recent $765 million settlement with former players over brain trauma—and continued that with Gumbel. “What I would say to the commissioner, to the owners … You got an obligation and responsibility to those guys because you wouldn’t have a damn job right now if it wasn’t for those guys.”

When Gumbel asks Ditka, in effect, if this could end up being the ruination of the sport, Ditka says: “Let me ask you a question better than that. If you had an eight-year-old kid now, would you tell him you want him to play football?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Gumbel. “Would you?”

“No,” Ditka said. “That’s sad. I wouldn’t. And my whole life was football. I think the risk is worse than the reward. I really do.”

That’s Iron Mike Ditka, folks. Should be a piece well worth watching Tuesday night.