Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (15 page)

November 24, 1963: the emperor lay dead in the capital but the gladiators carried on at the Forum. The game was played at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in front of a glowering crowd of drunks who should have been somewhere else. Before the coin toss, Halas got his team in a circle and said, “We’re going to play this game to get people’s minds off the assassination.” Late in the fourth quarter, the Bears were down 17–14. If they lost, no championship. Clouds rolled in from the west. Billy Wade took the snap. Ditka went upfield, hit a linebacker, turned, looked the ball all the way in, caught it, tucked it, and headed for the end zone, the burner’s son running under an inky sky. He had about seventy yards to go. Every time a Steeler came up to make the stop, Ditka would bring his big forearm around. He broke tackle after tackle, leaving the wounded in his wake. He was finally brought down by defensive back Clendon Thomas deep in Pittsburgh territory. He’d gone fifty yards after the catch. He lay on the field spent, a burned-out engine. In Chicago, they called it “the run.” “That was the luckiest run in the world,” Ditka said. “It was a combination of me being tired, them being tireder, and poor tackling. It was terrible.”

The Bears kicker Roger Leclerc hit an eighteen-yard field goal to tie the game. Pittsburgh got the ball back with seconds left, ran a play, then another, then before anyone realized what was happening, a Steelers receiver was going downfield for a touchdown. He crossed the goal line and raised his arms, but at some point, way back there, impossible to hear above the din, a whistle had been blown. The play was no good though no one was sure why. In the meantime, the last second had run off the clock. It was over. A murmur went through the crowd:
Halas paid off the refs! He bought the fuckin’ thing!
The drunkest fans came over the wall. It was a mob. The refs blew their whistles but were quickly overwhelmed. The Bears grabbed their coach and raced through a storm of beer cans. They got to the locker room and shut the door only to realize a Pittsburgh reporter had followed them inside. He was waving his notebook in the old man’s face, cursing,
You bought it, you evil bastard, you bought it, didn’t you?
For a long moment, Halas stared into the face of the reporter as you stare into a garbage compactor that will not turn, wondering,
What the hell is down there?
His eyes flashed, but before he could move, Ditka had the reporter and was carrying him through the locker room and dumping him in the hall. He slammed the door. It got quiet. They stared at each other. Someone turned on a TV. Cronkite or Brinkley. What he was saying made no sense: the man who’d shot the president had himself been shot in a garage in Dallas.

The NFL Title Game was played in the Polo Grounds in New York. The Giants were led by the Hall of Fame quarterback Y. A. Tittle. One of those ancients who seemed to play forever—he was thirty-seven when he faced the Bears in the championship—Tittle was the subject of perhaps the greatest sports photo ever taken. It shows him on his knees on the turf. His helmet has been knocked off, blood trickles from his head. Beaten and old, the gladiator suffers stoically. The final score was Bears 14, Giants 10. “I guess today’s game proves that if you live long enough, everything you want to happen will happen,” Halas said. He was named Coach of the Year. He was sixty-eight. It was the last time he’d see the Bears win a championship.

*   *   *

“Why didn’t you repeat?”

“What’s that?”

“Why didn’t your championship team repeat?”

This was me talking to Ditka over dinner one night. He sat back in his chair, his eyes glittering as he said, “Well, you see, right there, you’ve put your finger on the big question. Why’s it so hard for a team that’s won to win again? Maybe winning is the greatest thing that can happen to a team and also the biggest disaster. It’s never the same after you win.”

8

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES

Chicago in the funkadelic summer of ’76

I grew up in the 1970s. It was a sad time in my country, my city, and my house. Everything sucked. In my earliest memory, I’m wearing a T-shirt that says
IMPEACH DICK NIXON.
I have no idea who that is. There are always hearings on TV. It seems as if everything good is over, the best of life consumed—my generation has been left the rind, the husk of a city. Do I blame Jimmy Carter? Of course I do. And Mayor Daley, and Rick Reuschel, and the rock band Chicago. On short autumn days in my town, you could see melancholy rising from the ground. Like sand from the beach, the sadness was in your shoes in the morning and in your bed at night. Chicago, which boomed for a hundred years, had, by the time of my childhood, fallen into gray dissolution, a seemingly endless decline. As Ray Liotta says in
GoodFellas
, “This was the bad time.”

Start with the crime—that fantastic run of infamy. It had been glamorous in the ’20s and ’30s, Al Capone and Bugs Moran and downtown turf wars. John Dillinger was shot coming out of the Biograph movie theater. Leopold and Loeb, whatever else you might say about them, at least put some thought into it. After Nails Morton was bucked and trampled to death by a horse in Lincoln Park, his friends brought the animal back to the ill-fated spot and whacked it. But by my first year in grade school, this magnificent underworld panoply had broken into a mash-up of nihilistic tribes: Latin Kings, El Rukns. In the newspapers, they were depicted as shapeless mobs creeping out of the slums. Like the ancient hordes, they were coming.

And the housing projects, those carefully arranged monstrosities. The Robert Taylor Homes—bleak beyond bleak. You’d see them from the highway, blank towers and black windows, weedy yards, a man skulking in an alley. In the summer, on game days, the elevated train did not make local stops between the North Side and Comiskey Park but just rattled on through the South Side like a closed coach carrying Russian aristocrats through territory that has fallen to the Reds. What I’m describing could probably be characterized as white anxiety in the wake of white flight, a suburban fear of the city. But for me it was just the world as seen from the backseat of a Buick station wagon. I mean, what does a kid really know?

Mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976. For several days, his face was seen, in the way of a religious miracle, floating above the slaughter yards. While sitting on a storm-grounded plane at O’Hare one October, the man seated next to my father said, “It never snowed this early when Daley was mayor.” When the plane, having finally gotten clearance, broke through the clouds into the sunshine, the passengers cheered. That’s how it was in Chicago when I was small. The sun went away in October and stayed away until mid-April. A lid closed over the city. You had to remind yourself not to panic.

Jane Byrne was elected mayor in 1979. She had short blond hair and the clipped officious manner of someone else’s mom—she wants to punish you but has been forced to acknowledge you’re outside her jurisdiction. She was beyond her depth. She made the city feel ungovernable, doomed. In response to a crime wave sweeping the North Side, she moved into Cabrini-Green. I’m not sure what it was supposed to accomplish: bring attention to the plight of people trapped in that housing project; show the rest of the city, “Look, it’s not so bad!” It backfired when a journalist, having tailed the mayor, reported that she almost never stayed there, and, when she did, was protected by armed guards.

Superrats were said to have taken over entire blocks—slum raised, monstrous. The most impressive, descendants of the Norway brown, were smaller than a husky, bigger than a beagle, with needle teeth, yellow eyes, and graspy claws. They were on the move, colonizing in the way of the ancient Phoenicians, advancing from neighborhood to neighborhood, destroying stuff and grossing people out. News anchors showed maps: where they’d been, where they were, when they’d get to you. And they were coming, as sure as the turning of the earth. I don’t know if superrats were real or if they were a nightmare conjured by the city’s subconscious. I only know that I did worry about them, as did my friends and siblings. At times, it verged on hysteria. One afternoon, my sister, returning from town in our parents’ car, slammed on the brakes, pointed at our dog, Fluffy, a terrier mix who had grown a little paunchy, and screamed, “Superrat!”

We first heard about John Wayne Gacy in 1978. He was a contractor, a serial killer, a clown. He performed at parties and painted clown pictures in his spare time. A body was found in the crawl space beneath his house that summer. Then another. Then another. And so on. The victims were boys around my age, hired for odd jobs. He gives you ten bucks to mow his lawn and no one ever sees you again. I remember watching the news as bodies were exhumed from beneath his house at 8213 West Summerdale near Des Plaines, a town not far from my own. I used to go there to play hockey. (A girl spit on me after one of those games.) Seeing the house was terrifying because it was so ordinary. If you can’t tell the house of the serial killer from the other houses, what chance do you have?

*   *   *

The White Sox played baseball on the South Side. And though I grew up north of the city, in an area populated by Cubs fans, there was no small number of Sox fans. For the most part, these were the fathers of my friends, men who’d grown up near Comiskey Park. Meatpackers, record producers, traders—they spoke with a nasal twang. Now and then, they took us to a game at Comiskey. One afternoon, as my friend Danny’s father was locking his Cadillac in the parking lot, we were surrounded by young men, one of them carrying a crowbar, which he flipped hand to hand. He said, “Give me twenty bucks, and I’ll make sure no one throws a crowbar through your window.”

As part of a promotion, fans were invited to bring disco records to a doubleheader in July 1979, where radio shock jock Steve Dahl piled and detonated them in center field between games, blowing a hole in the grass and inciting a riot. Fans tore up the place. It was called Disco Demolition. The second game could not be played and the Sox lost in a forfeit. For part of the 1976 season, the Sox played in what are considered the worst uniforms ever: shorts. Even on a bang-bang play, players refused to slide. Jimmy Piersall, the team’s color commentator, went on a Mike Royko television special, filmed at the Billy Goat Tavern, where, in the course of discussing the wives of White Sox players and why they were always on him, Piersall called the wives “horny broads.” He was suspended. Harry Caray, the play-by-play man, quit in protest and was then hired by the Cubs. Ah, the Cubs! My Cubs! They’re always bad, but they were worse in the ’70s. That’s when they acquired Dave Kingman, a gangly slugger who one season struck out 131 times. At a game in ’75 or ’76, in Los Angeles, two deranged fans ran onto the grass and attempted to light an American flag on fire. The match flickered, but Rick Monday, the Cubs center fielder, scooped up Old Glory before it ignited, and carried it lovingly to safety. Then what do the Cubs do? Trade Monday for Bill Buckner.

In Chicago, it all added to a sense that every season was doomed before it began. We had lost, and lost, and would lose again. That’s why my father begged me to root for the Dodgers. He believed a Cubs fan will have a bad life because a Cubs fan will accept losing as inevitable. “And it’s not just the Cubs,” he told me, “but all the teams around here”—my father grew up in Brooklyn. The Sox had not won the World Series since 1917. The Black Hawks had not hoisted the Stanley Cup since 1961. The Bulls had never been champions of the NBA. I once saw a kid with a T-shirt that said, in giant letters,
CHICAGO CUBS, WORLD CHAMPS
, then, in little numbers, 1908. The Bears had last won in 1963, but that was before I was born, before the Super Bowl, and before football had overtaken baseball in popularity. By the end of that sad decade, many of us had come to believe that winning was reserved for other people in other towns.

*   *   *

I had just missed the last of the great Bears, the last players who belonged in the pantheon with Luckman and Grange. These men, whom you could almost see in the distance, disappearing like the caboose of a train, had been driven from the field by injury. That’s football—the average running back lasts just over two years in the league.

For starters, there was that personification of football grace, Gale Sayers, a running back who made his Wrigley Field debut in 1965. He came from Kansas—the Kansas Comet, a fleet flash of lightning who could switch direction without losing speed. Deceptively quick, Sayers could wrong-foot a defensive back with his eyes or the shift of his hips. He made the professionals on the other side look clumsy. His best runs unfolded like Coltrane solos. You never knew where he was going, but, once he found a line, it seemed like it had to be that way. It was as if he could see the field from above, knew just when to cut, where to find a path. (“Give me eighteen inches of daylight, that’s all I need.”) He scored twenty-two touchdowns in 1965 and 132 points, rookie records. The films made of him that year probably give the best sense of what Red Grange might’ve looked like in his prime. There have been only a handful of runners like that.