Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (16 page)

On December 12, 1965, in the mud at Wrigley, in an otherwise inconsequential game against the 49ers, Sayers put on maybe the greatest running performance ever. What was it like? One winter, I played pickup football with friends in a park in my town. It had rained the night before, the rain turned to ice. I was in cleats; everyone else wore sneakers. Whenever I turned, the kid coming at me was carried away by his momentum, gone. I weaved through defenders as if they were highway cones. It remains an outstanding afternoon of my life. I figure it was like that for Sayers times a billion. Halas pulled him after his fifth touchdown, but the crowd kept chanting his name. He went out for a punt return—just so the fans could get another look. You can watch the film: Sayers camped under the ball, hauling it in, sizing up the field, making a move, accelerating—his sixth touchdown. He gained 332 yards, a record. But it was never numbers that defined Sayers—it was the surfeit of grace, the cool of his game. In sports, it’s style we remember. Not Mickey Mantle’s home runs but how he tossed away his helmet when he failed; not Michael Jordan’s dunks but how he slowed at the decisive moment, as if savoring it. Gale Sayers is remembered because he was beautiful.

A few years ago, speeding along Route 35 in Connecticut, I almost ran into a deer, a big buck with a full rack at the peak of autumn. The road was black, the trees were gold. I slammed on the brakes, locked ’em up, skidded. The deer stopped and stared, hesitated, then took off. As the buck got clear of the road, it stutter-stepped before bounding away—it was a kind of end zone dance, an animal telling itself,
I did not die today.
It was one of those naturally occurring outbreaks of style that the Darwinists could never explain. What’s the advantage in this? The deer running was survival; the deer stutter-stepping was God.

Sayers was banged and twisted from his first day in the pros. It’s human nature: if, in the midst of a brutal world, you see a high-flying thing, you want to crush it. The first serious injury came in his third season. His foot went this way, his leg went that way. Ever tune a guitar one turn too many? The ligaments in his knee snapped. The doctors said he wouldn’t play again, but he worked and worked and came back to lead the league in rushing once more—he’d become a different kind of runner, more ordinary. People know this story from
Brian’s Song
, a movie about Sayers and Brian Piccolo, who shared the backfield in Chicago. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970. That movie—a story of rivalry, friendship, disease—is etched in the memory of a generation of fans. Billy Dee Williams as Sayers; James Caan as Piccolo; Jack Warden as Halas. It’s a tearjerker. The first notes of the theme song can turn me into a puddle of goo. When I asked members of the ’85 Bears what they knew about the team before being drafted, many of them said, “
Brian’s Song.
”

“Did you cry when you watched it?” I asked McMahon.

“Fuck yeah, I cried. Do you think I’m some kind of monster?”

Sayers’s second injury came in 1970. It was the other knee. He never could make it back. He retired in 1971. He’d spent less than three full seasons on the field. Sayers was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977. He was the youngest player to ever receive the honor. In case you’re wondering, that’s not good.

Dick Butkus was drafted in 1965, the same year as Sayers. Two picks, two Hall of Famers. He was the flip side of the coin, the other face of the NFL. Sayers was the rainbow, Butkus the thunderstorm. Sayers was the horn solo, Butkus the cymbal crash. It’s this mix of sugar and salt that gives football its tremendous vitality.

In many ways, Butkus was the model for the ’85 Bears, the template the team was in search of whenever it went looking for another hard hitter to fill out the roster. McMichael and Singletary have each spoken of reading Butkus’s book
Stop-Action
in high school, memorizing passages, wanting to intimidate in the way of Butkus. Whenever a new defender showed up in Lake Forest, he knew he had to play to the level of the original madman. At its best, the ’85 defense operated in the spirit of Butkus, the brutal middle linebacker. He twisted heads, bit people in the pile. Now and then, you’d see a running back raised off the ground, then driven back, feet still moving like the legs of a flipped cockroach. He last suited up a million years ago, but I still hear him barking like a dog, bloody fingers wrapped in gauze, steam jetting from his mouth, monster of monsters. “I didn’t just want to end a play,” he said. “I wanted to rip their fucking heads off.” He was a South Side legend long before he was famous, a man among boys at the Chicago Vocational High School. The lunchroom turned quiet when he entered, the stillness that tells you a shark is gliding over the reef. Even the greasers avoided eye contact. He was dynamite on the field, big and fast with a lust for contact. Loving to hit is not enough. You have to love getting hit, too.

He was all-American at the University of Illinois in 1963 and 1964. He came within a few votes of winning the Heisman Trophy. Halas always paid attention to local products. He wanted to give fans a hero and also thought, all things being equal, a Chicagoan was going to be superior. (When I was a kid, I had a T-shirt that said
CHICAGO: YOU GOTTA BE TOUGH.
) The Bears took him in the first round. He made All-Pro his first eight seasons. In 1970, he was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
under the headline
THE MOST FEARED MAN IN THE GAME
. He carried nastiness like a torch, preserving Bears tradition in a dark age.

He had terrible knees and often seemed to be playing on one leg. By 1973, he was like a jellyfish in a puddle: dangerous but only if you step on it. He did not suit up for the 1974 season. According to the AP, Butkus claimed that surgeons as well as a team physician had looked at his knee and basically called it a day. The Bears refused to pay off the remainder of the linebacker’s contract. Butkus said the team was at fault—its doctors and trainers had not warned him of the long-term effects of the cortisone shots he was given every time they wanted to wheel the mad dog back onto the field. Butkus announced his retirement and sued the Bears for $1.6 million. Halas was infuriated but eventually settled for $600,000. Butkus’s number was not retired until 1994, which seemed like an intentional slight.

And yet when Butkus was elected to the Hall of Fame, he asked Halas to induct him. If you can explain this, perhaps you’ll understand the love and hate that drew and repelled players and fans with George Halas. He was cheap, shortsighted, and mean but also genuine, brilliant, and loyal. He was the coach of your youth, the flask-carrying miser who stands for all coaches and all fathers, for authority everywhere. You hated and cursed him but found yourself craving his approval. You don’t want to want it, but you do. When Halas did an event for his autobiography, Butkus stood in line, then handed the book over for an autograph. “To Dick Butkus,” Halas wrote, “the greatest player in the history of the Bears. You had that old zipperoo!”

*   *   *

Halas retired in 1968. He’d been in and out of the game a half dozen times. He would leave, but he could never stay away. A season or two after a big press conference—
So, this is it, boys, you won’t have Halas to kick around anymore—
he’d be back on the sideline, fedora low, cursing through a rolled-up program. But this time was different. This time he was truly and irredeemably old, seventy-three, shrunken, hobbled. He had a bad hip, which made it painful to walk. On game days, after the players had gotten their injections, the doctor shot up Halas, too, deadening the joint so he could function. “Dr. Jim Stack provided some relief at critical periods by inserting a five-inch-long needle through the groin into the hip,” Halas wrote. “He felt around to find where the head of the femur fitted into the socket and injected painkiller directly into the joint. The injection would see me through the game.” But the shots were increasingly ineffective, and by 1967 Halas could not get around quick enough to curse out the referees. “I had to give up running along the sidelines, instructing officials, encouraging Bears, and taunting our opponents,” said Halas, “all activities which were part of the game and appreciated by our fans.”

He spent much of his last season on one knee; at practice, he traveled by golf cart. By then, the consensus was that Halas had stayed too long. He was out of touch with the modern game. In the
Chicago Daily News
, Mike Royko described him as “a tight-fisted, stubborn, willful, mean old man.” According to Royko, Halas conducted a postgame interview “in his long underwear on a bench in front of his locker sipping from a pint of whiskey.” Halas was outraged:
That cocksucker, everyone knows I don’t take whiskey from the bottle. I drink it out of a can.
When the criticism became intolerable, Halas finally stepped aside, turning the keys of the machine over to his assistant, Jim Dooley, the first of a generation of pretenders who, in retrospect, seem like nothing but stepping-stones to Ditka.

Halas had been a good coach right up to the end. The team went 7–6–1 his final season. He retired with a 324–151–31 career record. He’d won eight NFL titles. But the roster was a mess, and the team fell to pieces not long after he moved to the owner’s box. The year 1969 was the worst season in franchise history. After they lost the first seven games, there was nothing left to play for but the number-one draft pick. If the Bears wanted to improve, the best thing they could do was lose. But on November 9, they defeated the Steelers, the only team as bad as the Bears. Chicago was not even best at being worst. They finished the year in a 1–13 tie with Pittsburgh.

The number-one pick would go to the winner of a coin toss. This was done in New Orleans during Super Bowl week. Halas tapped his son-in-law to call it for the Bears, Virginia’s husband, Ed McCaskey, a tall man who was as nice and handsome as could be—perhaps too nice and too handsome as far as Halas was concerned.

Virginia Halas met Ed McCaskey in Philadelphia. She was enrolled at the Drexel Institute of Technology, studying to be a secretary; he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed grew up in Lancaster. He was a naturally elegant man who was immediately liked by just about everyone. He did not have a lot, but he was hardworking and decent. On paper, he was perfect. He said grace before each meal, adding, “Oh, God, please convert the Russians.”

In spite of this, or maybe because of it, Halas did not trust Ed McCaskey at first. Halas was the sort of father who examined his daughter’s suitors through hooded eyes, trying to figure the angle. He asked two Pennsylvania friends to do some snooping on McCaskey. The “agents” in question were Bert Bell and Art Rooney, the owners of the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers. They gave the young man the okay—Rooney supposedly protested, “Whoever said Halas was such an angel?”—but the old man was not convinced. His worst fears were realized when he found out how McCaskey made a living: he’s not a crook, he’s a goddamn singer, a nightclub dandy! According to family lore, McCaskey would have been the front man of the Harry James band had he not been aced out by Frank Sinatra. There is a beautiful symmetry in this: Halas was replaced by the Sultan of Swat, McCaskey by the Chairman of the Board.

Years later, McCaskey actually recorded a crooney version of “Bear Down, Chicago Bears.” (It was played at his funeral in 2003.) But when McCaskey showed up in Chicago with a ring to ask for permission to marry Virginia, Halas said,
Gimme that.
This was at Halas’s apartment before World War II. It was summer. The old man had stripped to his underwear. “Don’t you know I own a jewelry store,” he said. “You’d have done much better than this. You can give her the ring, but you can’t get married.”

Like protagonists in a Billy Joel song, Virginia and Ed eloped shortly before Ed went off to war. He saw action in France and Belgium. When he returned, Halas gave him a job at May & Halas, the old man’s sporting goods company. (Their slogan was, “A Bear for Quality.”) Conditioned by the marginal early days of the NFL, Halas had invested in half a dozen side businesses: laundries, oil wells, athletic equipment. In 1967, McCaskey went to work for the Bears, where, according to biographer Jeff Davis, he was given an out-of-the-way job. It’s like that scene in
The Godfather
, when Don Corleone, speaking of his son-in-law Carlo, says, “Give him a living, but never discuss the family business with him.” By then, the team’s daily operations had been turned over to Halas’s son George Jr., known as Mugs, who’d been designated to run the club when the old man died.

Ed McCaskey picked heads in that coin toss. It was tails. A reporter shouted out, “McCaskey, you bum, you can’t even win a coin flip!” Pittsburgh used the first pick to take Terry Bradshaw from Louisiana Tech. The Bears traded their number-two pick to Green Bay for veterans—all of whom were soon out of the game. The Steelers would become one of the great dynasties, winning four Super Bowls with Bradshaw at quarterback. The Bears? Well, the Bears kept on being the Bears.

*   *   *

I first watched the Bears in 1974 on the black-and-white TV in the kitchen. I went to my first game a year later. I went with friends; every third parent had tickets. When I asked my father if I could go, he would say, “You know what you’re doing,” or, even more damningly, “We can’t tell our children what to love.”

The Bears left Wrigley Field after the 1970 season. It was by league order, which required each team to play in a stadium with at least fifty thousand seats. They moved to Soldier Field, a coliseum just off South Lake Shore Drive. Low and white, it went forever. At one point, it seated one hundred thousand people. From the cheap seats, the game looked like a dispute in the distance, something that was none of your goddamn business. The façade is ornamented by columns, which gives everything a gladiatorial feel. The first teams I remember seeing there were quarterbacked by Bob Avellini, whose name makes a certain generation of Chicagoans wince. I also remember Roland Harper, Gary Huff, and Doug Buffone. Gary Fencik said Buffone smoked cigarettes during halftime, the butt shoved between the tips of his taped fingers. “I’d watch him puffing and be like, ‘Guys, I might know why we’re getting winded in the fourth quarter.’”