Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (20 page)

“We call him Sybil after the girl in the movie who had all those personalities,” said McMahon. “Mike will be calm one minute, then throw a clipboard the next. People don’t understand that, but we do. The players figure he’s just going from one stage to another. He’s merely Sybilizing.”

Jim Finks described Ditka’s method as “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

Over time, a team takes on the personality of its coach. If he’s strong, the team will be strong. If he’s weak, the team will be ineffectual. But what if he’s insane? Ditka’s temper galvanized many Bears, got them hustling and hitting. But it was different for the skill players. What fired up the bruisers could be the undoing of a passer, that gridiron aristocrat who must do more than pound his way through. Even Ditka’s admirers acknowledge that he was a terrible handler of quarterbacks. He bullied, shouted, undercut, threatened, punished, and chewed them out in front of teammates—in other words, he treated them like he treated everyone else. But a quarterback is not like everyone else. He’s a delicate instrument, a jockey riding his own sense of self-confidence, out there on an audible and a spiral. “Ditka called plays we didn’t even have,” Bob Avellini told me. “I’d signal time-out, walk over, and say, ‘Mike, we don’t have that play.’ And he’d shout, ‘Shut up, and run the fucking thing.’” The list of quarterbacks terrorized by Ditka is illustrious: Bob Avellini, Mike Tomczak, Rusty Lisch, Jim Harbaugh.

“One time, we were on our own one-yard line,” said Avellini. “We had ninety-nine yards to go with three seconds left in the half. Ditka sent in a play. Willie Gault is the split end. Ditka said, ‘Throw the bomb.’ I said, ‘The defense is laying off thirty yards. There’s nothing good that can possibly happen from this. I can take a safety, get stripped … what’s the best that can happen? A thirty-yard completion?’ He said, ‘Just run the fucking thing.’ Another time, we were supposed to run a sweep right. I saw something so I called a sweep left. It went for thirty yards. I get back to the sideline and Ditka is pounding his fist, slamming his clipboard. He’d rather have a shitty play that he called than a play that actually succeeded.”

Avellini continued, “Everything he did was based on fear. It works for a short period but you can’t continue on fear. I remember the first practice. We’re running a two-minute offense. I threw the ball right where I was supposed to, but one of the guys ran the wrong pattern: it got picked off. I was supposed to run the whole two-minute offense but Ditka said, ‘Avellini, you’re out.’ I said, ‘What about the guy that blew the pattern?’ Ditka said, ‘You want to pack your bags and get the hell outta here?’ I said no, but at least I stood up to him. When we got back to the locker room, the guys all said, ‘Bob, that was great.’ I said, ‘Yeah, guys, thanks for backing me up.’ I was always walking a tightrope. He’d threaten me: I’m gonna cut your ass. I’m gonna cut your ass. I went in against Green Bay when McMahon got hurt. I didn’t even have a chance to warm up. I threw an incompletion. When I get back to the sideline, Ditka says, ‘I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ ass.’”

In a game in Seattle in 1984, Ditka told Avellini that under no circumstances was he to audible—that is, change the play sent in by the coach. Even if he saw an opportunity, the wide receivers wouldn’t hear the change. The Kingdome was probably the loudest stadium in football. The Bears got to the goal line. Avellini was under center—he saw something. “I hear Ed Hughes, our offensive coordinator, say, ‘Oh, no,’ said Ditka. I yell: ‘What is it, Ed?’ He says, ‘That son of a bitch is audible-izing.’”

Avellini threw to a receiver who was supposed to be in the corner of the end zone but wasn’t because he hadn’t heard the call. The interception resulted in a Seattle touchdown.

Ditka: “Bob comes out of the game, and I say—I’m trembling—‘Bob, why would you do that, son?’”

Avellini: “Well, I thought—”

Ditka: “Don’t THINK!”

After several deep breaths, Ditka went on: “Bob, if you ever do that again you will never—ever—EVER—play another down for me! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?” On another occasion, under similar circumstances, Avellini did the same thing with the same result. When he got back to the sideline that day, he was greeted by Ditka in full Ditka: “Don’t you like me, Bob? Don’t you like your teammates? Do you think we’re stupid and don’t give you good plays?”

When Avellini tried to explain, Ditka shouted, “That’s it, you’re done!”

“Then he looked at me,” Ditka remembered, “and said, ‘You never liked me anyway.’ I was going to kill him. Right there. Tear his flesh off like a jackal. I was so mad my neck veins had veins!”

Avellini finished his career with the New York Jets.

In a game against the Chargers, Ditka swore at quarterback Rusty Lisch—he had fumbled—until he was out of breath. A few minutes later, when the Bears got the ball back, Lisch refused to play, saying, “I don’t think I can go in after the way you talked to me.”

“Hey Rusty,” said Ditka, “I was
kidding
!”

“I got mad at Lisch for carrying the ball like a loaf of bread,” Ditka explained. According to several players, Mike Tomczak, the Bears’ third-string quarterback in 1985, was ruined by Ditka. “He once told me he was getting treatment from a sports psychologist to help him deal with the harsh criticism he received from Ditka,” Dan Jiggetts wrote in
“Then Ditka Said to Payton…”
“He said the sessions helped him maintain his personal confidence and perspective.”

Of all the Bears quarterbacks of the 1980s and ’90s, only McMahon figured out how to handle Ditka, which is probably why only Mac won a Super Bowl. “T-Czak, T-Czak, I always told you how to deal with Ditka,” McMahon said, laughing. “You just look him in the eye and say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ If you did that, he’d leave you alone.” McMahon was a goof, a talented flake who simply did not take it to heart when the coach blew up.
He’s just Sybilizing
. He let even the titanic rages flow around him, leaving his inner quarterback compass untouched. Ditka called a play, Mac changed it, the Bears scored, Ditka went nuts. “He was the perfect quarterback for that team,” Danny White told me. “First of all, when they needed a big play, he’d come through. He could throw down the field and had a hell-bent-for-leather approach that matched the team. But it was his temperament that was crucial. McMahon was the only quarterback who could put up with Mike Ditka. He would not let it get to him. Because McMahon was just as crazy as his coach.”

*   *   *

Ditka met Halas once a week, master and protégé lingering in the fading light of a December afternoon. Prospects, plays. Till the very end, the old man had ideas. The body fails, but the brain keeps churning out solutions. In Ditka’s first game as head coach, the Bears were on the Detroit 1-yard line with seconds left. They had two chances to get into the end zone for a tie, handed off both times, and failed. When Ditka got to his office the next morning, there was an old playbook sent over by Halas. It was opened to the QB sneak. From then on, that’s what Ditka called whenever he got near the goal line.

Though he was an old man by then, Halas still took time to mentor select members of the team. He was a teacher at heart, which is why he took so long to leave the sideline and what made it so hard when he did. “I stopped in after a game when the offices were downtown,” Plank told me. “I had a visit with [general manager] Jim Finks. George Halas stuck his head in and said, ‘Doug, I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes if you have time.’ So after I got done with Finks, I sat with Mr. Halas. He started talking about general things, what was happening on the team, then went into our most recent game. I was amazed by the detailed nature of his knowledge about each play. He picked up key things, crucial things, I’d missed. He’d say, ‘Doug, on that long pass, their second possession in the third, I noticed that you started about twenty feet off the hash mark. But if you cheat a little, move five or ten steps closer to center, I think you’ll get a helpful jump. Also, Doug, I thought you could have been wider on that punt return; it would have given you a better angle at the block.’”

“After one practice, a bunch of us were just sitting around Mr. Halas,” Fencik said. “He was showing us how to hold a football so you wouldn’t fumble. He asked for a ball, put his index finger over the point, and said, ‘Here’s the way!’ It was such a perfect detail. You weren’t really expecting it out of the owner of the team.”

Mike Singletary: “I remember one day, after a miserable game, Halas just roared at our offense: ‘This is football. Hold on to the fucking thing!’”

“The game had passed him by,” said Avellini. “Is it sacrilegious to say that? One time he called me on a Friday and I’m in bed and everything, and he says, ‘This is Coach Halas.’ I said, ‘Yeah, right,’ thinking it’s one of my friends. ‘No, this is Coach Halas.’ ‘Okay, Coach, what’s up?’ He said, ‘I want you to run this play.’ Well, his play was something out of the 1940s. I’m sure you’ve seen it on film—in black and white, never in color. You take the ball and toss it backward to a guy like Gale Sayers and he just outruns the defense. But we were playing the Cowboys that week and I said, ‘Boy, Coach, I don’t know. Too Tall Jones could catch that ball in the air his arms are so long.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘just run the play.’ The result was Walter Payton having the most unbelievable run for a two-yard loss I’ve ever seen.

“I went to his apartment in the city,” Avellini went on. “If you’re from Chicago, you’d know it. A pink building around the 5600 block North, off Lake Shore Drive. It was one of these old buildings. I go up, and there’s Halas sitting with Sid Luckman. And Sid starts telling me how to throw the ball. He says, ‘You gotta throw it from your shoulder.’ I said, ‘Mr. Luckman, if I do that, I’m going to hit these guys in the head. I got to release the ball higher.’ And the old man says, ‘What do you know? You’re a rookie. This is Sid Luckman!’”

“He came to our meeting room one day in my sixth or seventh year,” Plank told me. “This was in Lake Forest, and he said, ‘I’d like to talk to the team, share a few memories.’ He then gave one of the most detailed breakdowns of the game I’ve ever heard any coach give. He goes to the blackboard, draws the field, [then divides it into sections]. He points with the chalk, saying, ‘This is the red zone, this is the blue zone, this is the white zone.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard the term ‘red zone.’ Think about how often ‘red zone’ is used today! He tells us what you do in each area. These are the plays you call, this is the strategy that works, here’s how many yards you need per attempt. He backed it all up with an incredible breakdown of statistics. Here was a man who founded the league, who excelled as a player, a coach, and an owner, and he was sharing this knowledge with us. Come on! You’ve got to be kidding me.”

*   *   *

In the spring of 1982, Halas was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He hadn’t felt right for a long time. Knowing the name and prognosis of the disease—six months, a year—pushed him downhill. Patrick McCaskey realized his grandfather was near the end when, after his eighty-eighth birthday, he suddenly stopped swearing. He never again said a bad word about anyone. No more cocksuckers, no more motherfuckers, no more pop-off artists. A profane voice had retired from the scene. He stopped drinking, he stopped yelling. He was in and out of the hospital, where he sat, propped on pillows, meeting friends and coaches. “I went to the hospital all the time,” Ditka said. “He was very lucid. He asked about the draft and about the players. I told him he would like [Jimbo] Covert because he was just like Joe Stydahar. He would smile and say, ‘That’s good.’” A few months before he died, Halas sent Ditka a bottle of Dom Perignon with a note: “Mike, don’t open it till you win the Super Bowl.”

Virginia and Ed McCaskey wanted the team to be run by their oldest child, Michael. “Halas, who thought his grandson lacked the toughness to run the club, rebuffed them,” Jeff Davis wrote in
Papa Bear.
“As unfair as it may have been to Michael, in many ways the eldest grandson paid the price for his grandfather’s enmity toward the senior McCaskey.” The story turned monarchical, Tudors and Romanoffs, words whispered outside the room of the dying king. According to Davis, Halas spoke these words shortly before he died: “Anybody but Michael.”

George Halas died on October 31, 1983, Halloween, the streets filled with goblins. At the time of his death, the franchise, which he had purchased for $100, was worth millions. It passed to his daughter, who’s watched its value grow and grow. Virginia Halas McCaskey’s net worth is currently estimated at $1.3 billion. The
Sun-Times
ran the old man’s obituary under the sort of banner usually reserved for declarations of war. Here’s the lead: “George Halas is dead, they say. But he can’t be. The Old Man is too tough to die.” The funeral was held at St. Ita’s on the North Side. There were twelve hundred mourners; storied figures from every era of football filled the pews: Pete Rozelle, Wellington Mara, Art Rooney, George McAfee, Gale Sayers, Tex Schramm, Lamar Hunt, Gene Upshaw. Sid Luckman was a pallbearer; he rested his hand on the lacquered wood. Halas had many sons, but, after Mugs, Sid was the most beloved, the Brooklyn boy who returned, like a dog with the kill, with title after title in his teeth. “I have vivid memories of the service,” Fencik told me. “The whole team went down on the bus. Everybody came from the NFL. The last guy in was Al Davis, the owner of the Raiders. He was in a black leather trench coat. It was very gestapo. He and Halas had fought like mad over the years, yet here he was, paying his respects.”

*   *   *

Virginia Halas McCaskey made the announcement eleven days after the funeral: Michael would be the new president of the Bears. Mike McCaskey, who, at thirty-three, was nearly as young as some of his players; Mike McCaskey, a preppy, the product of Notre Dame High School and Yale; Mike McCaskey, once a member of the Harvard faculty and the author of a book on management; Mike McCaskey, a consultant who’d studied the art of corporate warfare; Mike McCaskey, who seemed to have everything but the one thing that mattered: the old zipperoo. He was, in fact, a fascinating, even brilliant man. Once upon a time, he wanted to be a priest. He served in the Peace Corps after college, teaching science and English in Ethiopia. But he was erudite and refined in a way that set him apart in the hypercharged world of the NFL. Despite the team’s success in McCaskey’s first years at the helm, he would never be truly accepted by the players. In his relationship with his grandfather, McCaskey stands for my generation in our relationship to the tough old America: we inherited a country we did not build.