Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (21 page)

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As Halas sickened, Ditka, along with Jim Finks, Bill Tobin, and Jerry Vainisi, assembled the pieces of what would become the 1985 Bears. It was done via trades and the draft, the players appearing one after another, each taking a turn on the screen, smiling or sneering as a narrator fills in the backstory: this one because he can shoot the whiskers off a mule; that one because he can throw the blade.

Dan Hampton, six five, 264 pounds, a monster who could kill you with a single halfhearted blow, was drafted in 1979: the anchor of the defensive line, the thumping bass that made everything rock. In twelve seasons, he would break every finger and destroy every joint. He had at least a dozen knee operations. I worked out at the same gym and once saw him with his leg on a massage table, stretching. Sweat beaded his hairline, there was agony in his unfocused eyes, but you knew he’d be back out there on Sunday.

Otis Wilson, a linebacker from Brownsville, Brooklyn, was drafted in 1980, as was Matt Suhey, a fullback from Penn State. Suhey’s grandfather played for the Canton Bulldogs against Halas in the industrial days of the NFL. Keith Van Horne, a key on the offensive line, was drafted in 1981, as was Singletary. He showed up late to camp his rookie season, part of a negotiating strategy. Singletary was of mixed parentage: African American and part Cherokee Indian. His features have an almost Asian cast. Buddy Ryan was all over him that first summer, running him, breaking him, calling him “the fat Jap.” “You’re nothing, 50,” he’d shout. Singletary was known around the league for his grunts and curses, the intensity of his eyes. (When I asked former Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski about the ’85 Bears, he said, “I still see Singletary’s eyes.”) Plank gave Singletary his nickname. It happened on the sideline, when Buddy asked the safety why he hadn’t run the play he sent in with Singletary.
’Cause I couldn’t understand a word he said. That guy sounds like a fuckin’ samurai.

Jim McMahon was Chicago’s top selection in 1982. The Bears had not used a first-round pick to take a quarterback since 1951, but Mac was special. Ditka saw in him the leader of the Bears as Terry Bradshaw had been the leader of the Steelers. He was small for a QB, his arm was questionable, and he had a bad eye, but he knew how to win. Ditka was always less interested in where a prospect ranked than in what he had inside. In McMahon’s junior year at Brigham Young, he led the Cougars to one of the great comebacks. It was at the Holiday Bowl in 1980. BYU was down 42–25 with four minutes left. Fans were streaming from the gates. McMahon got into a shouting match with his coach, who threw up his hands, turning the game over to the QB, who somehow, just like that, led the team to two quick touchdowns, then, with time running out, beat SMU with one of those high, arching Hail Marys that is everywhere a sign of desperation. It’s still known as the Miracle Bowl.

Ditka and Finks supplemented their draft picks with trades and free agent pickups. Gary Fencik was invited to camp after being released by the Dolphins in 1976. Emery Moorehead came over from Denver in 1981. Steve McMichael was signed after the Patriots cut him. “[The general manager in New England] called me into his office and said, ‘McMichael, do you know why we’re cutting you?’” McMichael remembered. “‘’Cause we think you’re the criminal element in this league.’ Thank God an old criminal in Chicago was still alive. When I met Halas, he said, ‘We want you to be the person you are.’”

And what sort of person was Steve McMichael?

Big and scary. Fat now but made of iron then, a screw-loose sort of guy you approach with extreme caution. They called him Mongo after the Alex Karras character in
Blazing Saddles
. They also called him Ming the Merciless after a Flash Gordon villain. He was a bruising, durable defensive tackle who often led the rush on the quarterback. He would make over a hundred consecutive starts for the Bears. It usually took two linemen to stop him. He never seemed to be having anything less than a fantastic time. When McMichael first came to the Bears, Hampton picked him up at O’Hare. He had a single piece of luggage, a burnt orange garment bag emblazoned with a University of Texas logo—that’s where Mongo grew up, where he played college ball and studied to be a dentist.

The early days in Chicago were a struggle. He made little money. One afternoon, when he was on the practice field, his car was repossessed from the parking lot. He wore his helmet high, his fists were bloody. He did not win all the awards, but the players in the league feared him. Not long ago, McMichael told Chicago interviewer Mark Bazer that he’d been playing a role in those years, a character named Mongo. “I’d go stand at the fifty-yard line and stare at the other team before the game,” he explained. “I wouldn’t warm up with the guys. I would just stand and stare. Wade Wilson, a quarterback from that time, looked me up at a convention. The first thing he said was, ‘Steve, do you remember me?’ I said, ‘I remember you, quarterback. I’m like a vicious predator on the Serengeti. I remember all the wounded gazelles.’”

Drafting is an art. Those with the genius are able to discern not only who is good but who will be good. It’s soothsaying, intuition. An acceptable draft might yield a player or two who stick. A great one might bring in two or three long-term starters. But now and then, a team will hit the daily double. In 1983, the Bears drafted seven starters, including four future All-Pros: Jimbo Covert, a guard from western Pennsylvania; Willie Gault, an Olympic sprinter who became the Bears’ deep threat; Mike Richardson, a cornerback from East Los Angeles; Dave Duerson, who played safety; Tom Thayer, an offensive lineman from Joliet. In the eighth round, they took Richard Dent, a skinny defensive end with bad teeth. As part of Dent’s contract, the Bears agreed to pay for his orthodontia. He started gaining weight as soon as his teeth were fixed; it had always hurt him to eat. He put on fifty pounds in two months. He’s now in the Hall of Fame. Mark Bortz, also taken in the eighth round, started for eleven seasons in Chicago.

When I asked Bill Tobin what explained this success, he said, “Well, we looked for character. Character is huge. It’s a saying we had: When in doubt, bet on character. That’s why we ended up with the Leslie Fraziers and Jeff Fishers and Ron Riveras and Mike Singletarys. When your best players are also your best people, you got a lot going for you. We had some ornery kids but we didn’t have any bums.”

“It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Ditka told me. “You’ve got to get those missing pieces. We needed a quarterback, we drafted McMahon. We needed a left tackle, we got Covert. We needed a speed receiver, we got Gault. We already had Singletary, Otis, Fencik. We got Duerson and Richardson for the secondary. We had Hilgenberg and Van Horne. We got Thayer. We had Suhey and Payton. We didn’t have any tight ends, so we brought in Emery Moorehead.”

In 1984, the Bears used their first pick on linebacker Wilber Marshall, perhaps the best athlete on the team. In 1985, they took William Perry, a huge, gap-toothed tackle from Clemson. Perry was 220 pounds in seventh grade, 13.5 pounds at birth. “I was big even when I was small,” he said. After collapsing during an early practice, Perry was placed in a dehydration tank. “He’s just a big overweight kid,” Buddy Ryan told the press. “He was a wasted draft choice and a waste of money.”

“I thought he was one of the most dominant college players I watched,” said Ditka. “He could dunk a basketball. He had a great vertical leap. He had great explosion. He was fast for twenty or thirty yards. He had no endurance to run a mile, but he could do those other things pretty damn well.”

Perry was listed at 310 pounds, but when defensive tackle Dan Hampton saw him at camp he laughed and said, “That kid’s a biscuit away from 350.” This explains Perry’s first nickname on the team: Biscuit. His second was also credited to Hampton, who, seeing Perry without a shirt, said “It looks like a mudslide.” But the nickname that stuck had been given to him in college by a teammate who, feeling trapped when Perry squeezed into an elevator behind him, said, “My God, he’s like a refrigerator.”

10

THE FRIDGE

William “Refrigerator” Perry spiking the ball during Super Bowl XX

In 1983, I made out with Christine Conner on the grass behind North School. In the summer of 1978, I canoed the rivers of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That August, I walked through Charlevoix from the hardware store to the lake in bare feet, eating an ice cream cone. In 1981, I set the high score on Defender at Big Al’s in Glencoe. In 1990, I drove all night from New Orleans to a town in South Carolina, where I ate bacon and eggs and slept on the beach. In 2005, my oldest son was born. In 1977, my tickets to Bozo’s Circus arrived in the mail. On July 30, 1975, I saw a cool big-kid bike parked in front of my house. When I asked who owned it, my mom said, “You!” It was my birthday. In 1983, in Eagle River, Wisconsin, I threw a wild punch that connected, felling a bully who’d been terrorizing the kids at my camp. For several weeks, I was regarded as a hero. In 1988, I dated a girl many of my friends considered out of my league. Each of these is a wonderful memory, a treasured moment in time. But looking back, it’s clear that none of them stands up to the collection of memories that accumulated from the fall of 1985 to the winter of 1986, when the Chicago Bears came into their own.

The team had been getting better every year. They went 8 and 8 in 1983 but finished with five wins in six games. So bad a few seasons before, they were rising quickly through the ranks. They went 10 and 6 in 1984, winning the division—their best showing since 1963, when Ditka led them to an NFL Championship. The Bears had died after Iron Mike left, and with Iron Mike they were being reborn.

The team made the playoffs that year, but no one expected much from them. In the first round, they faced the Redskins, who were favored. The Bears were minus McMahon, who had lacerated his kidney in the fifth week of the season. Without Mac, the offense resorted to its old playbook: Walter right, Walter left, Walter up the middle. He ran for 104 yards. The crucial score came on a trick play that Ditka probably thought up in the shower: quarterback Steve Fuller pitched to Payton, who cavorted down the line, turned, and threw a wobbly pass for a touchdown. Chicago, 23–19.

As the Bears turned their attention to the NFC Championship, everyone in the city seemed to have the same realization: they could actually go to the Super Bowl! At the end of the week, the team went to San Francisco to play Bill Walsh’s 49ers, one of the great powers of the era. I watched on the kitchen TV, my hands balled into fists, waiting for the offensive release that never came. I was all knots inside. The defense kept the Bears in it long after the offense quit. Finally, in the third, worn out by all those minutes on the field, each brilliant stop made futile by another offensive failure, the defense broke. That’s sports: you have a hero, knowing that, at some point, you’ll see that hero fail. I sat by myself, tears streaming down my face as Fencik gave futile chase to a 49ers rusher who burst into the end zone as Candlestick Park exploded with noise. In the fourth quarter, the San Francisco fans seemed to be laughing at the Bears, mocking the team’s inability to do anything with the ball.

In the last seconds, Joe Montana handed off to a 264-pound offensive guard named Guy McIntyre, who lined up at fullback. Bill Walsh called it the “Angus formation.” To a fan, it might seem like another big man killing the clock. To Ditka it was a coded message sent sideline to sideline—the 49ers coach saying, “I don’t even need a real running back to beat you.” “I thought it was just Bill Walsh being a jagoff,” Hampton said. “But Ditka didn’t forget.”

For the Bears, the game ended in the best possible way other than victory: in taunts and curses, the sort of trash talk that burns. As Hampton and McMichael headed for the tunnel, the 49ers were shouting, “Next time, bring your offense.” The final score was 23–0. “I read the newspapers for a week after they beat us,” said McMahon, who stayed in San Francisco after the game. “I wanted to vomit. The whole idea they were putting across was that we didn’t belong on the same field with them.”

Payton cried in the locker room. Talking in that effeminate voice that broke your heart, he said, in essence, It took me ten years to get here; I’ll never get back. “Quit holding your head down,” Otis Wilson told him. “Next year, we’re not just gonna knock on the door, we’re gonna kick the damn door down.”

Winter went by. Spring came, then summer. A few days before training camp, Ditka got hold of Rick Telander, a legendary Chicago sportswriter—he is a hero of mine—who lived next to Halas Hall. A workman went up to Telander’s roof with a bucket of paint. In huge numerals, he wrote 23–0. Ditka wanted his players to see the score of the San Francisco game every day. The ’85 Super Bowl run was driven by the anger and shame of that loss. It was the response. “Next time, bring your offense.” The Bears were determined to make the 49ers and everyone else eat those words. It’s one reason it’s so hard to repeat: If you’re out to prove something, what drives you after you’ve done it?