Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (22 page)

The season began with a string of wins: the Bears concussed Tampa Bay, crushed New England, roughed up Minnesota, embarrassed Washington. A few games linger, live in the memory, defining contests. The first of these came in week six, when the Bears returned to San Francisco. In Chicago, it was hyped as a shot at revenge. McMahon was back, which would be the difference. That’s how it was: the defense dominated, but the team’s fortunes depended on the quarterback. When Mac played, the Bears almost always won. Ditka stood before the press that week, giving a typically pugnacious assessment of what had happened, what would happen, who had laughed, who would be laughing and from what side of his face: the other fucking side.
Last time we were the hit-ees; this time we intend to be the hit-ors.

There’s footage of McMahon examining the field a few hours before kickoff, in sweats and tennis shoes, or maybe flip-flops, or maybe his feet were bare, grass between his toes, walking the grounds as the Cheyenne Indian Chief Two Moons walked the riverbank in the sweltering dawn before the arrival of General Custer. (Asked how long it took to defeat the Seventh Cavalry, Two Moons said, “As long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.”) The Bears started with the kind of flashy drive they hadn’t been able to muster once in the previous encounter, Mac leading his team downfield one wounded duck at a time. Now and then, he would uncork a beauty, a classic old-school spiral. He was like a punk who could sit down and sing like Sinatra. Payton carried the ball into the end zone. In five minutes, the Bears had scored more points than they had scored in the entire ’84 NFC Championship game.

The Bears beat up San Francisco for the rest of that brief, satisfying afternoon. It went by like a dream. By this point, I was watching games—unless I could wangle a ticket—with my father on the twenty-two-inch Zenith in the family room. Sometimes friends came over, but usually it was just me and my old man, my personal Halas: me in full regalia, him in boots, jeans, and the cowboy hat he insisted identified him as a High Plains Drifter. “Billy the Kid, he was from Brooklyn, too.” Like Ditka, my father is a man of slogans. If Sweetness executed a particularly miraculous fake, he’d say, “The key to walking on water is knowing where the stones are.” If an opposing coach seemed to have no answer to the Bears, he’d say, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” If the camera zoomed on Michael McCaskey in the owner’s box, he’d say, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.”

Despite his instincts, my father had come around to the Bears, slowly at first, then with enthusiasm. By late September, he was committed. When I asked how a person could change his opinion so radically, he reminded me that he wore two watches, one on each wrist, because “a man with one watch believes he knows the time, but a man with two watches can never be sure.”

My father loved Ditka, McMahon, the defense—all of it. When Wilson, Marshall, and Dent crowded the line, then, at Singletary’s direction, began to swarm, he’d say, “Here they come!” A lot of these games had the feel of a heavyweight fight. When I spoke to Wilson, he compared the ’85 Bears to Mike Tyson—the young fighter in plain black shorts, a killer from Brownsville, Brooklyn, waiting, probing, locking in, then ending it with a blow. As a Bears fan, you knew it was only a matter of time: it might come in the first quarter, or it might happen late, but the blow that broke the other team would come. When it did, my father would light his cigar, the flame dancing before his eyes, then, through a cloud of smoke, say, “The Buccaneers are in big trouble,” or “The Packers are in big trouble,” or “The 49ers are in big trouble.”

The Bears were winning 16–10 at the half, but it was never much of a contest. From the first quarter, Chicago had the game in hand. At one point, when Payton executed “the Utah draw,” a beautiful shovel pass of a play, the announcer said, “What a contrast in coaching. The rough-and-tumble Mike Ditka, against a
perhaps
more sophisticated Bill Walsh.”
Perhaps
was the qualifier that saved the announcer from calling Ditka a savage. The Bears sealed it with a characteristic drive: slow, plodding, clock consuming. If you want to defeat Joe Montana, keep him on the bench. Payton rushed for over a hundred yards, but, late in the game, when Ditka was running out the clock, it was not Sweetness who got the ball. It was William Perry, the massive defensive tackle known as the Fridge. Buddy Ryan hadn’t been using him on defense—Buddy called Perry a wasted pick—so Ditka brought him over to the other side. “I’ve got to break him in somewhere,” Ditka said.

It’s startling to see such a big man lined up at fullback. He seems miscast, in the wrong costume, on the wrong stage. “Here comes William Perry waddling onto the field and into our huddle,” McMahon wrote. “‘Gimme da damn ball,’ he said, all hyper. Most of our linemen thought it was a joke, until they realized they’d have to block for this 325-pound mountain. They were afraid he would run right up their backs and crush them to death.” Perry carried twice, picking up close to zero yards, which was not the point. “They ran a big, fat offensive lineman against us last year,” Hampton said. “We thought we’d run a big, fat defensive lineman against them this year.”

Those first feeble runs made William Perry a star, first in Chicago, then in the country, then in the world. It’s hard to believe it happened. The Fridge T-shirts and the Fridge hats, the Fridge memorabilia, the Fridge commercials, the Fridge dance, and the big-boned cheerleaders who called themselves Fridgettes. For some, mention of the ’85 Bears brings just this image to mind: Fridge, ripples of fat, gap-toothed smile, big cheeks, and size-22 cleats, maniacally dancing in the end zone of a poor sacked city. “It was revenge for me,” Ditka said. “Yeah, I’ll admit it. A little bit. Maybe a lot. Even though my first thought about using Fridge back there was, This big fellow can really block. I’d watch him in sprints in practice, and for the first five yards or so there was all this dirt flying up from under his shoes. Looked like a rototiller. I didn’t like it when they used McIntyre in the backfield against us, that’s for sure. So here’s a response.”

The Ditka paradox: having experienced Bill Walsh’s use of the Angus formation as an insult, he responded with the Fridge. Even Don Corleone would call that justice. But then, having taken revenge on Walsh, Ditka continued to use the Fridge in the backfield against teams that had done him no wrong. The Packers. The Patriots. He deployed the Fridge as a blocker for Payton, as a fullback, even as a receiver. In doing so, Ditka was taunting other coaches in the exact way he had been taunted. Of course, by that time, the Fridge had become a phenomenon. At the end of games, fans would chant his name until Ditka probably felt he had no choice but to send him in. As any reader of science fiction can tell you, sooner or later the mad doctor loses control of his creation. When challenged by reporters who considered the Fridge a circus act, Ditka said, “Think about it. How could
you
stop a man that size coming directly at you?… Call it a sideshow,” he added. “I call it beating their ass.”

But the big story was the Bears defense, which had emerged as the most devastating force in football. “You describe it—please,” Walsh told a reporter. “Use any adjective you want. I’ll say it was intense and ferocious. They gave us a good, sound beating.”

Amid the postgame mayhem, Ditka went on Chicago TV and told the city that he planned to celebrate on the flight home. He had purchased a case of wine on a trip to Napa Valley. Iron Mike tasting zinfandels and pinot noirs in wine country, swirling and spitting, closing his eyes, searching for that hint of raspberry, is an image worth swirling in your own mind. Ditka had promised to share the wine with his players if they won, but the booze never made it to the main cabin—Ditka sat in first class with McCaskey, while most of the team sat in coach.

How much wine did Ditka drink?

How many bottles are in a case?

“We were at 40,000 feet,” Ditka wrote. “I was drinking white wine. If a lot is two bottles, then I had more than a lot.”

Back in Chicago, several players noticed their coach’s stumbling walk as he made his way to the parking lot. A few offered to drive him home, but Ditka just mumbled—
Angus, Fridge, Fucking Genius—
before roaring off in his car. “He damn near ran over a couple of guys,” McMahon wrote. “Ditka was all over the road.”

The players Ditka passed coming out of the lot saw him again a few minutes later: handcuffed on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops, party lights flashing. Having seen the coach boast on TV, an industrious patrolman set up just outside the airport. “When we caught up to where he’d been nailed, we saw his car on the side with a police chaser,” wrote McMahon. “Nobody pulled over. We just honked our horns and drove on.”

“I celebrated too much,” Ditka said. “I was arrested and later convicted of drunk driving. It was the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen to me. I was stopped on I-294 shortly after leaving O’Hare. I was driving home. The officer handcuffed me and I didn’t think that was necessary.”

Copies of the ticket, which Ditka had been required to sign that night, made their way around Chicagoland. Someone showed me one at school. The violation was described, the time of arrest (12:14 a.m.), the name of the arresting officer. There was Ditka’s drunken signature, all loops and bravado. Beneath it, in a section set aside for “comments,” in letters that actually seemed to slur, he’d written, “Fuck you Jack.” Ditka lost his license for six months and was required to take classes. As a fan, you wanted more than a legal resolution; you wanted a moral. What can it tell us? What does it mean? Perhaps it’s the other side of all that exuberance, the price paid by the high-intensity boy; perhaps it’s the comeuppance of a prideful man, the inevitable result of the fatal flaw that Ditka shared with Odysseus, whom we were studying in English: pride. Perhaps it was the reappearance of the devil that had ridden Iron Mike since his earliest days in the game, the beast that caused him to pop off about Halas. In the end, it seemed like just another part of the drama, another act in the circus: “Call it a sideshow. I call it beating their ass.”

*   *   *

In week eleven, the team traveled to Dallas to play the Cowboys. This game was important on two levels. First, there was the hatred every Bears fan had for the Cowboys. We believed it was the culture of the team we hated: the Cowboys cheerleaders with their white go-go boots, their posters, and their appearance on
The Love Boat
; the Cowboys coach, stern and emotionless in his fedora; the holier-than-thou Cowboys’ prayer circle; how Dallas had been anointed “America’s Team.” But it was really their excellence we could not stand, the machinelike perfection that returned them to the playoffs season after season. Then there was Ditka’s relationship with Landry. As a coach, Ditka was the child of Landry. He learned from Landry, loved Landry. Ditka was thus returning to the house of his father, not with small talk and pastries but an army of brutes determined to trash the joint, wipe their bloody paws on the drapes. It gave the encounter a Freudian charge, the sting of patricide.

For a Bears fan, a thrashing of the Cowboys could justify an entire season. You can have the playoffs and you can have the Super Bowl and you can have the Fridge and the State Street parade—just leave me that Sunday afternoon in Dallas.

Before the game, Everson Walls, a Cowboys cornerback, shouted at Hampton, “You guys might be 10 and 0, but you haven’t played anyone yet.”

Describing the game is difficult in the way it’s difficult to describe a hurricane: the devastation was everywhere, all at once. The signature play came early—in the first quarter—though “signature” might be too decorous a word to describe what happened. It was more like a knockout punch, a blow that broke the will of a willful team. It was near the Cowboys’ end zone, where much of that game was played. Dallas was like a man with his back to the sea. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but fight and die. Danny White, the Dallas quarterback, took the snap and dropped into his own end zone. Then, before he even had a chance to look downfield and find his receivers, he was surrounded, overwhelmed, on the floor of a collapsing house. McMichael, Singletary, and Fencik flying in from safety. White stumbled and threw, just to get rid of the thing, just to unload the dingus. Hampton reached up one of those meaty hands, blood, tape, and busted fingers, and batted the ball, which wobbled like a struck bird. It was up there for a long time. Richard Dent grabbed it and busted into the end zone. Touchdown. First score of the game, and the first touchdown of Dent’s career.

Football is the ultimate team sport. If Hampton does not reach the ball, Dent does not make the play. And it was a career of such plays that put Dent in the Hall of Fame. Dent is there because he was great, but also because he played beside Hampton, who is himself in the Hall of Fame because he played beside Singletary, who is in the Hall of Fame because he played beside McMichael and Wilson and Marshall and Fencik, who will never be properly recognized because there are already too many Bears in the Hall of Fame.

The camera zoomed in on Ditka. It was only later, after the Bears visited England, that he began wearing that Savile Row crap; this was still Ditka as Ditka, an angry man trying to prove himself to all the pop-off artists. He wore the same basic outfit every game: coach pants—possibly rayon, possibly polyester—coach shoes, white like a nurse’s sneaker, a blue oxford shirt beneath a Bears sweater-vest. After big plays, Ditka showed minimal emotion. When things went wrong, that’s when he exploded. He just nodded and spit when things went right. He probably spit in the dirt after big plays in Aliquippa, too. I know he did the same when he played at Wrigley. Spitting in the dirt after driving in the stake is a bit of code as old as the schoolyard.

From there, every step for Dallas was a step down. You could see the shoulders of their linemen sag, heads low in the huddle. The pupils of Danny White’s eyes turned into asterisks. He was looking everywhere, focusing on nothing. He was sacked as soon as Dallas got the ball back. Otis Wilson coming from the blind side. White lay there for a long time, like a raised seal on the Texas turf. The Bears were relentless, blitzing again and again. In the course of the afternoon, the 46 defense revealed itself as something terrifying and new. “The images were shocking,” Ron Jaworski wrote. “My study of the game feels more like an autopsy than a film breakdown: that’s how violent Chicago’s performance was. Seen 25 years later, it’s still frightening.”