Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (23 page)

“By the middle of the first quarter, my only thought was—it’s the only time I ever thought like this—get the ball out of my hands as fast as I can,” White told me. “Whether I threw it away or handed it off, I just wanted to get rid of it.”

White was knocked out in the second quarter. Otis again—it was probably the best game of his career. He caught White in the act of throwing. When the camera moved close, you could see that White’s eyes were closed, his face as relaxed as that of a sleeping child. As Buddy Ryan liked to say, “It’s time to open a new can of quarterback.”

Gary Hogeboom, a twenty-seven-year-old QB from central Michigan, came in for Dallas, but it didn’t get any better. The Cowboys’ offensive line had broken. The Bears came like water through a sieve. “Those poor Dallas quarterbacks didn’t know whether to shit or go blind,” Ditka said. “I can still see their backup Gary Hogeboom, when he was already on his way to the turf, and Singletary hit him so hard before he could reach the ground that I thought Mike had killed him.”

Danny White came back for the second half. When I asked why he did this, he laughed and said, “Good question. I guess my ego got the best of me, pride or something. I wasn’t going to let them knock me out and just sit over there watching this massacre. It was like watching your kids getting beaten up by somebody and just sitting there. These were my teammates and I was the guy they were counting on.”

The second knockout came in the third quarter. Otis again, number 55, driving his helmet into White’s spine. He went down in sections, folding like a card table. “He pinned my head into my chest,” White said. “I thought I broke my neck. I remember the relief when I moved my head and realized it was still attached.”

“For years, people in Texas would say Danny White is a terrible driver,” Wilson told me, “’cause he flinches every time he sees the number 55.”

“The Bears beat people up,” said Jim Brown. “Most defenses in the NFL have maybe five hitters … The ’85 Bears had eleven hitters on defense. The pressure they exerted was severe. Forget about the quarterbacks having time to pass—the runners couldn’t even get started.”

Coaches had begun to accuse the Bears of putting bounties on quarterbacks: take out Danny White, get ten thousand; take out Joe Montana, get thirty. Buddy Ryan just seemed too certain when he said, “We’re gonna get to know their second-string quarterback.” When I asked Bears linebacker Jim Morrissey, he said, “Nah, we did it for free. Who doesn’t want to go after the quarterback? It’s why we loved interceptions. It’s the one time you can take a free, legitimate, big-time shot at the quarterback. Buddy talked about it religiously. When we intercept, the first thing you do is go find that quarterback.” By the fourth, the game had become an embarrassment. Ditka took out his starters. He didn’t want to run up the score on Landry. But Buddy kept his in—what’s more, he was still blitzing, going for the kill. Ditka asked Buddy to “call off the dogs.”

“Fuck off,” Buddy told him. “It’s my defense, Ditka.”

“Dad never could stand Dallas,” Buddy’s son Rex said recently. (Rex Ryan is the head coach of the Jets.) “He wanted a beat-down. He wanted to kick their ass.”

Ditka: “What was it, 44–0 or something? And we’re still blitzing at the end of the game? That makes a lot of sense. I had to tell [Buddy], ‘Quit blitzing, what the hell you gonna accomplish? You knocked out two quarterbacks.’ I mean, it’s crazy. And that game was embarrassing to me because there’s no man in football I had more respect for than Coach Landry. It was just our time. We were a better team than them, period. Let it go at that.”

As Dallas fans streamed out of Texas Stadium, Wilson and Marshall started barking on the sidelines. John Madden, calling the game for CBS, said, “My God, they’re barking like dogs down there.”

The final score was, in fact, 44–0. It was the first time the Cowboys had been shut out in fifteen years. On the way off the field, Ditka shook Landry’s hand and said he was sorry. “Don’t be,” Landry told him. “You have a heck of a football team.”

“I felt good, but I also felt bad,” said Ditka. “Here we were, doing what we could only dream of doing. And yet it was the worst thing. We had our picture taken before the game, Coach Landry and me, with our arms around each other. This was the guy I’d learned everything from.”

Hampton found Everson Walls after the game, the cornerback who’d said, “You guys haven’t played anyone yet.” “And you know what,” said Hampton, “we still haven’t.”

On CBS, as the camera sweeps the stands in a final goodbye, a fan holds a sign that says
CHICAGO BEARS: YOU LOOK MAHVELOUS!

11

A RACE TO THE QUARTERBACK

Linebackers Otis Wilson (55) and Wilber Marshall (58) closing in on Dallas quarterback Danny White. November 11, 1985

Of all the ’85 Bears, I was probably most excited to interview Gary Fencik. If anyone could explain the team, I figured it would be him. Here was a man of two worlds: the world of the suburbs, a public school world of penny loafers and paisley, and the hyperviolent world of the NFL. Fencik seemed like a kind of undercover agent, a medium-size man in a big man’s game. He attended Barrington High School; his father was an assistant principal. He graduated from Yale and got an MBA at Northwestern. He’s spent his post-football life in private equity, in the exact kind of job occupied by every kid I knew growing up. He lives in Lincoln Park, in the exact kind of apartment where I might live if I lived in Chicago. He looks like the guys I grew up with, too. Ditka is a bear with ruined hips. Otis is a killer in a tracksuit. Plank has titanium shoulders. Dent is broken-down and walks like John Wayne in
The Searchers.
But Fencik is a regular guy, handsome, with dark hair and a bent nose. He’s you raised to the highest power, a kid who wished the same wish, only his came true.

Size has a lot to do with it. The dimensions of professional football players set them apart, mark them as a distinct species. Hampton was six five, 264 pounds when he played. McMichael was six two, 270. Dent was six five, 265. Today’s players are still bigger. In some cases, much bigger. You cannot imagine yourself playing in their game. You’d have to be nuts. But when I met Fencik for brunch, I was gratified to see that, depending on my shoes, he and I were roughly the same class. The Bears listed him at six feet, 194 pounds, but I’d put him closer to five eleven. Nor was he terribly fast when he played. Fencik was, in fact, an average-size American who had a talent for making big hits—he sped up when a normal person would slow down. “Deluding yourself, that’s the trick,” he told me. “You have to work yourself up into such a state that you forget just how much bigger than you some of these guys are.”

“And that worked?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, but not all the time,” he said, laughing.

He thought for a moment, remembering. “One night, after a game, I met up with Dan [Hampton] and Steve [McMichael],” he said. “They were hours ahead in terms of relaxing. After I had a couple beers trying to catch up, maybe a couple too many, I told Dan, ‘I bet, if I were as big as you, I could whip your ass.’ It made him crazy. He picked me up like a two-by-four and lifted me over his head and started shouting, ‘But you’re not as big as me! You’re not, you’re not!’ He threw me down onto the floor. It really hurt. Then McMichael picked me up and cradled me and said, ‘Hey, Hamp, be careful, you’re going to hurt the little fella.’ That’s when you realize, these guys—well, they’re great, but they’re also very strong. I had some big friends.”

Fencik was the hiker who had fallen in among grizzlies, the fan who’d gone through the looking glass but would always remain a fan. He rooted for the Bears as a boy, reading up on Butkus and Sayers, filled with Super Bowl dreams. He was a good player in high school, “not great,” he said, “but I got better at every level. We had a good junior team at Barrington. The quarterback went to Arizona State, the wide receiver ended up at Minnesota. I got recruited simply because I was in film with those guys—it’s the only reason college coaches happened to see me.”

Fencik visited Yale in the spring of 1972. The white stone, the ivy—he fell hard. “There was just something about Yale that went beyond football,” he told me. “I wandered around and looked at everything and thought, Oh boy, I really want this experience!” He played both ways freshman year, a receiver on offense, a safety on defense. Junior year, Coach Carm Cozza limited him to offense. “I had the longest reception in Yale history,” he told me. “We ran a halfback option against Princeton from the one and I went ninety-nine yards for a touchdown.” He was drafted by Miami in the tenth round in 1976, “the only team that had gone back and seen film of me playing defense. They said, ‘Look, you have no chance of playing receiver in the NFL, but you could possibly make it as a defensive back.’”

In those days, a draftee would sign that first contract as soon as it arrived in the mail and not think about it again until a year or so later, when he realized he’d been screwed. But Fencik happened to be taking a class taught by Howard Cosell. I mention this partly to give a sense of the distance between Fencik’s college experience and that of, say, Payton, who attended Jackson State. “It was a seminar with twelve students,” Fencik said. “Every week Howard would come in with someone from sports. We had Pete Rozelle address us. We had Bob Wood, the president of CBS. We had Bob Woolf, who’s considered one of the first great sports agents. He represented Larry Bird. On draft day, Howard invited me to New York. The Giants had just signed Larry Csonka and I remember walking in Manhattan with Cosell, Csonka, and Csonka’s agent. I had dinner with Howard and his wife, then Howard had a car take me back to New Haven. When I got the Dolphins contract, I asked Howard what to do. He said, ‘I’ll have Bob Woolf take a look.’ Bob made a few fixes, gave it back, and said, ‘Now it’s fair.’

“I was excited to be going to the Dolphins,” Fencik continued. “They were just a few years off their undefeated season. Bob Griese was the quarterback, Mercury Morris was the halfback. They had the great ‘No-Name Defense.’ I worked like a dog in training camp. I ruptured my lung the first month—broke a rib, which popped the thing. They didn’t tell me about that rib in Miami. I only found out when I was with the Bears. I got hurt during a drill and went to the locker room for X-rays. The doctor asks, ‘When did you break your rib?’ I go, ‘Never.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you busted a rib in the last couple of months.’”

Miami cut Fencik in the last weeks of preseason. You think the final roster has been chosen, that last bullet dodged, then get a tap on the shoulder:
Coach Shula wants to see you, and bring your playbook.
(In football, the playbook is like the briefcase with the nuclear codes; it must never fall into the wrong hands.) Miami had traded for a veteran safety, making Fencik redundant. Shula later described the release as among the worst decisions of his career.

Jerry Vainisi contacted Fencik and asked if he wanted to come by Halas Hall and try out. The Bears were always looking for hometown prospects, players fans could identify with. “I was on my way to become a baby banker in the Citibank management training program in New York when they called,” Fencik said. “I was going home to see my parents anyway, so I figured, what the hell, and went for a one-day tryout. The next thing I know, I’m sitting with Jim Finks and he’s welcoming me to the team. My God, after all those afternoons in Wrigley Field, I was a Bear! When Finks flipped through my Miami contract, which the Bears had to honor, he was perplexed. He said, ‘No rookie gets all [these guarantees]. Who the hell did this for you?’”

Fencik appeared in thirteen games his first year, mostly on special teams. By his second, he was a starter. He played safety beside Plank, who trained the Yalie in the school of big hits. They came to seem a perfect pairing, a duo in the way of Captain & Tennille. (Plank told me that fans still call him “Gary Plank.”) Fencik stood up receivers, Plank finished them off. Late hits, low hits, high hits: they were dirty and mean, carrying on a Bear tradition of operating on the legal line. They were known as the Hit Men. Plank was knocked out of the NFL in 1982. Fencik continued alone. Well, not alone—Plank’s spot was taken first by Todd Bell, then by Dave Duerson, but it always seemed like Fencik was alone without Plank. When Fencik, appearing in “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” called himself “the Hit Man,” it made me sad. Hearing it, you could not help but think of the other hit man who got injured a few seasons too soon.

Fencik played twelve years in Chicago, beginning in the dark days when the team was an embarrassment. Thus, he was in the perfect position to understand how the team became what it became, how, on defense, it went from mediocrity to maybe the best ever. When I asked about this—“I mean, how the hell did it happen?”—Fencik smiled. “Well, now you’re talking about the 46,” he said, “and if you want to understand the 46, you’ve got to start with Buddy Ryan. Remember, I’m the guy that wrote the letter that saved Buddy’s job. I’d always remind him about that.”

*   *   *