Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (27 page)

“He was pretty well wasted,” Officer Henderson agreed.

We spent two or three hours in his office, drinking beer, chewing tobacco, and talking. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops. He sat in a swively desk chair. His computer glowed. His shelves of memorabilia—footballs, awards, pictures taken on red-letter days, the young McMahon covered in grime, the old McMahon posed with presidents—looked down. His dogs came in—two Doberman pinschers who ran around smelling everything and a poodle who seemed to be in charge of the operation. Mac’s girlfriend refilled drinks. Her name is Laurie Navon. McMahon has her name tattooed in Chinese characters on his arm. He has a gold hoop in his ear. He had houseguests. You could hear their happy voices in the distance, by the pool. Now and then, Mac seemed impatient to join the party, but mostly he had nothing but time.

He was unrecognizable when I first saw him, or nearly so, but as we talked, the years fell away and I found myself in the company of the quarterback I’d followed so zealously. This McMahon and that McMahon are the same person after all—the same house after a hundred years in the rain, when the ivy has penetrated the tuck pointing and the broken window lets the wind wreak havoc.

We talked about Chicago and the suburbs. McMahon has four grown kids and told me how strange it was to sit in the bleachers at his kids’ games where every eye followed him and all the fathers seemed to want something. “The parents were a pain in the ass,” he told me. “Especially the hockey parents. I actually got into a couple of … well, they weren’t altercations, no punches were thrown, but words were exchanged. I’d try to sit away from everybody. I didn’t want it. They tend to mouth off. I remember when my son was ten or eleven, playing in one of those rinks where you can stand behind the goalies. There were four or five fathers beating on the glass and I thought I saw a guy flip off the kids. Sure enough, a minute later, I see my son whack the glass—the guy is flipping him off. After the game, my son comes out of the locker room, and I see him jawing with somebody. I look over. It’s the same guy. He’s about six three, in a business suit, glasses, buddy-buddy with his friends. I tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, tough guy, what’s your problem? Why are you flipping off little kids?’ He says, ‘I didn’t flip off your son, Jim. I flipped off the other kid.’ I said, ‘Does that make it right, asshole? I should beat the shit out of you right here.’ I almost hit him but thought, No, I can’t. So I asked my son, ‘Do you want to kick his ass?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ dropped his bag, walked up, and jacked the guy in the chest, knocked him into the glass. The guy took a step toward my son. I said, ‘You take one swing, pal.’ He just stood there. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ turned to my boy, and said, ‘Let’s go.’”

I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I asked about audibles—why did he call so many audibles? Was he doing it just to drive Ditka nuts? “Nah,” he said, “that was a side benefit. Truth is, there were times when our offense was just not producing. Unless you did something, it wasn’t going to happen. That’s why, any chance I got, I’d throw it.”

“Was it fun?”

“Was what fun?”

“Playing.”

“Fuck yeah, it was fun as hell,” he said, smiling. “But if you’re not playing, if you’re injured or backing up or whatever, that sucks. My last couple years, I didn’t play much at all.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Sundays were great,” he said. “That’s the only part of the game I miss. The week of work, dealing with the media and all that shit—don’t miss none of it. Hanging out with the boys, being in the locker room—that’s what you really miss. ’Cause they were some funny sumbitches. But I don’t want to be young again. Have to do all that shit again. Feel that pain again.”

McMahon gripped his right shoulder as he said this, thinking. While trying to untangle a knot with a fork when he was nine, he stabbed himself in the eye, permanently damaging his cornea. In Chicago, we used to joke that only the Bears would draft a half blind quarterback. When asked why he always wore sunglasses, even indoors, he would blame this childhood injury, saying it left him acutely sensitive to light. I always figured that Mac came up with the story to explain why he wore sunglasses indoors. After all, he didn’t wear them during games, even on sunny days. But now, sitting close, his eyes did seem funky. He doesn’t really look at you when he talks—he looks at a vanishing point over your shoulder.

“I still feel the pain of the game every day so I don’t need to miss it,” he went on. “I like doing what I do now, which is pretty much whatever I want. Didn’t make a lot of money in the game, but I put four kids through college, so I did all right.”

At his peak, Mac earned close to $1 million a year, his income significantly supplemented by endorsements. Every time you turned on a TV, there he was, hawking another product. He was lucky enough to be represented by Steve Zucker, who protected and increased the quarterback’s money. According to Celebrity Net Worth, McMahon is currently worth $15 million, which makes him an exception among retired football players. Most of them struggle to earn for the rest of their lives.

“What’s your typical day?” I asked.

“I get out of bed around ten. When it’s nice out, which it usually is, I’ll go lay by the pool for an hour or two. Check my mail. Watch some TV. For the last six weeks I had [a postsurgical] boot on, so I couldn’t play golf. But now that I can play, I’ll get out and play a little bit more.”

“How are you holding up physically?”

Every player I asked this question responded with a catalog of woe.

“Not good,” said McMahon. “My shoulders, my elbows, my knees—they’re all pretty much gone. I’m probably going to need a new knee. They said if I screw this one up one more time, I’ll have to get another. My shoulders and elbows are what really bother me. I got memory issues. I got a deterioration in my neck, my upper neck, a compressed disk. And my lower back, lower spine, it’s all degenerating.”

The memory issues—that’s what I wanted to know about. McMahon had joined hundreds of other former NFL players in a class-action lawsuit to force the league to take responsibility for the long-term effects of all those concussions and head blows. In recent years, doctors at the Brain Bank at Boston University have made a convincing case that many if not all football players will suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, a disease that destroys parts of the brain. Symptoms include memory loss, depression, dementia. In recent years, several former players with the disease have committed suicide.

At some point, every conversation I had with a retired player turned to “the disease.” Dave Duerson, an All-Pro safety on the ’85 Bears, who suffered from CTE, killed himself in 2011. Duerson’s former teammates spoke of the disease with a wounded sense of betrayal—they’d been betrayed by their team, their league, even their own love of the game. Here were men who played a rough sport they knew would extract a price in hip replacements and artificial knees, but to find out, twenty years after retirement, that it might also take their personality, their mood, their memory, their mind? In the end, you forget your own name. And there’s no test, no way to know if you’ve got it until they do the autopsy.

When I asked McMahon about the lawsuit, he said, “Which one? I’m a plaintiff in this concussion case and I’m also doing a workmen’s comp case and a disability or line-of-duty case. And then I’ve got my limo driver case. We were in a limousine coming back from Tahoe, and our driver fell asleep, went off the road, fuckin’ … we should be dead.”

“How’s your memory?”

“Sometimes, I come into a room and have no idea why I’m there.”

“That’s not good.”

“They gave me this memory test, a list of fifteen things, and they’d say, ‘What do you remember of those fifteen?’ I’d get two or three. And I’m like, ‘Damn, you just told me that shit!’”

Whatever the state of Mac’s brain, he’s a pleasure to be around. When asked about a specific moment or play, he lights up. We spent the afternoon talking about his past.

*   *   *

Jim McMahon was born in Jersey City. When he was in grade school, his family moved to California. When he was ten, a coach arranged all the kids who’d signed up for Pop Warner football in a line on a suburban field. Each kid was handed a football and told to huck it, heave it as far as you can. There were wobblers, wounded ducks, scorchers. The coach walked until he reached the most distant ball, picked it up, walked it back, then handed it to McMahon, saying, “You’re the quarterback.”

Like Ditka, he was a high-intensity boy. When he was twelve, he was kicked off his Little League baseball team for smoking. In high school, he was suspended for vandalism. When he was sixteen, his family moved to Roy, Utah. McMahon was the kid from nowhere, the smartass who, at the end of the summer, turns up on the high school field and blows them all away. He could hit a man at thirty yards. He was tough, too, small but fearless, ready to shove the ball down the throat of a player twice his size. A kid like that attracts scouts. They sit in the stands with notepads, behaving like men at an auction.

In the spring of 1976, McMahon made the puzzling decision to attend Brigham Young, the Mormon university up the road in Provo. Why would a high-intensity boy who’d already been in trouble put himself under the jurisdiction of the Mormon honor code, which forbids tobacco, alcohol, premarital sex, and everything else Mac loved? He blamed his dad, or, more simply, his father’s desire to watch him play. It was the last time, he later said, that he’d let anyone else influence his decisions.

McMahon threw his first touchdown freshman year and started as a sophomore. He would set fifty-five records at BYU and pass for more yards than any other quarterback in NCAA history. He was small and his arm was just good enough, but he had an uncanny sense of the game. Looking at a defense, he could quickly cycle through every possibility. “You could see in college he was one of those savants,” McMichael wrote, “who takes a snap and as he’s backpedaling has deciphered where to throw the ball already.”

McMahon was trouble at BYU. It was not just that he violated the Mormon code, but that he seemed to take cavalier joy doing it. Reports were constantly making their way back to the dean: McMahon has been chewing tobacco on campus, as if Joseph Smith had never been martyred; McMahon was drinking at a party, as if the secret book had never been found in upstate New York; McMahon has been sleeping at his girlfriend’s apartment, as if Brigham Young never led the faithful through the mountains. There were threats, second chances, probationary periods, then, finally, after the 1981 season, McMahon was expelled. He was told he might return someday, later, not now, to earn the credits to take a degree. It confirmed what McMahon always believed about authority: Ditka swears his religious devotion, then calls Mac a motherfucker every Sunday; BYU suspends Mac for violating the honor code, but only after they’ve gotten every possible bit of service out of his heathen body.

When I asked McMahon the hardest he’d ever been hit—he was a rag doll, known for taking a pounding—he did not have to think. “In college,” he said. “We were playing New Mexico. Linebacker by the name of Jimmy Carter. I won’t forget it, ’cause Carter was the president at the time. He knocked the fuck out of me. I was looking left. I was supposed to have protection on the other side. The blocker was a sophomore. He blew the assignment. Just as I’m getting ready to throw, Carter’s helmet hit my wrist, and my own fist hit my chin. Then he picked me up and dumped me on the back of my head. I was out for ten minutes. But I got up. Or they said I did. They said I got up and walked to the sidelines and fell down. Then I was out again. That’s the last thing I remember till Monday. But they said I went back in and played. I missed like two series. I couldn’t remember the plays. I couldn’t call them. That’s what they said. I’d just call a formation and say, ‘Get open quick.’ They said I picked the defense apart. They said it was easy.”

The Bears took McMahon with their first pick in 1982. He was not the biggest or the fastest, and his arm, well, I’ve told you about his arm, and his eye, and his attitude, but Ditka tended to go for the guy who struck him as a player.

“We thought we were getting close and we needed a quarterback, and he was the best,” Bill Tobin told me. “We liked his toughness. We liked his aggressiveness. And he was a winner. He had that bowl game he won—that was pretty special. And he fit our mold. See, one thing that we never let bother us in our draft room was size and speed. We liked them big and fast, but we would break the mold and draft players as opposed to specimens. McMahon was not tall and he wasn’t a great passer. He didn’t have a superquick release. But he was a winner.”

Halas seemed to like McMahon at first. “I’m well pleased,” he said after the draft, “as this quarterback seems to have ‘the touch.’” His optimism turned to scorn when McMahon dragged out contract negotiations. Mac finally went in to meet Halas. “He was kind of crotchety,” McMahon told me. “I’d been sitting outside the office for an hour. I finally asked the secretary, ‘What am I waiting for?’ And she said, ‘Mr. Halas is taking a nap.’ I said, ‘Well, wake him up, I got things to do.’ When I got in there, he said I was asking for too much money, though even if they met my terms, I’d still be one of the lowest-paid quarterbacks in the draft. ‘If we give you two hundred bucks a game, you’re overpaid,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a bad arm, a bad eye, bad knees, and you’re too small. Maybe you should go to Canada.’ So I asked, ‘Then why the hell did you draft me, old man?’”

By the early 1980s, Halas, having prospered with the television deals that have made the NFL fabulously profitable—the league generates $9 billion a year—was a wealthy man. In addition to the Bears, he owned several side businesses. And yet, perhaps conditioned by early years of struggle, he fought for every dollar. McMahon finally agreed to a four-year deal starting at $60,000, ending at $100,000. Paltry for the time, it’s shocking when compared to today’s salaries. In 2011, quarterback Michael Vick signed a six-year deal with the Philadelphia Eagles for $100 million, then had a terrible season. (In the course of ten games, he threw twelve touchdown passes and ten interceptions; his team finished 4–10 and his coach was fired.) But if players from the ’80s and ’90s feel they missed out, they’re aware that the players from still earlier eras looked upon their $100,000 contracts with stupefied envy. When it comes to big money, everyone believes he arrived a generation too soon.