Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (31 page)

Hipple finished the game at quarterback for Detroit. He was sacked again and again but kept getting back on his feet. It was never really close, which made his performance inspiring. In the way of Hemingway’s matadors, he seemed to stand for mankind in its fight against absurdity. Near the end, he was hit in the same way as Ferguson: square on the chin by an airborne Wilber Marshall. The ball was knocked from his hands and recovered by the Fridge, who went forty yards before being hauled down at the Lions’ 20. It was a prized image in Chicago: the joy of the fat man in the open field. (Ditka: “Fridge is a big man with some fat on; not just a big fat man.”) But what lingers is Hipple, a mile behind the play, struggling back to his feet.

The players were celebrating on the flight home from Detroit, getting loud. Finally, Ditka got on the PA system:
All right, ladies, listen up! There’s nothing to celebrate yet. We have yet to win a single fucking thing that matters. I want you to spend some serious time over Christmas thinking about that and trying to find yourselves.
A moment later, as the players stared glumly at each other, McMahon came on the PA:
And after you find yourselves, ladies, come find me. I’ll be in a gutter somewhere.

15

THE YEAR WITHOUT A WINTER

Jim McMahon during the ’86 playoffs. Forced to choose between defiance and submission, Mac found a third way.

For me, Chicago will always be as it was in the mid-1980s. That was the city as I loved it, the world at noon. It was Greek Town and Wrigley Field and beers at the Checkerboard Lounge. It was days at the beach and nights on the toboggan and house parties in Winnetka. It was being chased by the cops and sneaking out and the city in the distance. It was Howlin’ Wolf and red hots at Big Al’s and frosty malts and denim jackets and girls in penny loafers and stone-washed jeans. Every other place is measured against the city when the world was whole. That’s when I was young and my parents were young and my brother and sister were home and we huddled together when the big snows came. When I look at my own children, I am filled with envy. Everyone lives in Eden and everyone gets banished. Everyone falls from grace just for being alive.

Chicago was the center of the world. It’s where John Hughes set all those movies, where the Belushis lived like shambling comedic saints in Wheaton, where Big Twist & the Mellow Fellows played at Biddy Mulligan’s every Thursday night. The city had shaken off the torpor of the 1970s: Jane Byrne was gone, Harold Washington was going. (He died in office in 1987.) We would soon hand our fate to another Daley. For what are the bad times but a nap between Daleys? It was the start of a renaissance that continues, the rebirth of the greatest city. New York has one foot in Europe. Los Angeles is a collection of suburbs. Miami is café con leche. New Orleans is drunk. Seattle wears flannel. San Francisco is beautiful vistas and empty streets. Boston is ancient. But Chicago is America. The ’85 Bears seemed to symbolize the city in its resurgence, the reawakening of the beast after a funkadelic slumber. It was not the fifteen wins—it was how they were achieved, the smash-mouth style that seemed to capture the spirit of the town.

In previous years, after the Bears played their last game, a melancholy settled over everything like a cloud. It marked the beginning of the true winter, a dark stretch that did not end until March or April, a season of ice, in which the sun was off in another country. But in 1986, the Bears kept on winning. The
Tribune
ran an editorial: “What have the Bears done for Chicago? They have given us something to hope and cheer for in January, the time when ordinarily that bleak postholiday depression sets in and all we have to look forward to are subzero temperatures, blizzards and watching our cars rust. This January, cabin fever has been replaced by Bears fever.”

In Chicago, 1986 was the year without a winter.

*   *   *

The Bears, having the best record in the NFL, earned a bye in week one of the playoffs, jumping directly to the second round. On January 5, 1986, they played the New York Giants. For Ditka, the big challenge was Lawrence Taylor, LT, the Giants’ All-Pro outside linebacker. Many consider him the best ever to play the position. He was a disruptive force, fast and hard-hitting. He set up a few feet off the line, outside the tackle. When the quarterback dropped back, LT was coming from the blind side. If he got by the left tackle, he could shut down Payton and concuss McMahon. He could tip over the king. Before the Bears did anything else, they had to solve LT.

The Bears have a tradition of playing dirty, playing right on the line, that goes back to Halas. Barely legal is legal, which is how they dealt with Taylor. On the second or third series, as McMahon dropped back, Dennis McKinnon, a Bears wide receiver who was just the opposite of Willie Gault—tough instead of fast, he never flinched—sprinted downfield, seemingly following a deep pattern. Taylor forgot McKinnon as soon as he vanished from his peripheral vision, focusing instead on McMahon’s eyes: Where’s he looking? Where’s he gonna throw? Once forgotten, McKinnon raced at Taylor from
his
blind side, lowered his helmet, and launched at the big man. It’s a play feared by linebackers, a play many have tried to get banned: the crackback block. Delivered just right, it can end a career. Even a giant of a man is perched on very human knees.

McKinnon’s crackback block—Taylor believed it had been ordered by Ditka—did not end LT’s career, or even knock him from the game, but it did infuriate him. He lost his focus as he lost his temper. He began to look over his shoulder, wondering if some receiver was closing in for another crackback. When LT should have been hitting, he was thinking about getting hit. He’d gone from hit-or to hit-ee. At one point, he stood before the Bears’ bench screaming at Ditka. He told Giants’ linemen to hold Payton,
Stand him up so I can finish him.
The Bears did not have to worry about LT because LT took care of himself. Asked what the team had done to contain the great Lawrence Taylor, Ditka said, “Knocked the shit out of him.”

It was 14° at kickoff, but the wind made it feel colder. It came from the lake in twenty-five-mile-per-hour gusts. It was nasty. The network broadcast a helicopter shot of Soldier Field. It was white as ice. The lake was blue. Ditka paced the sidelines in an old-time Bears jacket, the sort worn by college lettermen, a winter cap, sunglasses. Giants quarterback Phil Simms spent much of the afternoon on his back. New York’s star runner, Joe Morris, went fourteen yards on his first run but never did much after that. In the end, he gained thirty-two yards on twelve carries. When he left in the second quarter, he was gripping his head. “We were hitting him so hard he said he got a migraine so he did not have to play,” Dave Duerson told a reporter. “He didn’t want to carry that rock.” The camera zoomed in on Hampton’s hands. They were wrapped in tape, and blood showed through like a steak through butcher’s paper. Each finger was mangled, proof of his commitment. For stretches, the game seemed to return to football’s origins: it was mob ball, where anything is permissible as long as the fool holds the dingus. When the Giants missed a field goal, Ditka did a triple fist pump. He chewed his gum like a fiend.

The sequence that broke the Giants came in the opening quarter. First Joe Morris was tackled in the backfield. Then Phil Simms was knocked down just as he got rid of the ball. Then Simms was dropped for a twelve-yard loss by Dent. After starting on the 35-yard line, the Giants ended the series at their own 20. The New York punter set up on the 12. His name was Sean Landeta. He was a twenty-three-year-old rookie. He blew on his hands. He was cold. If you looked closely, you could see confusion in his eyes. You could see his breath, too, a cloud of panic that drifted above Soldier Field. He caught the long snap with brittle hands, took two steps and lofted the ball, setting up for the kick. At the crucial moment, he made the mistake of looking up. The Bears were coming at him jailbreak fashion, howling and waving their arms. If the tightrope walker looks down between buildings, he sees a vortex. The earth drops away and he’s falling. Landeta kicked the ball, but the ball was not there.
How strange. He missed it completely.
By then, the Bears were over the wall. Shaun Gayle, a cornerback playing special teams, scooped it up at the 5-yard line, took two strides, and was in the end zone. It was the shortest punt return for a touchdown in playoff history.

Dan Hampton (99) leaping over the enemy to get to the quarterback. October 28, 1985

Landeta later claimed the wind had taken the ball, a mystery gust from a mystery system. I met him six or seven years later, interviewed him in training camp before another season with the Giants. He would play forever, or football’s version of forever, taking his final snap in 2005, when he was forty-three. As soon as I identified myself as a Bears fan, he put up his hands in the way of Ferguson and said, “I know, I know, but it really was the wind.”

He was such a nice man, and such a good punter, and so adamant that I believed him. At least until I spoke to the Bears who were on the field that day, all of whom laughed at the mystery wind. “He can say what he wants, but I was there!” Otis Wilson told me. “The wind blew no damn ball. Go back and watch. It’s clear as day. That boy looked up at the wrong time and what did he see? The abyss. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss is looking right back into you.”

The Bears won 21 to nothing. The Giants quarterbacks—plural, because, at some point, another can was opened—were sacked for sixty yards. They gave up more territory than they gained. McMahon threw two touchdown passes and Payton ran for ninety-three yards. John Madden, who announced the game on CBS, called it “the most dominant performance by a team I have ever seen on a football field.”

*   *   *

A few days before the game, McMahon received a warning. He’d been seen wearing an Adidas headband on the field, which violated the NFL’s agreement with advertisers. In flashing the name of his sponsor, Mac was selling something he did not own: network television time. He was ordered to cease and desist. When he protested, pointing out that he’d been wearing the headband most of the season without complaint, he was told,
Yeah, well, things change.
McMahon is a true individual, the sort of person who positions himself in opposition to authority by instinct. He does not like being told what to do, especially if it strikes him as arbitrary. If Ditka offered a legitimate criticism, he’d listen. If Ditka Sybilized, Mac flipped him off. If he’d been alive during the Revolutionary War, he would have been in a hemlock tree, picking off redcoats. As coaches in Chicago and at BYU had learned, the surest way to get him to do something was to issue a warning not to. He wore the Adidas headband during the Giants game, proudly, staring right into the camera. Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, levied a $5,000 fine, which would increase if McMahon wore the headband on the field again. It became the story of the week: Would McMahon defy the commissioner, or would he submit?

This controversy was probably good for the Bears; it took the pressure off. As we all focused on Mac’s headband, the team was preparing for the second round against the L.A. Rams. To some, they looked like trouble. They were weak at quarterback but had a player many considered the best running back in the game, Eric Dickerson, big and fast, a challenge to tackle. For several days, reporters wrote about the greatness of the Dick. He had gained 248 yards against Dallas the previous week. But when asked to comment, Buddy Ryan predicted a bad day for the running back: under 50 yards and multiple fumbles. “He’ll lay it on the ground for us,” Ryan said. “We expect him to lay it on the ground at least three times.” This only fueled the fire, filling the air with nervous talk about headbands and defiance and Miami and comeuppance, and remember what goeth before a fall, and so on and so forth, with each round of reports stoking the old Chicago fear of collapse, and the ’69 Cubs, and how good they looked in ’84, and the ’83 White Sox, and what about “The Super Bowl Shuffle” and the jinx, and
My God, Dickerson can fly!
until finally, in the way of a strong, calming father, Mike Ditka went on TV and explained the reality of the situation to the hysterical fans. “There are teams that are fair-haired, and teams that aren’t,” he told us. “There are teams named Smith and teams named Grabowski. The Rams are Smith. The Bears are Grabowski.” He went on to explain how the Smiths would be coming to the Grabowskis’ house on Sunday, where it’s mean, where it’s violent, and where, in the third quarter, it’s going to snow.