Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (42 page)

5: THE EYE IN THE SKY

On Halas and the move back to Chicago, see the books above, as well as
“Then Ditka Said to Payton…” The Best Chicago Bears Stories Ever Told
by Dan Jiggets;
Chicago Bears: The Complete Illustrated History
by Lew Freedman;
Halas by Halas
;
Papa Bear
by Jeff Davis;
Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football
by Robert W. Peterson; and
Bear With Me
by Patrick McCaskey. The story of Bronko Nagurski and the brick wall appears in many places, including
What a Game They Played: An Inside Look at the Golden Era of Pro Football
by Richard Whittingham. For more on Nagurski, see
Monster of the Midway: Bronko Nagurski, the 1943 Chicago Bears, and the Greatest Comeback Ever
by Jim Dent. For more on Wrigley, see
Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography
by Stuart Shea. (Funny that a guy named Shea wrote a book about Wrigley.) Buffone’s comment on Halas’s coaching styles appears in
Papa Bear
by Jeff Davis. For the history of gridiron innovations, including the modern T-formation, see
Luckman at Quarterback: Football as a Sport and a Career
by Sid Luckman;
Halas by Halas
; and
Papa Bear.
Also
Return to Glory: The Story of the 1985 Chicago Bears
compiled by the
Chicago Sun-Times.
On George Wilson: he was the head coach of the Detroit Lions when George Plimpton went undercover to train with the team, the result being his phenomenal book,
Paper Lion
. Plimpton described Wilson and the famous block. Great resources on Sid Luckman are the sports reports that appeared in the New York papers after most of his high school and college games, including the
New York Times.
See the
Times
obituary, William N. Wallace, “Sid Luckman, Star for the Bears, Dies at 81,” July 6, 1998. On Luckman’s college accomplishments, see the Columbia Lions website:
gocolumbialions.com
. I went to summer camp with Sid’s grandson. We had an epic fistfight in the rain—it’s still talked about in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Before Luckman died, a member of his family asked me to write a book about him. Stupidly, I said no; I worried I could not do him justice. I wrote an essay on Luckman in the recent antholog
y Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame
edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy. My chapter is “Sid Luckman: Hebrew Mind, Cossack Body.”

6: THE QUARTERBACK

I relied on many books for this chapter. On the emergence of the modern NFL, I found a handful especially helpful, including
America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
by Michael MacCambridge (New York: Random House, 2004);
Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport
by Michael Oriard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
Blood, Sweat, and Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook
by Tim Layden; and
How Football Explains America
by Sal Paolantonio. Bob Snyder, who came back to play QB for the Bears during the war, told his story in
Pigskin.
On George Preston Marshall, the Redksins, and race in the NFL, see
Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins
by Thomas G. Smith. On Halas in the war years, see
Halas by Halas
and
Papa Bear
, as well as the official biography on the Bears’ website, according to which Halas “spent three years in the South Pacific with the Navy, mainly organizing R&R and entertainment for weary troops.” On Lombardi, see David Maraniss’s
When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.
Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” The history of this phrase is fascinating. Reported in various forms over the years, it apparently comes from a football movie in which John Wayne played a broken-down football coach in need of a second chance. Lombardi was a big moviegoer. Ditka: “The past is for cowards and losers.” This quote is reported in
“Then Ditka Said to Payton…” The Best Chicago Bears Stories Ever Told
by Dan Jiggetts. On Namath, there is more ink than there is water in the Caspian. You might start with
Namath: A Biography
by Mark Kriegel. For the title alone, I recommend Namath’s autobiography,
I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow…’Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day.
I made use of these books, as well as the profiles that
Sports Illustrated
published about the quarterback in the ’60s and ’70s, testaments to the New Journalism. Raiders v. Bears, 1984: this was featured as NFL Game of the Week in 1984, and a beautifully produced recap can be seen online at NFL
Films.com
. Mac’s kidney injury: my best sources on this were interviews with Jim McMahon, Kurt Becker, and Emery Moorehead. Peter Gent’s
North Dallas Forty
was published a few years after he retired from the Dallas Cowboys, where he’d been a wide receiver. It’s probably the best book written about life in the NFL. Gent died in 2011; he was sixty-nine. On Cutler’s injury, see Sean Leahy, “Jay Cutler Under Attack for Leaving Bears’ Loss with Knee Injury,”
USA Today
, January 23, 2011. Cutler’s injury was given a different resonance when an MRI showed he had seriously hurt his knee. Still more doubt came the following season when Redskins QB Robert Griffin III played on a wounded knee, the result being a perhaps career-altering injury in the playoffs. For a wild take on all this, see the website SB Nation skewer ESPN’s theory that “Jay Cutler is responsible for RGIII’s knee injury,”
www.sbnation.com/nfl/2013/1/10/3861430/jay-cutler-is-at-fault-for-rg3s-knee-injury
.

7: MIKE DISCO

On Ditka’s life and biography, I relied on the books mentioned above, that is, Ditka’s autobiographies as well as the biographies of Halas and the histories of the Bears. Each of these books takes a stab at Iron Mike’s story. I also drew on the interviews that I did with men who played with Ditka and those who played for him at varying points in his career, including Danny White in Dallas, and Jim McMahon, Jim Morrissey, and Tim Wrightman in Chicago. Then the coaches and football executives who worked for and with Ditka: Dick Stanfel, Johnny Roland, Vince and Bill Tobin. Also Brian McCaskey. And then, of course, Ditka himself. To get a sense of the terrain, I visited Aliquippa, Ditka’s hometown, and the country around it. I ate at Ditka’s restaurant in Chicago and visited Ditka’s resort in Florida. This turned into my story “Waiting for Ditka: Thirty Years After He Saved Chicago, the Fabled Bears Coach Is Everywhere—and Nowhere,”
The Atlantic
, December 2011. On Ditka as a new kind of tight end, see Cooper Hollow, “Ditka: A Hall of Fame Career: Desire Helped Him Break the Mold at Tight End Position,”
Chicago Tribune
, July 29, 1988. Teaching Ditka to catch: the numbers on the balls anecdote appears in
Papa Bear
by Jeff Davis: “Sid taught me to catch the ball and look at the number,” Ditka told Davis. “He wrote numbers on the ball. I had to catch it and call out the number. I had to look at it all the way in and put it away before I started to run with it.”

8: SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES

A lot of the Chicago stuff in this chapter comes from my memory, which I corroborated or corrected by searching the archives of the
Chicago Tribune
and
Sun-Times
, as well as various books, including
The Encyclopedia of Chicago
and
Chicago: A Biography
by Dominic Pacyga. On Jimmy Piersall, see Jim O’Donnell, “Jimmy Piersall Covers All Bases: No. 37 Is Still Fired Up About His Field,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 25, 1992. See also Frank Corkin’s column, “Frank’s Corner,” which appeared in the
Meriden Record-Journal
, October 8, 1981, and included Piersall’s entire comment, made during that interview with Mike Royko: “I think every ball club should have a clinic once a week for the wives because I don’t think they know what the hell baseball is. First of all they were horny broads who wanted to get married, have a little security and a big, strong baseball player.” Other sources include the NFL archives. On Sayers, see his autobiography,
I Am Third.
It was a basis of the movie
Brian’s Song.
(He’s third because God is first and family is second.) Also see
My Life and Times
by Gale Sayers. The jacket shows Sayers leaping over Ditka. On Butkus, see
Stop-Action
by Dick Butkus. This is the book that was treasured by McMichael and Singletary. Also
Butkus: Flesh and Blood
by Dick Butkus. On Butkus’s retirement see “Butkus Wins $600,000 Lawsuit Against Bears,” Associated Press, September 14, 1976. Sayers as a deer: it reminds me of what Coach Zuppke said about his running back Red Grange: “Red had that indefinable something that the haunted wild animal has—uncanny timing and the big brown eyes of a royal buck.” Payton was the star of my childhood, so it was a pleasure to reread the old profiles. I found the following books useful:
Never Die Easy: The Autobiography of Walter Payton
, and
Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton
by Jeff Pearlman. On Ed McCaskey, see
Papa Bear
by Jeff Davis;
Bear With Me
by Patrick McCaskey;
In Life, First You Kick Ass
by Mike Ditka; and
Chicago Bears: The Complete Illustrated History
by Lew Freedman. Other details come from discussions with players as well as Brian McCaskey. Also
It’s Been a Pleasure: The Jim Finks Story: One Man’s Football Journey
with contributions from seven award-winning sportswriters. Finks was the Bears’ general manager from the mid-’70s to the early ’80s. To further my argument about the sadness of big brothers whose little brothers surpass them, see
Walter & Me: Standing in the Shadow of Sweetness
by Eddie Payton. Jim Brown on Walter: “What kind of animal…?” This quote comes from an NFL Films documentary on Payton, which was part of its
A Football Life
series.

9: READY, FIRE, AIM

Personal interviews were hugely helpful assembling these pages, especially those with Danny White, who played with Ditka in Dallas, and with Ditka himself. Other details come from books mentioned above on Ditka and the Bears. Ditka to the Eagles: the Eagles were actually coming off a decent season when Ditka showed up. They had gone 9–5 in 1966 but would finish 6–7–1 in Mike’s first season with the club, and 2–12 in his second. On player statistics and team standings, see
The Football Encyclopedia
as well as
pro-footballreference.com
. Ditka’s comments on his coaching tactics, specifically his instruction about hitting in the solar plexus, appear in his autobiography
Ditka
. He made similar comments to
Sports Illustrated
at the time. On Ditka’s letter: I interviewed Neill Armstrong and got the sense that he felt Ditka had done him dirty with the letter. His anger at Halas is evident. When I asked him if Halas was tough, he said, “I’d say so. He fired me.” On Mugs, see “George Halas Jr. 54, Dies in Chicago,”
New York Times
, December 17, 1979. A legal battle followed the death. Halas’s first wife suggested the death might have resulted from foul play, or else negligent medical care. Mugs’s body was exhumed for a second autopsy in 1987, which showed nothing. (See Charles Mount and Rudolph Unger, “Judge OKs Halas Jr. Autopsy,”
Chicago Tribune
, August 6, 1987.) Jerry Vainisi was the team’s treasurer from 1972 to 1982. When Jim Finks left the team after Mugs died, Vainisi took over as general manager. Vainisi left the team after 1986 and later worked for the Detroit Lions. He retired from football altogether in 1995 and works as a lawyer in Chicago. He’s known to many as the man who got rid of the Bears’ cheerleading squad, the Honey Bears. (See Rich Lorenz, “Bears Say Cheerio to Cheerleaders,”
Chicago Tribune
, November 16, 1985.) Vainisi’s comments on Halas’s plans appear in
Papa Bear
by Jeff Davis. On Ditka’s first practices as the Bears coach: every player I spoke to told me his own version of the story. Especially helpful were Brian Baschnagel, Doug Plank, and Bob Avellini. The letter sent to Halas by “The Chicago Bears Defensive Team” was reprinted in
The Daily Herald
on Sunday, December 27, 1981 (“Halas Rewards Defensive Staff; Ryan Stock Grows”), as was the old man’s response. In addition to books mentioned above, details in this section—the garbage bags and so on—come from interviews. Ditka versus Avellini: these stories appear in Ditka’s book
In Life, First You Kick Ass
. I got more from interviews with Ditka and Avellini. On the last days of Halas, see
Papa Bear
and
Bear With Me
, as well as tributes and obits that filled the newspapers. (See Dave Anderson, “The Bear Who Really Was One,”
New York Times
, November 2, 1983.) “Anybody but Michael”: it sounds like a line from
The Godfather.
It’s reported by Jeff Davis in
Papa Bear
and in several other books, including
The Best Chicago Sports Arguments: The 100 Most Controversial Questions for Die-Hard Chicago Fans
by John “Moon” Mullin (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006), who adds the following: “Whether or not that actually happened has become almost superfluous; those were the sentiments of millions of Bears fans, if not precisely the founders.” On Michael McCaskey, see “How the Chicago Bears Fumbled Away a Fortune,”
Forbes
, September 13, 2010. On drafting the ’85 team, I referred to articles, the book about Finks, and interviews with Ditka and Tobin, the men most responsible. I had dinner with Finks when I was an eighteen-year-old Tulane freshman, a wonderful night during which I plied him with questions, the answers to which have shaped my views. He told me, for example, that fans watching the 1979 draft booed when he took Hampton first, which shows you what people know.