Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (8 page)

The early years of the NFL recall a lost chapter in the leisure life of America. It was a time of over-the-hill quarterbacks and asthmatic runners, men traded for equipment, fans deputized to play. It was fun in the way of a fad or an enterprise everyone expects to fail: enjoy it while you can, soon you’ll take your place on the factory floor. The league was considered disreputable, the Wild West of professional sports. Each year, the names of the teams changed as old powers faded and factory squads ascended. Thirty-five franchises folded in the first decade, including the Milwaukee Badgers, which featured Paul Robeson, the great African American bass-baritone, who played one season in the NFL while attending Columbia Law School; the Providence Steam Rollers; the Akron Pros; and the strangest team in sports history, the Oorang Indians. The passion project of Walter Lingo, who made a fortune in dog kennels, the Oorang Indians were based in LaRue, Ohio, the smallest town to ever boast a professional anything. Lingo, a digger of arrowheads and builder of tepees, loved all things Native American and staffed his team entirely with Indians. He recruited from the Carlisle and Haskell Indian schools as well as Chippewa reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The names on the starting roster included Big Bear, Red Fang, Little Twig, Deer Slayer. He signed Jim Thorpe when he was so broken-down no other pro team would have him.

Halas made the great play of his career against Oorang. It happened in Chicago, on a rainy afternoon. Thorpe was carrying the ball, plunging into the pile. Halas put his head into the big man’s stomach. You could hear the wind leave his lungs:
oof!
The dark face scowled as the ball came loose and bounded across the field. Halas picked it up, made one cut, and was gone, with Thorpe behind him. “I ran faster and faster but I sensed he was gaining,” Halas wrote. “I could hear the squishing of his shoes in the mud. When I could almost feel his breath, I dug in a cleat and did a sharp zig. Thorpe’s momentum carried him on and gave me a few feet of running room. He narrowed the gap. I zagged. Just short of the goal, Thorpe threw himself at me and down I went, into a pool of water. But I slid over the goal. No professional had run 98 yards for a touchdown. None did so again until 1972.” The Green Bay Packers entered the league in its second season; the New York Giants came a few years later. Tim Mara, a bookmaker who knew Halas from the smoky back rooms where ballplayers and gamblers mingled, paid $2,500 for the franchise. He was no football fan but figured anything in New York was worth $2,500. The Steelers started as the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1933, the hobby of former prizefighter Art Rooney, who knew everyone because he basically grew up in a saloon. The Redskins began in Boston but were moved to D.C. by George Preston Marshall, a Southerner who made a fortune in laundry. Marshall, the premier racist of the NFL—because of him, African Americans were kept off rosters for years—had his wife write the league’s first fight song:

Hail to the Redskins!

Hail victory!

Braves on the warpath!

Fight for old DIXIE!…

Scalp ’em, swamp ’em

We will take ’em big score …

When I think about those early days, I imagine black-and-white photos, moments of football time frozen in the phosphorous stink of a cameraman’s flash. Bloody faces beneath leather headgear, busted teeth, bloody hands, a ball wobbling in the cold air. The league was filled with characters: Shipwreck Kelly, Benny Friedman, Johnny Blood. Its great early star was Thorpe. By making him the first commissioner, Halas and Hay seemed to connect their game to the original inhabitants of the land, distinguishing football from fey sports like baseball and golf, which stunk faintly of Europe. Football was American, its first star a big gamboling red man, who, a generation before, you might have faced in more dire circumstances at the Little Bighorn. The presence of Thorpe, who was a myth when he was still alive, seemed to prove what the champions of the game claimed from the beginning: though the West had been won and the Indian Wars had ended and the cowboy had faded away, the spirit of the frontier lived on, on the football field.

Thorpe was a perfect symbol of the frontier because he was actually born there, in Indian Territory in 1887 or 1888. His parents were of mixed heritage, part Irish, part Sac, Fox, and Potawatomi Indian. Thorpe grew up on reservations all over the Midwest. The skills Thorpe developed while rambling in the open country were just the ones he’d need for football: speed, endurance, stealth. His Indian name was Wa-Tho-Huk, “Bright Path.” He was as fast and strong as anyone who ever lived. His career in organized sports began at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where, according to lore, he walked onto the field one day and did a just-for-the-fun-of-it high jump in street clothes that set a record: five feet nine inches. He was nineteen. He played every sport at Carlisle but excelled in football, where he was coached by Pop Warner. It was Warner who convinced Thorpe to go out for the U.S. Olympic Team. In 1912, Thorpe won the decathlon and pentathlon in Stockholm. He was covered in gold. At the medal ceremony, he was given gifts by Czar Nicholas II and King Gustav V of Sweden, who shook the Indian’s hand and said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Jim Thorpe, the first great star of professional football

Thorpe’s response—“Thanks, King!”—was said to demonstrate the casualness of the new American character. He returned a hero, marched in parades, and was showered in honor. He called it the peak of his life. That’s the way of the world: you are shown everything, the entire hand, fanned out with kings and one-eyed jacks, a moment before it’s taken away and shuffled back into the deck. A few months after Thorpe’s return, a newspaper scared up an old minor league box score, which proved Thorpe had been paid a few dollars to play a handful of baseball games for the Rocky Mount Railroaders of the Carolina League. College athletes earning food money in the summer leagues was a common practice. Thorpe stood apart only for his naïveté: he didn’t know enough to invent an alias. In a letter to the Olympic Committee, he begged for forgiveness. “I hope I would be partly excused because of the fact that I was simply an Indian school boy and did not know all about such things.” His records were stripped from the books. He was asked to return his medals as well as the gifts that had been given to him by the czar and the king.

For Thorpe, it was the trauma that confirmed his sense of the world: its prejudice, its hypocrisy. From there, his story is desultory, an opera of decline shot through with occasional moments of triumph. He bumped from town to town, sport to sport, playing 289 games in major league baseball, mostly for the New York Giants, where his name was still a draw. Like Halas, he could not hit the curve. He married, drank, lost a son, and eventually reached Canton, where he would put the NFL in the news. According to Grantland Rice, a prominent sportswriter of the time, “Thorpe was the cornerstone, badly used, but nevertheless a cornerstone of professional football.”

He played for a half dozen teams, valuable as a name long after his body began to fail. He spent less and less time practicing, more and more time drinking. He was a barroom brawler. By 1926, he embodied everything the game does to a man: strong and skinny at the start, he was beefy and broken at the end, alcoholic, in constant pain, bitter and confused. His boyish face had become a mask. His body wasted, the world-class speed gone. It was with melancholy that Rice wrote, “I can still see Thorpe as Pop Warner described him when he first came to Carlisle from the plain country of Oklahoma: a skinny Indian youngster weighing around 130 pounds … but moving like a breeze.”

Thorpe was the subject of perhaps the first great football movie,
Jim Thorpe—All American
, starring Burt Lancaster. You see him tackle, hit, break free; you see him robbed of everything, humiliated—all in hallucinatory close-ups that anticipate modern sports coverage. Near the end, Thorpe sits alone in L.A. Coliseum, the empty seats rising high above him like a grave. He’s nothing but self-pity, rage, regret. Of course, there’s a happy ending. But in real life, Thorpe continued to struggle, working construction, digging ditches. He appeared in B movies, often playing the Indian who gets killed. In 1950, diagnosed with cancer, he went to a charity hospital. He was destitute. His wife begged donations. “We’re broke,” she told reporters. “Jim has nothing but his name and his memories.” He died in 1953. He was sixty-four, just a belly and a dollar or two.

Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence. People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who’d already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.

5

THE EYE IN THE SKY

Wrigley Field configured for the 1963 NFL Championship. The temperature was ten degrees at game time.

My first job after college was at
The New Yorker
. I was a messenger and a receptionist. I was supposed to deliver packages, sort mail, and answer the phone, but I spent a lot of time working on stories. On one occasion, a valuable piece of art entrusted to my care was destroyed. It was not my fault but I was blamed. On another, a panic button was accidentally pressed and the authorities were summoned. Finally, one day, the managing editor called me into her office, sat me down, and said, “It’s clear to everyone that you care more about writing than about answering the phone.” I mention this only to explain my sympathy for George Halas, who, in the summer of 1921, when he was twenty-seven, was called into Eugene Staley’s office. Staley sat him down and said, “George, I know you like football better than starch.”

Staley did not blame his employee. After all, Staley brought Halas to Decatur to do exactly what he’d done: build a team. But he hadn’t counted on the cost. It turned out Staley couldn’t afford to employ sixteen men to play football. He’d already lost $14,000 on the team. He felt guilty about the situation: he’d made promises, and a young man had quit his job and moved to a strange town on the basis of those promises. With this in mind, Mr. Staley made Halas an offer, the deal that would bring the Bears to Chicago. Staley would give Halas $5,000 to take the team independent, get them up and running in a new home, a business like any other, with payroll covered by ticket sales. Staley’s only condition was that the team keep his name for another season. This explains the first line in the Bears record book, which lists the Decatur Staleys.

A few weeks later, Halas worked out a deal with Bill Veeck Sr., the president of the Chicago Cubs. The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned:

“You okay, Bronk?”

Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.”

In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.

*   *   *

Chicago was booming in 1922. It was the Jazz Age, the city of the gangster, the great metropolis taking in and spitting out the raw produce of the nation via freight yards and slaughterhouses and lakefront factories. The first skyscraper had been designed in Chicago, and the city was being remade in its image, a line of towers rising and falling along South Michigan Avenue like notes on a musical score. There are certain times when everything is in the right place, when all the players are at their instruments—you want to slow the spinning world and let the moment linger. Big Bill Thompson was serving as mayor in 1922, Al Capone was at his club in Cicero, Louis Armstrong was on the South Side playing his horn, and Carl Sandburg, who was at his house in Evanston, had turned it all into verse: