A deep dive into the Chicago Bears and the 1986 Super Bowl victory leaves a lot of yellow flags on the field.
I used to go to my accountant’s office in Jerusalem. He’s an American CPA raised in Chicago who is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Walking into his office I would find myself face-to-face with a massive poster of William “The Refrigerator” Perry as well as an equally large picture of old Comiskey Park, while its replacement was under construction. Visiting him was a chance to go back to Chicago without booking a flight. We have reminisced over many Chicago sports successes and failures.
Recently, my CPA sent me Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football by Rich Cohen. As I still have my 1986 limited-edition Carson-Pirie-Scott stuffed Chicago Bear with sweater and ski hat, I obviously had to read this book. The author is wee bit younger than I am but otherwise attended the same high school, lived in a neighboring suburb and went through the ups and mostly downs of being a Chicago Bears fan. While the book dwells a great deal on the Bears of the Mike Ditka-Buddy Ryan era, there is an outstanding introduction to the genesis of modern football in America. The college and professional football worlds of nearly a century ago had nothing to do with each other. One Columbia coach lamented that when his college players had reached their peak in football knowledge and capability, they had nowhere to go. Why? Because the pro or semi-pro leagues were populated by factory workers who used their time after work to pound each other in something that nominally resembles football today. Cohen goes through the founding of the league and the conversion of the Decatur Staleys (named after a starch maker) into the Chicago Bears. The Bears started their lives in Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. The author notes that the fledgling teams often took the names of their baseball counterparts, thus NY Giants in both sports. George Halas—Papa Bear himself—said that a cub sounds like a wimp so he upgraded to Bears instead.
For the past forty years, many Bears fans—including yours truly—wondered how the team squandered so much talent and only won a single Super Bowl championship. After reading the first few chapters, I realized that the true question is how they won any Super Bowl at all. Dysfunction, Chicago Bears is your name. Halas kept a very tight hand on the team and even came back to coach them when he should have been playing shuffleboard at some Miami retirement home. He brought back Mike Ditka from Dallas, where he had been coaching under Tom Landry, who literally saved him from a life of drink and failure after Halas sent Ditka to Philadelphia for not playing by Papa Bear’s rules. Before Ditka arrived as head coach, Gary Fencik, an All-Pro safety wrote a letter to Halas on behalf of the defense. They wanted a guarantee that Buddy Ryan would remain as defensive coordinator. What shocked me about the letter, which is printed in the book, is that it is addressed to Halas and sent by “The Defensive Football Club of Chicago.” Now, I did not know that there was a defense-only club that did not play any offense. I had the simplistic view that there was one club with offense, defense, special teams and management. Nope. Defense was all its own and Halas loved the letter and agreed. Thus, Mike Ditka arrived back in Chicago, where he had won a Championship in 1963 in order to rule over only half of the roster.
The fights between Ditka and Ryan are well-known and legendary. The two squads took separate transportation, and I still recall that after the Bears thrashed the Patriots 46-10 in the Super Bowl, each half of the team raised its coach—Ditka and Ryan—on their shoulders. When the Bears were clobbering Landry’s Cowboys 44-0, Ditka asked Ryan to stop blitzing in the fourth quarter. I cannot post Ryan’s response as this is a family website. But he kept blitzing while Ditka got more and more embarrassed in front of the man who took him in as a player and made him into a coach. The disconnect between the coaches is the main reason why I am shocked that they won at all. The two men could not get along and their players fell into camps. The defense respected the quarterback, Jim McMahon, because he played like they did—with reckless abandon and with no consideration for the well-being of his body. The offense gained Perry as a gravity-modifying running back, and I distinctly recall that he was one of the fellows who picked up Ditka after the Super Bowl. After the game, Ditka opened and drank a bottle of champagne given to him by Halas with the instruction not to open it until they had won the big one.
During an NFL draft after the Super Bowl victory, McMahon was asked what position the Bears should draft. He said, “an owner”. And unfortunately he was right. While George Halas was indisputably one of the founding fathers of modern football, his progeny did not inherit his NFL gene. Halas was a football genius, but he was known as cheap. When Chicago was clobbering Washington in a pre-Super Bowl championship, he told the kicker to shank an extra-point kick as he, Halas, was paying for the balls that went into the stands and did not come back. Halas’ son, the designated heir, passed away during Papa Bear’s lifetime. His daughter married Ed McCaskey and George Halas said before he died not to let grandson Mike run the team. Halas died and Mike McCaskey took over. The players did not like him and he thought like a businessman and not like a football man. Ryan left for Philadelphia after the Super Bowl. Thus, the Bears retained the talent without the coach, and the defensive coach became head coach without the talented bunch he developed in Chicago. Both Ditka and Ryan were successful but neither reached the Super Bowl again. Other teams came up with solutions for the “46 Defense” named after human torpedo, Dough Plank. Players respected the post-Ryan Bears but no longer feared them. During the 1985-86 championship run, opposing quarterbacks checked their life insurance policies and got rid of the ball as fast as possible so as to continue having a pulse.
Since the Space Shuttle blew up just after the Chicago triumph, the Bears never went to the White House. Barack Obama invited the team in 2011, and the front office had to locate players throughout the country. While some did well after football, many were broken physically and at times financially. Fencik became a banker, while a teammate became a real estate agent. Walter Payton, THE Bear himself, was devastated that he did not score in the Super Bowl. After he retired, he developed a liver ailment; he passed away before reaching the back steps of the White House. Obama said it correctly when he noted that the Bears’ success brought enormous civic pride. I still remember the massive Bears helmets placed on the lions outside of the Chicago Art Institute. The city held its head high because the Bears won and they did so in Chicago fashion—smash mouth and without mercy. The author notes that each player represented some neighborhood and its character. The Bears were loved by rich and poor, famous and unknown. The Bears united the city and brought a pride seen again when the Bulls with Michael Jordan tore up the NBA.
The Bears have been in one Super Bowl since and they lost. Welcome to Chicago.