Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (12 page)

“Virginia Halas used to go see him play in Wrigley Field,” Fencik told me. “The end zone at Wrigley, on one side, was cut short by the outfield wall. On the other side was the dugout. Well, Virginia was there, a little girl cheering for Dick Plasman,” who streaks across the secondary, throws up his hands, catches the ball, then is carried by his momentum into the dugout. Someone screams. Coaches come running. A man pops his head out, waving frantically. A doctor hurries down from the stands. There’s a long delay. It feels endless. Finally, they come out with Plasman on a stretcher. His eyes are closed, his body motionless. His head is wrapped in a bandage and the bandage is soaked in blood. For Virginia Halas McCaskey, well, it was one of those things you experience when you are young, and you’re never quite the same. “She thought she’d seen her favorite player die,” Fencik said. “She thought she’d seen Dick Plasman die.”

I mention Dick Plasman because you will not see his like again: he was the last of a species, the last of the free-spirited wild men who played the game in the beginning. The war changed everything. The NFL became more professional, better suited to the big market corporate culture that emerged in the fifties and sixties. Football became a different game because America became a different country.

The crucial shift came as a result of a tweak in the rules. The military draft that began before Pearl Harbor hurt all pro sports, but football more. After all, who was being drafted? Able-bodied men in their early twenties—the exact sort that filled NFL rosters. A football player was usually washed up by thirty. Many gained twenty pounds in their first year of retirement. It’s the same today. Players work like dogs and eat like sharks; then, when they quit, they continue to eat like sharks but don’t work at all. The freshman fifteen? How about the post-NFL forty? Baseball might get by with out-of-shape old-timers but, on a football field, such men were in danger. Back then, the rules required a player to play offense and defense. But few of the old-timers who returned when military conscription devastated the league were in the kind of shape required. Take Bob Snyder, a retired Bears quarterback—he was thirty—whom Halas asked to coach. The invitation was a ruse. Once Snyder was on the field, a football was shoved into his hands. “No way,” said Snyder, “I’m up to about 240 pounds—50 pounds over my playing weight. I’m full of beer.”

In 1943, after a sorry season in which out-of-shape athletes stood doubled over between plays, huffing and puffing, the NFL decided to change the rules. For the first time “free substitution” would be allowed, meaning players could go in and out of games without restriction. This was done to give the old-timers a chance to recover, but the unintended consequences were dramatic. Now a player could specialize, appearing in a game just long enough to perform a single task. A fullback might be brought in only in short-yardage situations; a runner might play only on kickoff and punt returns. Eventually, football rosters became divided into two teams: offense and defense. “What the rule has accomplished for tactical football is something Halas always hoped for but had not found feasible,” Luckman wrote. “The creation of defensive and offensive units which are switched constantly as the ball changes hands on the field.” Over time, football became strangely regimented, a game of specialists.

The coaches loved it. Not only did free substitution let them field superior teams, it also gave them control. They’d been banned from shuttling in instructions or calling plays from the sideline. Once a possession started, it was up to the quarterback. But with the rule change, a coach could send in a new play before every down, as long as it was carried by a substituting player. Football became a coach’s game as a result, men with clipboards, men in gray suits and fedoras. The war ended but the new rule stayed on the books.

The game changed in organic ways as well, evolving with the spirit of the time. It was just different after the war. For one thing, a certain brand of racism became harder to excuse. If 418,500 Americans died fighting for Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, how do you tell the owner of the Rams he can’t sign Kenny Washington because he’s African American? The unspoken agreement that barred blacks from the NFL fell away. Halas denied any such agreement had ever existed—there were black players on the early NFL teams—but in fact a black player had not suited up in twenty years. Some blamed it on George Preston Marshall, who would not integrate the Redskins until he was forced to by members of the Kennedy administration, in an effort led by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. For an owner like Halas, who cared less about race than about winning, access to such a huge pool of untapped talent was a boon. The Bears’ first black player was Eddie Macon, taken in the second round in 1952. The Bears fielded the first black quarterback in the NFL, the perfectly named Willie Thrower, who completed just three passes in 1953.

But the war’s most astonishing effects on the game were stylistic. This is a theory of mine—I can’t prove it—but it seems to me that football, which has been thematically linked to warfare from its beginning, is especially sensitive to innovations on the battlefield. Within a decade of World War II, football playbooks were filled with lessons seemingly learned at Calais, Dunkirk, Normandy. The NFL was founded after World War I, and the sport, in its early years, was a game of trenches, big men, and mud, a test of wills, a war of attrition. In the 1920s, scores often lingered in single digits. Halas broke the stalemate with the modern T-formation, which came into its own in 1940, shortly after the start of World War II, in which the Wehrmacht pioneered the blitzkrieg, a term retrofitted for use in the NFL. By the 1950s, football had followed the air force’s F-80 jets into the skies. For Halas, the reasoning was probably the same as it had been for Curtis LeMay: Why crawl, when you can rain terror from above?

Some of this influence was probably conscious, as coaches who read newspapers and watched newsreels borrowed the language and tactics of war; some of it was unconscious, as coaches were affected by the culture, which in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the military. Over a thousand NFL players had been in the service, some of them in positions of authority (Halas, a lieutenant commander in the navy, spent three years in the South Pacific). For many, it was the defining event of their lives: it’s no wonder they absorbed its lessons. Tom Landry, the Cowboys coach and an architect of the modern NFL defense, was a pilot in the Army Air Force’s 493rd Bombardment Group. He flew thirty missions over Germany and crashed his B-17 in a Flemish field when he ran out of fuel. Vince Lombardi, the dominant NFL coach of the era, perfected his craft at West Point, as an assistant under Army coach Red Blaik. Most weeks, Lombardi carried game film to an apartment in the Waldorf Astoria, which he screened for General Douglas MacArthur, a football nut who plied Lombardi with theories.

Luckman wrote of playing against Mario Tonelli of the Chicago Cardinals, who survived the Bataan Death March. “I shrunk from 200 pounds down to a 109-pound weasel of a man,” Tonelli told Luckman. “It’s crazy and impossible to picture myself as the same fullback who once ran 50 yards against Minnesota … Fact was, I couldn’t think much about the game at all, watching nine out of ten of my buddies die of starvation and beatings.”

The war’s influence was especially clear in the emergence of the celebrity coach, a mirror of the celebrity general. D-day gave us Eisenhower and Bradley; the Ice Bowl gave us Landry and Lombardi. Preseason training camp was remade as a kind of boot camp, with barracks, curfews, and ordeals of deprivation meant to break individuals and build teams: a man does not risk his life for an abstraction such as victory, but he will kill for his teammates. Lombardi did not let his players drink water during practice, as such luxuries weaken men. “Football requires spartan qualities,” he explained. “Sacrifice, self-denial—they’re cliché words—but I believe in them with every fiber of my body … Men want to follow. It gives them security to know there is someone who cares enough to chew them out a little bit or to correct their mistakes.” Lombardi perfected the football aphorism, which echoed the slogans of war. Patton said, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.” MacArthur said, “In war there can be no substitute for victory.” Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Ditka emulated this aphoristic style, but, Ditka being Ditka, always overshot the mark. Urging his players to shake off a loss, he told them “The past is for cowards and losers.”

*   *   *

Pro football looked different after the war, and it would have a different focus. It had been the team, the scrum. It would become the individual. Lombardi denied it, but he was among the biggest individuals of all. As was MacArthur. As was Patton. That’s the meaning of celebrity general.
I’m in front. Follow me.

Of course, Lombardi meant for himself to be
the
individual, the general in charge of the division, but once that genie was out of the bottle …

If you want to understand what happened to the NFL, don’t look at Jim Brown or Tom Brady. Look at Homer Jones, a Giants receiver who, attempting to distinguish himself in the 1960s, became the first man to “spike” the ball. In the past, a player handed the ball to the referee after scoring, or he might toss it into the stands. Jones heaved the ball into the turf instead, driving it into the end zone like a coup stick. You go from there to Billy White Shoes Johnson’s touchdown dance, to the Ickey Woods shuffle, to Terrell Owens’s Sharpie.

As the modern game emerged, here was the big question: Who will represent the league? The coach or the quarterback? Who will determine its style? Lombardi, with his coach pants and short sleeves and wire frames and buzz cut? Or Joe Namath, with his white shoes and fur coat and Lincoln Continental and Fu Manchu mustache, which, in 1968, he shaved on live TV for $10,000? (Namath was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, apparently on general principle.) According to David Maraniss, the author of
When Pride Still Mattered
, Lombardi’s last words, spoken in a delirium on his deathbed, were: “Joe Namath! You’re not bigger than football! Remember that!”

But Joe Namath was bigger than football—or, more dangerous, Joe Namath and those who rode the tails of his fur coat would become football. It had been the muck and the mire of a team in the pile, but it would be the quarterback. As Louis B. Mayer knew, every picture needs a star. In this inhumanly violent game, where players are armored and often indistinguishable, the quarterback is the standout, the figure onto whom we project our fantasies. More than just another player, he’s an archetype, like the cowboy or gangster. He stands for certain national characteristics. He represents us. His career is our life compressed to a handful of seasons. If you pick one to follow and he prospers, you will ultimately see a man when he’s young and green, and when he’s so old only knowledge and desire remain.

You can have a quarterback as a Catholic has a patron saint, a figure to focus on amid the chaos. Sid Luckman was the first to lead a modern offense. Johnny Unitas was the first to become a pop star—this had everything to do with television. Joe Namath was the first to become a trendsetter and revolutionary, a flash of color in a black-and-white world, “a real ring-ding-a-ding finger-snapper,”
Sports Illustrated
reported in 1965, “a girl ogler, a swingin’ cat with dark good looks who sleeps till noon.” But my favorite was Jim McMahon, who served as a kind of avatar. His struggles seemed to replicate and amplify my own, what I faced and how I wanted to react. The way he responded in crucial moments, how he seemed to get even better after he’d been hurt, the way, in the midst of the crowd, he always seemed in some fundamental sense to be all alone—it was everything I wanted to be.

How does the quarterback represent us?

The quarterback is man in pain. Via his suffering, we witness our own suffering at a safe remove. We eat chips and drink beer as he’s lacerated, stepped on, stomped, taunted, concussed. It’s the sort of physical torment that certain Christian sects fixate on, a Jesus-on-the-road-to-Calvary spectacle that is liberating because it shows you’re not alone.
The Passion of the Quarterback.
When I asked McMahon what sort of injuries he had in the course of his fifteen-year career, he gripped his shoulder and said, “Well, I destroyed my shoulder. You maybe know about that; it was bad. Then there was the Charles Martin thing”—the dirtiest play I’ve ever seen. “I wrecked my hands and knees, my head, lots of dings and concussions, go into a room now, can’t remember why I’m there, like,
Who are you and why are we talking?
Haha, just kidding—
or am I
? In ’91, I broke five ribs off my sternum in New York and bruised my heart. I could’ve punctured it, but it just bruised. That was an unusual injury: How many other guys have broken all those ribs off the sternum? Some guys get a cracked rib here or there, but to break them off your sternum? And then to hurt your kidney the way I hurt mine…?”

The kidney was a defining injury for McMahon. It happened in 1984, when the Bears hosted the Los Angeles Raiders, the reigning Super Bowl champs. The Raiders were considered the meanest team in the NFL, so for the Bears this was a nasty version of
King of the Hill
. Some consider it the most violent game ever played. Los Angeles lost two quarterbacks that afternoon. Their third-stringer, thirty-eight-year-old punter Ray Guy, refused to go in. There was a fifteen-minute delay while the first-stringer, Marc Wilson, was medicated, taped up, and sent back out.

In the third quarter, Mac, seeing no open receivers, tucked the ball under his arm and took off. “As I was running, I got jerked from behind,” he said, “and when I got jerked, my kidney was exposed and that’s when the guy hit me. And his helmet, it just sliced it in half.”

Sliced what in half?

“My kidney.”

Mac took two more snaps: it’s what the offensive lineman loved about him—he played the game like Doug Plank, a human missile living in the right fucking now.