Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (19 page)

“We did a deal right at his kitchen table,” Ditka wrote. “My contract for 100K was by far the smallest in the league, but that’s OK. That wasn’t my worry. I wanted to prove to Mr. Halas that he made the right decision.”

When the news hit the papers—Ditka to coach the Bears—the sportswriters went wild. That hothead? That hard-drinking, all-night-carousing pop-off artist? “The old man was on his deathbed,” said Bears quarterback Bob Avellini, “and here’s a guy writing a letter to that old man who’s been … what? A special teams coach for the Cowboys? And he gets the job? The odds of that happening are monumental. You don’t go from special teams to head coach. If there’s a coach on a lower rung than special teams, I can’t think of it.”

“Nobody else in the National Football League would have hired me, no question,” said Ditka. “Too many drawbacks. There’s an NFL image you have to be and maintain and I probably wasn’t it.”

“There were people right in the Bears organization who didn’t want me, who thought I was the stupidest hire of all time,” Ditka explains in
In Life, First You Kick Ass
. “But Papa Bear had the say-so—
he started the Goddamned NFL!
—and he gave me the job.”

“Some of the people who have known Ditka best … wonder if there is a punch line to this joke,” the Chicago columnist John Schulian wrote in
The Sporting News
. (“Hiring Ditka would be madness.”)

“I don’t know what was in George Halas’s mind when he hired Mike Ditka,” Bill Tobin, a Bears general manager, told me, “but I do know that Halas wanted physically aggressive teams, and that’s what Mike wanted, too. Halas knew Ditka and what Ditka stood for and what Ditka wanted from a team. The players that we’d been drafting from ’75 until Ditka got there came from the same cloth: hard-nosed, physical, intelligent people. Ditka was supposed to bring it all together and give us that identity.”

Before Ditka left Dallas, Landry offered a last bit of advice: “Whether you succeed or not, do it your way,” he said. “Don’t ever leave yourself open to doing it somebody else’s way, and then blame them if you fail.”

Ditka held his first team meeting as head coach in the summer of 1982 in Halas Hall. He was forty-three, a big man with a gaudy mustache and curled hair. He wore coach pants and a short-sleeve shirt stretched tight across the chest. He paced, chewing gum as he barked out words. He chewed so hard and fast you actually felt sorry for the gum. Every player in the locker room would remember this meeting as a pivotal moment, the end of one kind of life, the start of another. “I’ll never forget the first day I saw him, this tightly wound spring with close-set eyes that darted from side to side,” Mike Singletary wrote in
Calling the Shots.
“Intensity oozed from his skin. The first day, you knew change—for good, for bad, nobody was sure—was ahead.”

“I remember the first time Mike introduced himself as head coach so clearly,” Brian Baschnagel told me. “We were in Halas Hall in Lake Forest. Most of the guys were sitting in back—the first three or four rows were spotty with people, which was typical of team meetings. He comes in and doesn’t say a word, just looks at every one of us. There were probably fifty guys. After he had viewed every one of us, he says, ‘Hi guys, this is Mike Ditka, your new head coach. We’re going to the Super Bowl.’ And of course we all kind of nervously look at each other. Then he says, ‘I don’t know what year we’re going to the Super Bowl, but we’re going. It’s up to each and every one of you to decide whether or not you’ll be with us when we do.’”

“Size matters,” Doug Plank told me. “Having a guy five five walking in front of your team saying, ‘Hi, I’m the head coach, blah, blah,’ that’s one thing. But Ditka walking in at six three and looking like he’s been through a hurricane? Immediate respect. It didn’t take people long to figure out the terms he was coaching under.”

“I let them know there was going to be change,” Ditka told me. “We were going to win a Super Bowl but a lot of them weren’t going to be with us when we did. I didn’t say it to be cruel. It was just a fact.”

“There’s three kinds of coaches,” said Plank. “First, there’s the aspirin coach. He’s the guy that comes in and feeds you a bunch of baloney and makes you feel better initially, but nothing changes. Then there’s the penicillin coach. He comes in and fixes
almost
everything. The problems, the illnesses. But there’s one thing he can’t fix and that’s cancer on a team. What’s cancer? Guys don’t like each other, the offense versus the defense, huge attitudes. You need the third kind of coach for that: the chemo coach. Bill Parcells, Mike Ditka. The chemo coach comes in, man, he’s the new sheriff in town. He’s so powerful by the way he looks, his presence, his actions. If you got a bad attitude, you don’t buy into his system? He doesn’t care who you are—you’re gone.”

That July, the Bears had minicamp at Sun Devils Stadium in Phoenix, where, in the summer, the grass heats up to 120°. Ditka selected it with care: he did not believe the Bears’ failures had been caused by lack of talent alone but resulted from a losing attitude that can spread from player to player, a disease that must be sweated out. “If you accept defeat, you’re going to be defeated,” he said. “You can be gracious in defeat, but you better be doing flip flops inside. If you’re not churning, you’ll get your ass whipped, that’s all there is to it.”

When James Scott, a Bears star receiver, showed up late for practice, his equipment was put in a garbage bag and dumped in the hall. He was eventually cut. When Ricky Watts, a second-round pick in 1979, showed insufficient hustle, he was handed his own equipment-filled bag. (Ditka did give Watts another chance, but he was relegated to special teams and never started another game.) The fact that Scott and Watts were talented only emphasized the point: I don’t care who the fuck you think you are—you’re in, or out. Ditka wasn’t just getting players in shape, he was changing expectations. “The culture changed immediately,” said Kurt Becker. “The nonconformists were gone. And some of these were players, guys that had produced. It didn’t matter. If you weren’t with the program, goodbye.”

The practices that followed were as tough as any in the history of the league. Ditka ran ’em, pushed ’em, challenged ’em. If a guy doubled over, the bile filling his mouth, Ditka would say, “Look at it this way. You could be working for a living. And really, what can you do? I don’t think half of you are smart enough to get a job. We don’t need you. If you want to leave, get a better deal, fine, go.” Some players started calling Ditka “mad dog.”

“For all the pounding, the most important things were done subtly,” Baschnagel told me. “For example, he gave us two rules. Just two. First, we had to go unsupervised before practice and jog around the field twice; second, we had to do ten chin-ups on our own. If you can’t do ten chin-ups, do ten sit-ups. Those were his rules. And of course we all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, what’s the purpose of that?’ But those were the rules. And he’d watch: Which guys would try to get around doing those two laps and ten chin-ups? Maybe they’d do three or four chin-ups, or pull up after running a lap and a half. The guys that cheated on those two rules weren’t around for very long. I guess his point was that you have to do all the little things to be successful. All he had were two rules; if you couldn’t adhere to those, you weren’t going to sacrifice what was necessary for the team.”

*   *   *

Ditka was in a peculiar position. Though he was the Bears’ head coach, he controlled only the offense. The defense was coached by Buddy Ryan, who’d been hired by Neill Armstrong. When a head coach is fired, his staff usually goes, too. But in this case, when rumors of Armstrong’s ouster began to circulate, the team’s defensive standouts, who loved Buddy, took preemptive action. The Bears had remarkable defensive leaders: Alan Page, a Hall of Fame defensive tackle who now sits on the Minnesota Supreme Court, and Gary Fencik, the Yalie whom Mike Singletary described as “hit man bitch, reader of Kosinski and Fowles, world traveler, blues freak, fluent in the language of love.” As Ditka was writing to Halas, Page and Fencik, who believed the defense had made a breakthrough the previous season, were writing a letter of their own, which they carried around the locker room for every player on the defense to sign.

Dec. 9, 1981

Dear Mr. Halas,

We the undersigned members of the Bears defensive football team are concerned about the future of our team. We recognize that with the disappointing season the Bears have had this year that there may be changes in our coaching staff and/or administration of the team. Our main concern is over the fate of Buddy Ryan and the other defensive coaches … Buddy has maintained the discipline, morale, pride and effort that we need in order to play well defensively, in spite of the fact that we haven’t had much help from the offensive team …

“We knew Halas was supposed to be tough and not sympathetic to players, but we felt we had built something worth protecting on the defensive side,” Fencik told me, “and saw no other way to protect it. We had to reach out to the owner. We knew there’d be a coaching change, but we wanted Halas to keep the defensive coach. Everybody loved Buddy. We thought the defense was great.”

A week after Fencik and Page sent the letter, Halas showed up at a team practice, something he hardly ever did. He was a frail old man with blue eyes and a lantern jaw, more skeletal with each passing year. In the summer, he sped across the fields in a golf cart, “but it was winter, a cold, snowy day,” said Fencik, “and we were working out at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, practicing indoors. It killed the older guys because we played on a cement floor. Halas told our coaches to take a hike. He wanted to talk to the defense alone. When they left, he said, ‘I got your letter. Your coaches will be back next year.’” Halas also responded in writing:

… This is a magnificent letter! It is a beautifully written letter! It is the highest tribute a coach could receive!

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that this is the first time in the 61-year history of the Chicago Bears that such a letter has been written about a Bear coach … I’m so fortunate to have you boys on my team …

For Ditka, it must have been maddening. He was head coach but had little control over the defense—he could talk all he wanted but did not have the power to fire Buddy Ryan. The result was a rift between offense and defense, a rift and a rivalry. The squads traveled on separate buses, attended separate meetings, followed separate codes. Ditka and Ryan were often at war. It was not an act: these men truly hated each other. It was the energy behind everything; it was there at halftime, at the beginning and end of each practice and game. “Every now and again, when things weren’t going well on the field, Mike would come by and make some suggestions,” Ryan said. “I’d just tell him to go blank himself, and he’d turn around and walk off.”

In an unintended, roundabout way, this dysfunction actually helped the Bears: as squad went after squad, every practice turned into a battle and the players drove each other to the heights of ferocity. Asked to name the best team he faced in 1985, Ditka said, “the Bears.” “When you went out for a normal practice, you wouldn’t wear as many pads,” Plank told me, “but when Mike came to town and Buddy was the defensive coordinator, you went to every practice thinking, You know what? A game could break out here at any moment. I’m taking everything.”

“Our sidelines were a joke during the games,” Jim McMahon told the writer Steve Delsohn. “I bet if people really knew what was going on back then, they would be amazed that we could win. They were fighting each other all the time. Ditka would yell at him to run a certain defense, and Buddy would say, ‘Fuck you, I run the defense, get outta here.’”

“I give Mike all the credit,” Plank told me. “Not many CEOs could manage circumstances like that. Imagine being the boss of a company and half the employees don’t have to answer to you. But he figured out how to make it work. He knew the right buttons to push. Sometimes it was defensive buttons to get us angry or drive Buddy up the wall. He manipulated us, figured out how to push us where we had to go. The goal was winning. To do that, we needed to be a unit. If that meant getting players to hate coaches, fine. In the end, he showed an unbelievable ability to change a situation that hadn’t changed since 1963. The Bears had been wallowing in mediocrity for years. It took Ditka along with a defensive coach that became his nemesis to make it work. There weren’t a handful of people on this planet that could have done it.”

*   *   *

For a fan, a new coach is like a new boyfriend. At first, it’s heady talk and promises of you and me, walks in the moonlight, singing telegrams on your birthday, but sooner or later you figure out what this guy is really all about. Ditka arrived in 1982. By the end of his first season, most of us had realized he was insane. Now, when he appears on television and occasionally turns up in movies, what you see is a parody: Ditka at seventy-four playing Ditka at forty-four—a cartoon that, even in the memory of most fans, has replaced the coach as he was in ’82, flipping off reporters, kicking benches to smithereens.

Rick Telander, a
Sports Illustrated
and
Sun-Times
writer who lived in a house beside Halas Hall, tells a story in the book he wrote with Ditka (
In Life, First You Kick Ass
) about a construction worker who, while patching Telander’s roof, got into it with the coach. Telander heard the construction guy say something, followed by a few shouted words. A moment later, he came downstairs, “terrified.”

What’s wrong? asked Telander.

“Ditka yelled at me.”

“What did he yell?”

“
‘
Use your hammer, not your mouth, jackass!’”

Ditka was moody and tantrum-prone. After a loss in Baltimore, he punched a wall, breaking his hand. Before the next game, he waved his cast at his players, saying, “Win one for Lefty.” Jerry Vainisi admonished Ditka, saying, “Your technique is coach by crisis. You always have to have some crisis to overcome. It diverts attention from the game. The players don’t understand it. They think you’re crazy.”