Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (28 page)

McMahon made his entrance in the summer of 1982. “[He] walks into Halas Hall and he’s got a beer in his hand and a six-pack under his arm,” Ditka said. “I think it was Miller, but it might have been something else. He has a wad of tobacco under his lip, too. First thing he says is, ‘I was getting dry on the way in.’”

There had never been anyone like him in Chicago, a city where heroes were often of the role model variety. For those of us attracted to rebels and mavericks, he offered a way into the game. By my sophomore year in high school, the walls of my room were covered with pictures of Mac: in a headband, a wad of chew in his lip; cursing Ditka; jogging into the end zone with unhurried ease; set up in the pocket like he has all the time in the world, an inspiration for all those who want to stay calm amid the storm of life.

He was terribly out of shape—this resulted partly from his own nonchalance, partly from his holdout. He’d been drinking on the beach long after the other guys had taken up the spartan ways of the season. The team introduced him with “the Bears Mile,” an annual event at which, as the press snapped pictures, the squad ran around the track. McMahon was a mess, huffing and puffing. By the end, he stopped running altogether—it was the last time the team would ever invite reporters to watch the players run. “I remember his first year,” Ditka said, “he ran a mile and a half in almost 13 minutes, walking the last part, looking like he was going to puke and die, finishing behind everybody but our very heavy offensive lineman Noah Jackson—but he was on board. I read that in 1984, even with his lacerated kidney, he’d gone out for Halloween with his teammates, dressed as a priest, drunk. He had a Bible with him, and I guess when you opened it, there were photos of naked women inside. Well, this was football, not religion.”

“I was his roommate in the first minicamp,” Tim Wrightman told me. “We were rookies. It was before the season. We weren’t even signed. It was three days. Sunday was the last. He goes out Saturday, then comes rolling in at three o’clock in the morning, blind drunk. He throws up till about six thirty, then we go to practice. Jim somehow fights through it, then, at the end, Ditka says, ‘Okay, we’re going to run ten cowboys.’ A cowboy was a sprint down the field, a walk back—a hundred and ten yards. Any other quarterback would have said, ‘It’s minicamp in May, it has nothing to do with the season; my hamstring’s a little tight, I can’t run those.’ But Jim did every one of those cowboys, then threw up. That’s why guys loved him as a captain and a leader. He didn’t take shortcuts. If he partied, he didn’t expect to get special treatment. It made you realize how tough he was—that’s why guys respected him and loved playing with him.”

Whenever I asked McMahon’s teammates to describe him as an athlete, they laughed. “As an athlete?” said Kurt Becker. “Horrible. He couldn’t scramble. He had a good arm but not a great arm. He wasn’t a pinpoint passer. But he did have knowledge of the game. That was his biggest attribute. He knew who was going to be open before the ball was snapped. He wasn’t a great specimen by any means, but he could read a defense.”

“He didn’t have the strongest arm, but he could get it there,” said Brian Baschnagel. “He had a great touch on the ball. He always put it where it needed to be in relationship to the defenders. Sometimes the ball would wobble, but his throws were easy to catch.”

Emery Moorehead: “He wasn’t going to hit a guy sixty yards down field but he would scramble and see somebody and have the strength to get it there. He knew the game inside out. That’s why he was able to stay in the league so long.”

Tim Wrightman: “Physically he doesn’t look like an athlete. He’s soft, pasty. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He couldn’t throw a spiral. Believe me, I caught lots of his passes. They never looked right. But he could read the defenses and he always found a way. He would switch the ball into his left hand on the goal line as he was getting tackled and throw it left-handed for a touchdown. He was just win at all costs. And he was smart. The guy could read defenses, and, most importantly, he was the only quarterback that could get along with Ditka.”

Ditka tried to revamp the Bears offense when he took over. “He came in with a scheme that was finally something other than Payton left, Payton right, Payton on the screen pass,” Moorehead told me. “That had been going on since Walter arrived. There was no diversity, no motions, everybody knew what was going to happen. It was pretty pathetic.” Ditka added deep routes and trick plays, but the offense remained woefully conservative. “It was boring,” McMahon said. “We ran the ball, not what I was used to. There wasn’t a whole lot to be successful with at quarterback for the Bears. There was nothing to do. You get to throw on third and long. If you’re lucky enough to get a first down, you keep playing. It was frustrating.”

Mac changed that: he would run Ditka’s plays only until he recognized a mismatch or a flaw in the defense, at which point he called an audible. This gave Ditka fits, but it finally made the Bears dangerous. But McMahon’s greatest contribution was leadership. Even on bad days, the team played better when he was on the field. With number 9 in the game, they always believed they could win. “It was his personality, the fact that he’d fight,” Plank told me. “If we needed a yard, he’d go headfirst. If it meant jumping off the ledge, he was going to jump off a ledge. I think the defenders looked at him and said, ‘Wow, we wish he was on our side.’ He was just one of those guys.”

“He played with total abandon and he’s not big,” said Fencik. “He took a beating.”

“Everybody rallied around him because he was willing to do whatever it took,” said Moorehead. “Even though he only weighed 190 pounds, he was just as physical as our linemen. He would deny the plays Ditka sent in, be like, ‘Nah, that ain’t gonna work.’ Then call a play of his own. And of course everybody really wanted to make that play work. Nine times out of ten, McMahon made the right call.”

“Jim knew what he was doing,” Ditka told me. “A lot of guys with audibles didn’t. If you knew the game and studied the game, it didn’t bother me if you wanted to change something. Nobody said the play I called was the best in the world. But I called it based on what I’d seen on film and everything.”

McMahon became the starting quarterback November 6, 1983, a week after Halas died. It took him time to find a rhythm, but by the middle of the following season, he’d become as effective as any other quarterback in the league. His impact is overlooked: Mac was playing in the era of masters like Marino, Elway, and Montana. He never put up big numbers—probably no QB could have with the Walter Payton Bears—but he had a talent for scoring when the game was on the line. He didn’t have the most passing yards, but he led in the only statistic that matters: wins. In one stretch, from 1984 to 1988, the Bears went 35 and 3 in games that McMahon started. There used to be a saying about Rocket Richard, the great hockey player: he’s not the fastest, but there’s no one quicker from the blue line to the goal. That was Mac. He could feel the end zone the way a surfer can sense the proximity of the sea: if it was on the wind, it made him wild. Though Halas was partly correct about McMahon—bad eye, weak arm—the quarterback did have the quality that Papa Bear prized above all others: the old zipperoo.

As we talked, McMahon kept making the same point about the ’85 Bears: amid all the hysteria for the defense, the offense is not given its proper due. “We scored the most points in the NFC that year, and the second most in the league,” he said. “We held the ball almost forty minutes a game. Tough to beat when you score that much and don’t give the ball back. And it gives the defense a good long break. You can’t win with just one side of the ball. Marino proved that in Miami. They had a great offense but couldn’t stop anybody. If you don’t perform on both sides, and have a good kicking game, you’re not going to win championships.”

“How do you think the ’85 Bears would do if they were playing today?”

“We’d still be kicking ass. Maybe we wouldn’t win a Super Bowl, but you have to remember, some of us are pushing sixty!”

It’s an old joke, and we both laughed. Then I asked McMahon if he still works out. Plank is in the gym several times a week, titanium shoulders and all. Fencik is all over the North Side on his bike. But Mac laughed. “I haven’t worked out in ten, twelve years,” he told me. “There’s not much I can do. I know I’ve got to do something. I’m fuckin’ feeling bad. But when I start to work out, I’m like, There’s nobody hitting me anymore, so why am I doing this? I did it for so long, it was my life for thirty-some years. It felt good to take the last few years off.”

I asked if he could still throw. I had brought a football. It was in my car. I had just reread Roger Kahn’s
The Boys of Summer
, published almost twenty years after the ’55 Dodgers won the World Series—a stretch similar to the one that separated Super Bowl XX from my discussions with the ’85 Bears. Kahn ended many interviews by asking some ancient Dodger to play catch. He would stand in the gloaming and toss a ball with a faded star. As he did, the years would fall away and the old men would again be as they had been on those dusky Ebbets Field afternoons, and Kahn, in the middle of life, would be as he’d been as a boy in the bleachers, when his heroes strode across the field like figures painted on a Greek vase.

I figured I’d do the same: me and Mac throwing the pill as the light went down. But football is not baseball, and the men I interviewed had been damaged by injury, consumed by surgery, recovery, implant, arthritis, depression. A few were all right, but many more were as dilapidated as old shotgun houses. In
Death of a Salesman
, Willy Loman objects to the indignity of capitalist America: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” he says, “a man is not a piece of fruit!” But that’s exactly what did happen to Willy Loman, and to a lot of old football players. Their youth is gone, and now only the peel remains, a husk filled with memories.

When I asked Mac if he wanted to play catch, he grimaced. “I haven’t thrown in years,” he told me. “My shoulder hurts so bad I can’t even throw my car keys.”

He sat a moment, then, hearing his friends in the pool, sighed, and said, “I’d better get back.”

He stood slowly, painfully, unfolding one joint at a time, then walked me out. “When you see the boys,” he said, “tell ’em Mac says hello.” Then, in the way of Colombo saving the best question for that moment when he stands with his trench coat in the doorway, I asked McMahon if it had been worth it. “Knowing what we know, about the injuries and the brain and CTE?”

He smiled and said, “I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”

13

STAR-CROSSED IN MIAMI

A typical position for backup quarterback Steve Fuller—on his ass, getting nothing done—during the Bears’ worst game of the season: December 2, 1985, when Don Shula and the Dolphins lay in ambush

By Thanksgiving 1985, it looked as if the Bears might never lose another game. The defense was only getting stronger. In addition to Buddy’s 46, opposing players had to master their own fear. “Before teams played the Bears, they weren’t even
thinking
about winning,” said Rex Ryan. “They were just hoping to survive—they didn’t want to get the crap kicked out of ’em. The ’85 Bears had teams beat before they even played.”

All of which drew special attention to the Dolphins game, played December 2, 1985, at the Orange Bowl. The 1972 Dolphins remain the only NFL team to go unbeaten in the regular season and playoffs, then win the Super Bowl. The veterans of that team, which won Super Bowl VII, let it be known that they did not want the Bears to match their record. They converged on Miami; they’d cheer from the ramparts as Don Shula and Dan Marino fought off the hordes. Before the game—it drew the largest audience in the history of Monday Night Football—you could see the old warriors dressed in sports coats and slacks, broad-chested men flashing Super Bowl rings, shoving those jeweled monstrosities right down the throat of the cameras.

In ways that would become clear, the game had been arranged as a kind of ambush. In a Western, the Kiowa scout would take one look at the shadows emerging from the tall grass and scream, “Run!” The players and coaches, the mood of each team, the tenor of practices—it gave you a queasy feeling. For starters, there were all those ’72 Dolphins, Bob Griese, Larry Csonka, Mercury Morris, who, in themselves, meant nothing—Csonka wasn’t going to play—but suggested how badly the Dolphins wanted the game. Then there were the Bears—Hampton, McMichael, Wilson—who seemed almost haughty, certain they could not be beaten. Then there was Miami itself: the sun and the umbrellaed cocktails, the girls on the beach where many of the Bears spent Monday afternoon, drinking and laughing and studying the line where the water went from turquoise to aqua. Then Ditka, who wanted to prove something, wanted to show that his offense was more than Walter left, Walter right, Walter up the middle. He’d beaten Landry and now wanted to beat that other deity, Don Shula, and do it in a way the maestro would understand.