Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (30 page)

The Bears’ take on the tradition was crude but wonderful in the way it seemed to blow out the mental detritus of a lifetime of losing. It opened with Payton dispelling any criticism of motives. Why were the Bears dancing like fools, he asked. Simple: to help the needy. Richard Dent called himself the Sackman and prophesied his imminent return, Gault characterized himself as a chocolate swirl, and Steve Fuller compared himself to thunder and lightning.

The video was shot at the Park West, a music venue on the North Side. Payton and McMahon refused to participate. “When the idea was brought to us, it was to feed the homeless on Thanksgiving and Christmas,” McMahon told me. “It seemed like a nice thing. But I didn’t know anything about a video—Willie only told us about the record. Then two or three weeks later, he said, ‘Okay, now we have to make the video.’ We’re like, Shit, you didn’t say anything about a video. And they had us taping it the day after we lost in Miami. Everybody got home at three or four in the morning—you had to be at the studio at eight o’clock. Walter and I told them, ‘We’ll do it after the season.’ But they said, ‘No, we have to release it with the record.’ So we just didn’t show up. They did everybody’s part. Walter and I finally did ours a week later, after practice, in the racquetball court at Halas Hall. We weren’t too happy about it.”

The song was a smash in Chicago. More than half a million copies sold. James Joyce never won a Nobel Prize.
Taxi Driver
lost the Oscar to
Rocky
. Jim Thorpe had all his gold medals stripped. But “The Super Bowl Shuffle” was nominated for a Grammy. Whatever else you might say, it’s catchy. A few verses have stuck in my mind: several times a year, they return like a case of tropical sprue. McMahon describing himself as the Punky QB, for example, or Wilson calling himself Mama’s Boy Otis, or Fencik identifying himself as the Hit Man. “Fencik shouldn’t have done it,” McMichael said, “because he showed everybody how horseshit of a dancer he was.”

Fencik’s dancing
is
terrible, but Fuller’s is worse; he was Eddie Murphy’s parody of a white guy, the backup quarterback flailing his arms as he raps.

Like many vivid childhood memories, “The Super Bowl Shuffle” fills me with a special kind of shame today. My face turns red when I hear it; my neck tingles. As you grow up you become too tasteful to enjoy things that once filled you with pleasure. Past thirty, most of us become too smart for our own good.

At the time of its release, the greatness of the “Shuffle” was beyond question. I had the single and the video. I scattered it on mix tapes, so, now and then, between Springsteen and Dylan, it came as a surprise that made me smile. In the summer of 1986, some friends and I, members of a softball team called the North Shore Screen Doors, recorded our own version. I remember just one verse, written for my friend Mark, who, having contracted the “kissing disease,” missed most of the season:

I swing like golf to psych a pitcher out

that’s why they call me Mr. Rout.

Doc, give me a shot, so I can play,

cause the Doors are hot every single day.

He said sorry, son, I know how you feel

But you’ve got to stay in bed till your mono is healed.

And I said, look, I don’t want to go out just to get a tan

I want to go do the Screen Door Slam!

The possibility of summoning the jinx—that’s the only thing that concerned most of us. Boasting of a triumph that has yet to be accomplished is the worst kind of bad luck. You might as well break a thousand mirrors or walk under every ladder from Glencoe to East Wacker Drive. There was a terrible history of this in Chicago. In 1969, shortly before the Cubs collapsed, a few musicians recorded the song “Hey, Hey” with the chorus, “Hey, Hey, holy mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way!” In 1972, Steve Goodman, a folk singer from Park Ridge, released “Go Cubs Go!,” the refrain of which (“Hey, Chicago, what do you say, the Cubs are gonna win today!”) turned haunting when the Cubs crumbled. In 1984, a month before the Cubs imploded in the National League playoffs, a handful of players released a country single that seemed an ominous precursor to “The Shuffle.” Leon Durham sang on it, as did Jody Davis and the ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe: “As sure as there’s ivy on the center-field wall, the men in blue are gonna win it all.”

I remember an emotional phone call with my brother who was in law school. “The Super Bowl Shuffle” struck him as an act of madness. “The idiots!” he said, sobbing, “have they no memory? Don’t they understand the importance of precedent?” (My brother was halfway through a first-year course on Constitutional law.) I defended the Bears—this team was different, I said, better and nastier, strong enough to whip the jinx. “The outcome is not a matter of curses,” I said. “It’s a matter of deciding who will be the hit-ees and who will be the hit-ors.”

“You’re too young,” shouted my brother. “You don’t remember. I sang ‘Go Cubs Go’ all summer in 1972 and look what happened!” Then he said something my parents said whenever a topic like the Cuban missile crisis came up: “To you, it’s history, but it’s my life!”

In the end, the Bears were saved by the very success of “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” which resulted in copycats. The Dallas Cowboys released “Living the American Dream.” The Cleveland Browns released “Masters of the Gridiron.” The L.A. Raiders released “Silver and Black Attack.” The L.A. Rams released “Let’s Ram It.” When everyone courts the jinx, there is no jinx.

The story ended in a classically Chicago way. There was controversy regarding the money and how much of it would actually go to charity, participants felt betrayed, and the Illinois attorney general, Neil Hartigan, had to get involved. All these years later, it’s still a sore subject. “There were a lot of hard feelings about it because even though money went to charity, many people thought more should have gone,” Gary Fencik told
ESPN.com
in 2005. “Even the backup band wasn’t happy with their cut. But it is what it is.”

14

THE FERGUSON HIT

Wilber Marshall (58) and Dan Hampton (with the ball) celebrating during their December 22, 1985, thrashing of Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers, as Mike Singletary (50) gets back to business

Every now and then, a single play captures the spirit of a team. It can stand for an entire season. If you want to learn about the ’85 Bears, you can talk to old players and old coaches about tactics, or you can simply say, “Tell me about the Ferguson Hit.”

The Bears underperformed in the weeks following the Miami game, stumbling through the remainder of their schedule with workmanlike wins over the Colts and the Jets. There was something bleak about this part of the season. It was like the chapter in the book in which the golden boy is set upon by gloom and wonders about the purpose of life. After all, these games had little meaning, the Bears having long since clinched their division as well as home-field advantage in the playoffs. Ditka worried that his players would bring this bad mood into the postseason. The landfill of history is packed with teams that peaked too soon. The Bears needed a shot of adrenaline to wake the barking dogs.

They ended the season at the Silverdome in Detroit. The Detroit Lions were at best mediocre, but their general manager had traded for one of my favorite quarterbacks, Joe Ferguson, who, at thirty-six, was still a creative playmaker and a terrific scrambler. I wanted the Bears to win but expected to see Ferguson complete a few passes. It’s a weakness of mine: I root for the old guys, their old guys as well as my own. What actually happened gave me a sense of what it must have been like for fans whose teams fell into the gears of the 46.

It was on the second or third play of the game. Ferguson took a snap, dropped back, looked downfield, but only for a moment, as the Bears were coming. He scrambled outside, doing his Ferguson thing, stumbled—watching it again, I think,
Go down!
—righted himself, then looked up just in time to see Wilber Marshall coming full steam, lowering his head, launching. The crown of Marshall’s helmet hit the aging quarterback square on the chin. He went skyward, then dropped. You could see that he was out cold. He landed in the heavy way of an inanimate object. As this was happening to his body, his soul, his spirit, his consciousness, everything that made Joe Ferguson Joe Ferguson, was somewhere else. “I can still see the lick Marshall put on Ferguson,” said Ditka. “My God, I thought he’d killed him.”

The Lions’ coach came out onto the field, followed by a trainer. Someone picked up Ferguson’s arm and let it go. It dropped, lifeless. For the moment, he’d been turned into a cadaver. The backup quarterback, Eric Hipple, walked onto the field to talk to the coach. He stood there as the staff worked on Ferguson. It was a naturally occurring split screen: dead Ferguson and concerned coach; concerned coach and fresh quarterback emerging from his can.

A few minutes later, Ferguson, having been revived, sat on the sideline, helmet off, hair tousled, dazed. I’ve seen the same look on the faces of old hobos on the Bowery, methadone addicts on withdrawal, winos with delirium tremens. If El Greco came back, he might want to paint Joe Ferguson five minutes after that hit, his eyes as wide as saucers, a fog all around him, the roof of the Silverdome rising above.

Marshall’s blow did not knock Ferguson out of the NFL. In fact, he stuck around for another four seasons, playing his last game for Indianapolis in 1990. But whenever I spotted him, I would think, But I saw him die in Detroit!

While working on this book, I decided to track down Joe Ferguson. It took about twenty seconds to find his number. He sells real estate in Arkansas. I got his machine. I was surprised by his voice. I had watched him play but had never listened to him talk: he had the thickest Southern accent I’ve ever heard; he sounded like a moonshiner from the Ozarks. Who’d buy a house from this guy? I left a message, telling him I wanted to discuss his career with Buffalo and Detroit, his playing style, his college glory, and maybe we could touch on the game against the Bears in 1985. He left a message for me a few days later, saying he’d be happy to talk, but he never returned any of my follow-up calls.

Around this time, I met Gary Fencik in Chicago. I told him about my back-and-forth with Ferguson. He laughed. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Well, it’s just that Ferguson’s never going to talk to you about that play. I know, because I tried, too. We happened to be at the same golf tournament. And I said to myself, ‘Hey, Joe Ferguson!’ So I went over, really dying to talk about it, but before I got within ten feet, he puts up his hand and says, ‘I know what you want to talk about and it will not be discussed. And besides,’ he said, ‘I’m the worst guy to talk to about it. I don’t remember anything that happened the day before or for two days after. It’s completely blank. I recovered, and that’s all.’”

For the Bears, the Ferguson Hit was an elixir. It set the tone for the playoffs. It closed the season with a flourish, put an exclamation point on a body of work: four seconds of action that captured the essence of the 46. Especially telling is the fact that Marshall’s play would now get you suspended. (He was fined.) Hitting with the helmet, hitting in the head, hitting a defenseless player, hitting to injure—it’s everything officials are trying to drum out of the league. As Plank said when I spoke to him, “My entire career would be considered a penalty today.”

It’s a matter of special interest to veterans and coaches of the ’85 Bears: When your entire style of play is banned, what does it do to your legacy? And what does it mean to fans who loved that team and writers who gloried in it? If you get pleasure from watching the Ferguson Hit, what does it say about you?

“What the league has done with the rules is right,” Ditka told me. “You’ve got to protect the player from injury at all costs. Football’s a collision sport. People collide at high speed. And what’s happening, in my opinion, is that the helmet, once meant for protection, has become a weapon. They’re trying to get people to quit leading with their head. There’s a lot of other ways to tackle. Originally, when you were taught to tackle, it wasn’t with your head. The new rules are just trying to get us back to that.”

Other football men were less sympathetic. After discoursing on the glory of big hits, Bill Tobin, who worked for the Bears from 1975 to 1993, eventually becoming the team’s general manager, told me, “And now they’re saying, well, late in life, these injuries are showing up. Hey, if you’re a coal miner, things show up. If you’re a farmer, things show up. The liabilities are there and if you want to take them, go for it. If you don’t, get up in the stands and be a cheerleader or join the band.”

“They’re sissies,” said running back coach Johnny Roland, who was himself a stand-out ball carrier for the Cardinals and the Giants. “They can’t even play football now. They don’t even know how to tackle. They want to protect the quarterback ’cause they’re making so much money and the fans want to see the quarterback. But if you get a good running shot at a guy, hell, that’s why they call it football. They don’t call it tiddleywinks, they call it football.”