Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (32 page)

It was in fact freakishly temperate on game day. Upper twenties, low thirties. When McMahon came out for warms-up, a plug of tobacco in his lip, throwing elegantly, each gesture exaggerated, he was wearing the headband. It portended an act of keen defiance, as Pete Rozelle would be attending the game in person.

The tenor of the day would be established in the first possession: either Dickerson was going to be able to run, or it was over. He was tall and lean, an exclamation point broken free from the page. He wore clear sports glasses, the strappy kind that hold fast and resemble skin-diving gear. He was handed the ball on the Rams’ first play. He went here and there, then ran bang into Fencik, who’d snuck up to the line. Any beginning that includes the safety tackling the star runner in his own backfield can be considered inauspicious. “Here’s Fencik,” said John Madden, “clean, nice guy, good-looking guy, Yale and all that, but when he gets that look in his eyes, it’s Jekyll and Hyde.”

McMahon soon took over, leading the Bears downfield. He got to the Rams’ 16-yard line. The TV camera moved across the stands: a wash of faces, a thousand superfans, a million beautiful mustaches, ten million brawts, a billion links of sausage. He crouched behind center, read the defense, began to shout. He dropped back, looked and looked, spotted something, and took off, feet flying, head high. When McMahon ran, you knew you were seeing something. It was the way he moved, how he carried himself, wild, intoxicated. He went through the defense like a drunk going through a bar—filled with bad intent. He slowed as he crossed the goal line, raised his arms, then handed the ball to Kurt Becker, who spiked it with the joy of a lineman who, on most occasions, remains anonymous.

A moment later, Mac was on one knee on the sideline, grizzled, packed with chew, watching the defense. He was beside a warmer, a blowing machine. He turned and looked at the camera. No Adidas. He was instead wearing a blank headband on which he’d written
ROZELLE
. A small act of comic rebellion, it hit the city like a starburst.
McMahon!
Rozelle loved it: selling Adidas was one thing, selling the commissioner was something else. In the world of professional sports, which tends to be humorless, a joke can feel like a revolution. Given a choice between defiance and submission, McMahon found a third way.

The Rams had their best chance in the second quarter. They were moving. They gave the ball to Dickerson. He plowed ahead, vanished, then popped above the pile. He looked pained as he was stood up, driven back, and dropped. It was a violent collision, delivered by Singletary, one of those helmet-shattering hits that make everyone in the stadium groan. Writing about it later, Singletary sounded weirdly sexual: “Oh, what a shot! It was beautiful, orgasmic, a lightning bolt that resulted in a one yard loss. I screamed.

“I imagine kids fantasizing that when Otis or Wilber makes a sack it’s them out there on Soldier Field playing before 60,000 fans,” Singletary added. “Their whole week, their life, is made better, more meaningful, and we have something to do with it. It’s therapy when we win.”

In the course of sixteen possessions, the Rams went three-and-out eight times. They averaged less than two yards a play. Their longest drive went twenty-seven yards. Buddy was wrong. Dickerson did not fumble three times, but he did fumble twice, which will do in a pinch. In the second half, just as Ditka had prognosticated, it started to snow—not regular flakes either, but silver dollars that fell like happy tears. “God, it was beautiful,” Ditka wrote. “… the big slow flakes coming down like in one of those Christmas snow globes, and it was perfect. Bears weather, Bears dominance, Bears success, Bears kicking ass.”

Late in the third, McMahon changed Ditka’s play at the line. You can tell by the way Ditka explodes as Mac drops back, rolls left, then finds Gault in the end zone. Touchdown. Mac races downfield, in search of linemen to head-butt. He walks over to Ditka, who glares, shouts, turns, stalks off. It’s like the moment in the movie when the veteran chews out the flying ace:
Yes, it worked, but someday that kind of maverick stunt will get us all killed!

Bill Murray is on the sideline, standing beside the blowers, wearing an iron-man-era leather helmet in the snow. He’s laughing and smiling, as happy as any other fan who’d lived through years of collapse. “I wonder how Murray got on the sideline,” says Madden. “The league office won’t like that. They won’t like McMahon’s headband and they won’t like that, either.” At one point, the camera pulls back to reveal the city skyline. It’s smaller than it is today, half the buildings, a third the size. It’s a jarring image that reminds you that this story is set in the same place George Lucas set
Star Wars
: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

All the while, you can feel energy building on the defensive side of the ball. It was one of the things that made Buddy’s defense so hard to play: he never did what was expected. With a game in hand, most coaches would shift into a prevent formation, put in the backups, call off the dogs. But Buddy kept blitzing. The blitz has always been a rarity: an aggressive defense might blitz ten times all day. During a game in 1984, Buddy called up eight straight blitzes. He was like that crazy fuck at the roulette table who bets only double zero. A guy like that makes you nervous: either he knows something, or he’s insane.

The Bears kept after Rams quarterback Dieter Brock. Something was going to happen. You could feel it. Then, with two minutes and fifty seconds left, something did. Richard Dent, coming from the blind side, unblocked, running free, crushed the Rams’ QB. Brock’s body, his poor weak human body, folded like a bad musical. The football came loose, bounded away. Marshall picked it up and took off. Just like that, he had men with him: the Fridge and Otis, a security detail racing toward the end zone as the stadium burst. And every beer was spilled. And every brawt was coughed up. And every card was dealt. And every cherry dropped in every slot machine. And every bride said “I do.” “I was ten, fifteen yards behind the play, running like mad, trying to keep up,” Fencik told me. “It was every dream I ever had coming true. It was every game of snowy backyard football going exactly as I’d pictured it. In that moment—my God, I will never experience anything like it again!—I was a player on the field, but, as I was chasing Wilber in the snow, I was a fan, too. I was a fan in a stadium filled with fans, and so happy because the Bears were finally going to the Super Bowl!”

The crowd counted off the last ten seconds: five, four, three …

In Chicago, you come into the street after a game like that and the city is one giant room and everyone is hugging and shouting and going crazy. I never had World War II; I never had V-J day; I was never a sailor and I never kissed a girl in Times Square—but I did have this.

In the locker room, Pete Rozelle presented Virginia and Ed McCaskey with the NFC Championship Trophy, which, in March 1984, had been renamed for George Halas. Payton hugged Virginia as Dick Butkus walked from locker to locker, shaking hands. Ditka got the team together. In an attempt at eloquence, he quoted Robert Frost but mangled it. In mangling it, he wrote his own poem, the song of the steelworker’s son who’s gone all the way. “You had to cry watching Ditka after the game as layer by layer Iron Mike began to melt,” Singletary wrote. “He stood in front of us, smoking a cigar, head down, lifting it only to speak. You knew that he was thinking of Papa Bear—that he’d finally re-paid the old man’s confidence. ‘I just want to say, you guys have accomplished something special,’ coach said. Down went the head, the feet shuffled. There were tears in his eyes when he spoke again. ‘There’s a poem,’ he said: ‘We’ve gone many miles, but there’s more to go before we can sleep.’”

16

A BUNCH OF CRYBABIES

Walter Payton, voguing for the press during Super Bowl week, 1986

I arrived in New Orleans on Thursday afternoon. I checked into a motel in Metairie. I was staying with my friend Matt Lederer. Each day, we woke at 11:00 a.m., watched an hour of TV, then caught a taxi to the French Quarter. I was seventeen, in possession of money that I had not earned, decked out in Bears regalia, and filled with the old zipperoo. It seemed like the entire city of Chicago was down there, mingling and exchanging predictions. Everyone had a story: some of us had followed the team for years, remembered Ditka as a player and only wanted to live long enough to see one more championship; some of us were new to the team and believed this is how it would always be; some of us were born in the desert and had known nothing but this wandering life—but all of us fell upon New Orleans like parched rats, gulping down milk and honey.

As soon as the Bears arrived, they were awash in controversy. The first issue had to do with McMahon’s ass, which he had bruised while sliding during the Rams game. “Yeah, I remember it,” said Kurt Becker, who shared a room with Mac in New Orleans. “It’s funny to remember a bruise on another man’s ass twenty-five years later, but it was so disgusting. I couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. And I want to.” Becker likened the bruise to a map on which different shades of purple denote varying elevations. McMahon believed the bruise could be properly treated only by a Japanese acupuncturist who’d helped him before: Hiroshi Shiriashi. But when Shiriashi turned up for the flight to New Orleans, Mike McCaskey wouldn’t let him on the plane. McMahon used his first Super Bowl Week press conference to denounce McCaskey. It sounds silly, but for several days the main topic of conversation, even among old Chicago guys, was the condition of McMahon’s butt and the effectiveness of non-Western medicine. The story reached its apogee midweek, when McMahon mooned a news chopper.

The second issue was more and less serious. Early one morning, a New Orleans DJ went on the radio and said that McMahon, while partying in the French Quarter, had been heard describing the men of New Orleans as stupid and the women as sluts. More serious because it resulted in death threats and turned Mac into a villain; less serious because the DJ later admitted he’d invented the story. The comments were out of character, anyway. McMahon never insulted civilians.

As fans, we worried that such sideshows suggested the Bears were taking the Patriots too lightly. Many players did indeed consider them pretenders. Chicago played New England the second week of the season, a game in which they sacked Patriots quarterback Tony Eason six times and knocked him down constantly. They beat him up and put a fear in him that, according to McMichael, never went away. Hampton said he knew the Super Bowl would be a romp that Wednesday, when he watched Eason at a press conference. He could tell just by looking at the quarterback’s eyes. Worried, scared, he had not come to fight. He was hoping only to survive. Singletary had taken a room by himself in the hotel. He stripped a sheet off the second bed and hammered it to the wall, improvising a movie screen, where he watched hour after hour of film. As his teammates partied, the middle linebacker, awash in room service plates, searched the Patriots offense for weaknesses.

The Bears had a final meeting the day before the Super Bowl. Ditka said his piece, then the offense and defense split up for separate discussions. Buddy went through the game plan, then, at the moment when he’d normally offer some parting wisdom, just stood quietly, as if considering. There’d been rumors. Everyone heard them during the playoffs: that Buddy, after five years of battling Ditka, had finally been offered a head coaching job of his own and would soon leave for Philadelphia. If true, the Super Bowl would be his last game as a Bear, his last game at the helm of a defense he had shaped in his own image. Buddy was more than a coach. He was the leader of a sect, where hitting was a ritual and concussing was a triumph and getting concussed was a sacrifice. For many of these men, football was Buddy Ball. Playing for an ordinary nickel-loving coach was hard to imagine. And yet they were not naïve. They knew it was the same for coaches as for players: careers in the game being so vanishingly short, you take the opportunity. As the flanker tells the owner in the movie version of
North Dallas Forty
, “We’re not the team. You’re the team. We’re only the equipment.”

Buddy admitted none of this; talking about next year while the fate of the current season is yet to be decided violates league rules as well as a taboo. It’s a mean, violent world: take your eyes off the prize, you’re dead. It’s exactly how heavily favored teams blow championships. But Buddy let his players understand the truth in his silence, his lumpy awkwardness. Then, when each man had stopped and considered and realized—the end of Buddy would be the end of the elite unit, the end of an ethos—he cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said, “No matter what happens after tomorrow, you guys are my heroes,” then walked out.

There was a moment of silence. It distended. It went on. In it, you could hear sobs and great big men weeping, tears flowing down thick gleaming faces. “Guys were sniffling and crying. Real quiet,” Ron Rivera, a backup linebacker on the ’85 Bears and the current head coach of the Carolina Panthers, said later. “Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, McMichael goes, ‘What a bunch of crybabies. We’re getting ready to play the most important game of our lives, and all you guys can do is whine about this?’ And he grabs a chair and throws it across the room and it sticks in the chalkboard.”