Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (35 page)

Steve McMichael (seated left), Dan Hampton (seated right), and William Perry filming a McDonald’s commercial in November 1985

Two: it was the players. They lost their focus, went soft, bought into the hype. It was the Super Bowl itself that undid them, the narcotic of winning, the trophy and the parades and the party that erupted in every room they entered. In short, the Bears sold out. “We had the same players as the year before,” wrote Payton, “but not the same desire, not the same hunger.”

You’ve seen it in a hundred movies, every time some yokel wins the lottery or strikes oil: how quickly he forgets who he is and where he comes from—he leaves in denim and returns in velvet. During the off-season, when they should have been training like Spartans, several Bears, including McMichael and Perry, went on the road with the World Wrestling Federation, appearing in capes and tights, spangles and glitter boots, standing on the third rope, calling out Jake the Snake Roberts. By the end of 1985, ten Bears, including an offensive lineman, had their own radio shows. (If you pay attention, you’ll notice that most NFL dynasties come in small markets, where there are fewer temptations.) By the first preseason game of 1986—played in London—Ditka had given up the sleeveless sweater-vest and coach pants that defined him as part of a style-starved breed. A Chicago clothier, spotting an opportunity, had begun to dress the coach. It was double-breasted and tweed from there: cuffs, pleats, snap-brim caps. Ditka opened a bar called City Lights, then a restaurant. It seemed every player owned an eatery. Mike Tomczak, a backup quarterback, opened T&T’s in Joliet with guard Tom Thayer. Payton had two bars in Schaumburg and another out where the sun meets the corn. Fencik opened the Hunt Club on the North Side. McMahon opened Arena, a restaurant in Northbrook. Even Kevin Butler, the kicker, had a restaurant.

Ditka castigated his players for their spirit-sapping overexposure.
Stay off the goddamn TV!
Which explains one of the big complaints about the coach: hypocrisy. The fact is, Ditka did more commercials than the rest of them combined. He endorsed a plethora of products in the ’80s: Peak Antifreeze, Dristan, Budget Rent A Truck, Talman Home Federal Savings and Loan, Hanes, Campbell’s Soup, Chunky Brand. “He’d tell us to stay off television, then he’d turn around and do the commercials he made us turn down,” Otis said. “When we did that ‘Super Bowl Shuffle,’ he told us he’d never, ever do a video. Then, all of a sudden, he comes out with the ‘Grabowski Shuffle.’”

The nadir of the sellout was the Fridge on
The Bob Hope Christmas Special
:

HOPE:
They said you can bench-press 465 pounds. Is that true?

PERRY:
Yes. I get a lot of practice by lifting myself out of bed in the morning.

PERRY:
People are making me out to be a lot bigger than I am. You know what that’s like, don’t you?

HOPE:
Careful, Fridge.

Three: it was the 46 defense. Simply put, other teams cracked it. This was an endless topic of conversation in my interviews. Whenever I asked, “How do you beat the 46?” I’d get back a carefully considered answer. The introduction of the 46 was an evolutionary step in football. Beating it was therefore about more than the Bears: it was about the game, a sport that each of these men, even those who’ve been seriously damaged, love. They discussed the riddle of the 46 as an old general might discuss Patton’s solution to Rommel. “Against that great defense, you wanted to play a very simple game,” Jaworski told me. “The Bears weren’t going to score a lot of points and you weren’t going to score a lot of points, so don’t take risks. Try to be close in the fourth quarter, then go for a big play.”

“The best way was to block eight people, then send out two wide receivers,” said McMahon. “That’s what the Redskins did to us in ’86 and it’s how you beat the defense. If they’re going to put pressure on you, block everybody and make your corners chase two guys around all day. As good as our guys were, they still couldn’t cover all day long. If you don’t get to the quarterback, the whole thing falls apart.”

“That defense changed the way the game is played,” Ditka told me. “’Cause if you bunch up your offense, the Bears’ ’85 defense would kill you. The solution was to spread everyone out. You do that, you can see where the guy is lined up without a blocker, hiding. Then pick him up. That’s why, in today’s game, guys line up from sideline to sideline. It’s how they solved the Bears’ defense.”

The Spread Offense. Variations of the spread are almost as old as football, but Mike Ditka told me it became a rage in the 1980s and ’90s, in part as a response to the 46 defense. If you spread the offensive players out from sideline to sideline, the guards and tackles can see where the extra rushers are hiding and pick them up. Versions of this offense have come to dominate the game.

“No matter how smart a coach or a scheme, the other guys eventually catch up,” Jaworski explained. “You got all kinds of guys studying this stuff all the time. Coaches and scouts, everyone. Finding that weakness, that tip, that hint that could beat it. It’s a game of adjustment. In the off-season, what these coaches do is remarkable. The time they put in, searching for the answer. So, by the end of the ’86 season, the other coaches had figured out the 46.”

*   *   *

Four: it was McMahon. I heard this again and again. McMichael: “We could have been the team of the decade if McMahon stayed healthy.” Fencik: “’86 was an interesting year; we wanted to prove it wasn’t just Buddy. But we didn’t have McMahon.” Baschnagel: “I think Jim alone, because of the injuries, was the reason the team didn’t win multiple Super Bowls.”

“Not having McMahon was key,” Morrissey told me. “We talk about the defense, but there was no one better than McMahon—no one better at knowing where his teammates were, where the blocking schemes were, how to find the open receivers.”

It was not just McMahon at quarterback the Bears missed. It was McMahon as a leader. When he was in the huddle, the players always believed they had a chance. As a result, everyone performed. It was a different team with him on the bench, which is where he spent most of 1986.

The play that ended his season still makes me mad. I was a freshman in college, watching at a friend’s house on Prytania Street in New Orleans. The Bears were playing Green Bay. A Packers defensive tackle named Charles Martin had a white hand towel tucked in his waistband. In black pen, he’d written numbers on it, the jersey numbers of Bears he intended to take out. It was a hit list, the kind Nails Morton used to carry when he was working for Al Capone. McMahon’s number was on the top. Early in the game, Mac made a bad throw, which was intercepted. But what matters is what happened after, long after—it seemed like five seconds, a football eternity. Martin grabbed McMahon from behind, lifted him like a doll, and drove him into the turf. It was the dirtiest play I’d ever seen, strangely disconnected from anything happening on the field. McMahon landed on his throwing shoulder, which had been reconstructed. He lay in writhing agony. Martin was ejected, but if I had the power of a mullah, he would have been executed. “It wasn’t even a football play,” Steve Zucker told me. “It was a criminal act.”

McMahon was slow to return to the starting lineup. Ditka sought ways to pressure him, get him back on the field. Ditka was not the only one to consider McMahon a malingerer. At a meeting, Hampton accused Mac of putting his own interests above those of the team.
Look at my knees, look at McMichael’s back! Don’t you think we play hurt?
“We’ll do it without you,” Hampton said, “just stay out of our way.” Ditka congratulated Hampton for saying what no one else had the guts to. That November, in what seemed like a ploy to motivate McMahon, the Bears acquired Doug Flutie from the Canadian Football League. Flutie had been a star at Boston College, the author of perhaps the most exciting football play in NCAA history—in 1984, Flutie defeated the University of Miami 47–45 with a last-second Hail Mary pass—but many considered him too small for the NFL. What’s worse, he was cute: apple-cheeked and flip-haired, a kind of Michael J. Fox of the gridiron. He seemed an especially bad fit for this collection of night-crawling ne’er-do-wells and was hazed from the first. Flutie’s Chicago sojourn was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, short. “[The guys] felt like he was a usurper to McMahon’s throne, so he wasn’t going to be accepted,” McMichael said. “Somebody even started calling him Bambi, not the manliest nickname in a football locker room. I don’t know who started it, but I have to admit it fit. You know, the little Bambi deer, how deer run around—he was kind of a prancer back there.”

For many Bears, the breaking point came in November, when Ditka, perhaps trying to make a point about acceptance, had the Fluties over for Thanksgiving. Instead of taking the hint—Doug is here to stay—most of the players had the following reaction:
Ditka never asked me to his house!
“When Ditka had Flutie over for the holiday, Jim went bananas,” Zucker told me. “Hell, they all went bananas.”

“Why did they bring in Flutie?” I asked McMahon.

“Nobody could figure it out,” he said. “Fuller was here, Tomczak was in his second year. And both of them played. I think Ditka did it to get rid of me. He was hoping Flutie would win big and then he could ship me out.”

Flutie never did produce for the Bears and was soon gone.

McMahon took a few snaps in the ’86 playoffs, but the Martin hit had changed the trajectory of his career. McMahon shrugs it off, but you can tell it bothers him. When I said it seemed like Martin’s hit came five seconds after the whistle, he said, “just over three seconds.” Charles Martin knocked McMahon into a parallel universe, where most of his career was spent in rehab or on the bench. In the course of fifteen years in the NFL, McMahon started just ninety-seven regular season games.

“Whatever happened to him?” I asked.

“Who? Martin?”

“Yeah.”

“They suspended him for the rest of that season. He ended up going to the Houston Oilers. Then, about five or six years ago, he died.”

*   *   *

Five: it was Michael McCaskey. The players never respected him. He was Yale, sports coats and slacks, pleats and paisley. “Mike McCaskey is a new breed of owner who favors blue shirts, red ties, and an uncluttered desk,” wrote Singletary. “His piercing blue eyes contrast nicely with his distinguished gray hair and expensive suits. He is a man who enjoys using words like finite and continuum. And the sound of his own voice.”

The way McCaskey walked the sidelines at the end of the Super Bowl, the way he hung around the locker room, the way he clung to the trophy—it rubbed players the wrong way. It was as if he was saying, “I did it,” while most of the guys considered his contribution less than critical. “I can still see him getting off the team bus back in Chicago, holding up that trophy like, ‘I am responsible for this,’” McMichael said. “My ass. It was George Halas, Jim Finks, Jerry Vainisi, and Mike Ditka. Michael McCaskey had no input whatsoever.”

At one point or another, every Bear had a run-in with McCaskey. “Finally, I couldn’t control myself,” wrote Singletary. “‘Have you ever played football?’ I screamed. It startled him. But he composed himself, saying, ‘Why yes, I played when I was in college at Yale. I was a wide receiver.’”

“[My agent] still talks about it to this day, and I swear I don’t remember it,” McMichael said, “but he says when the negotiations ended on the last contract I signed, I got up, leaned over the desk, and [told McCaskey], ‘I’d like to hit you right in the fucking mouth.’”

The players thought McCaskey was cheap—that was the complaint. You saw it in the Super Bowl rings the president ordered for his team. Compare the Fridge’s ring, on display at the NFL Hall of Fame, to those purchased for players on other championship teams: Bears rings are flimsy and jewel-deficient in comparison. Asked about it, McCaskey offered the sort of explanation that made McMichael want to hit him right in the fucking mouth: “Oh, we plan on going and getting a lot more of them, so we want to have money to buy more.”

At times, it seemed as if McCaskey had made a calculation not uncommon to the descendants of great men: mediocrity is better for business. If you win, everyone wants more money—you have to buy rings and get tickets and give bonuses. And the egos! And the headaches! Who can afford it? Nine players in the Pro Bowl means nine guys who expect to be paid like All-Stars. McCaskey began to balk at the demands. “The team is the only asset our family has,” he told Singletary. “It’s a fact of life that the Bears cannot reach into other pockets. We have to take a finite pile of resources and be fair in meeting our obligations.”

The McCaskeys are in fact an anomaly in the modern NFL. Unlike for most other owners, billionaires who purchased their clubs as a kind of lark or fantasy league hobby, the McCaskeys’ wealth is the franchise. If they seem overly careful with money—this has been less the case in recent years; the Bears spent as much as anyone in 2012—it’s because they have to be. It’s not just the win/loss record at stake but also the financial health of the family.