Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (9 page)

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding …

Halas was living in Oak Park with his wife. Her name was Wilhelmina Bushing but everyone called her Min. They’d met in high school. She’d been in the stands at one of his indoor baseball games, rooting for the other team. She heckled whenever Halas came to the plate; she was beautiful. The combination was irresistible. Halas kept after her until she said yes.

Their daughter, Virginia, was born on January 5, 1923. Their son, George Jr., known as Mugs, or Mugsy, was born November 4, 1925. In the first years after Decatur, the Bears had a co-owner in Dutch Sternaman, but Halas eventually bought him out for $38,000 and would never share ownership again. He took odd jobs and started businesses instead, anything to make the money he needed to hang on to the team (football would not be a going concern until the 1940s). For a time, he worked at his brother-in-law’s ice plant, the huge blocks clattering down steel chutes, trucks waiting to make the early morning deliveries. In charge of the night shift, he’d get to the plant at around midnight, spend hours checking orders and deploying men, go home for five or six hours’ sleep, have a breakfast of cornflakes and banana, then head to practice. He would eventually quit the icehouse, but he always approached football with the glee of a man who has snuck away from his real job.

Halas played his last game in 1928. He appeared just four times that season. His body had begun to fail. Hips and knees, his poor head, which, in the course of twenty seasons, had been slugged, crunched, dinged. His reflexes, too, the internal mechanism, which causes everything to speed up as you age … you see the ball, reach for it, but your hand arrives a moment too late. You shake your head and think, Two years ago, I had that.

At first, Halas retired altogether, bringing in his freshman college coach, Ralph Jones, to run the team. But he couldn’t stay away. The Bears were his life. He’d never really let go. By 1930, he was back on the sideline—only the uniform had changed: from jersey, helmet, and cleats to jacket, loafers, and fedora, a program curled into a megaphone, carrying the West Side growl:
Hey, O’Brien, why don’t you shut up, ya fuckin’ pop-off artist!
Despite the occasional profession of exhaustion, followed by a brief retirement, George Halas would remain on the sidelines for the next thirty-five seasons. He’s among the most winning coaches in NFL history, with a career record of 324–151–31.

He tends to be depicted as the personification of the old-time coach, the grandfather with the iron fist. Even his own players regarded him this way: “As a tactician, he was simple,” said the Bears linebacker Doug Buffone. “They’re either gonna knock you down, or you’re gonna knock them down.” But the opposite is closer to true. Halas was one of the great intellectuals of the game, a brainiac, a football genius. As a thinker, he stands in a line that starts with Alonzo Stagg and includes 49ers coach Bill Walsh and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was Halas, as much as anyone, who invented the modern NFL offense and lifted the game from the ground into the air.

His innovations, various and brilliant, were driven by the oldest of playground motivations: he wanted to kick ass. “I play to win,” he said. “I always will play to win. I speak no praise for the good loser, the man who says, ‘Well, I did my best.’ I have learned to live with defeat but each loss is an agony which remains with me for several days and is dissipated only by the growing prospect of victory.”

Halas was probably the first coach to use game film—to shoot every practice and play, then huddle in a screening room with players, watching and rewatching, searching for the weak point or hidden detail. It’s become an NFL cliché: the head coach gathered with his men, breaking down each failure but passing over moments of excellence in silence; you don’t get praised for doing what’s expected. But Halas was among the earliest to identify film as a way to glean hidden information. It’s what the old man had always been after: the fresh vantage point or unnoticed angle, a perspective from which the game could be seen as if for the first time.
Jesus, no wonder we’re getting killed on third down. That cocksucker is missing the block.

He was probably the first to employ an “eye in the sky,” a coach hidden in the bleachers from where he could see enemy formations as clearly as a general studying drawings in the book by Clausewitz. Like just about every meaningful breakthrough, it came about by accident. One afternoon, when the Bears were playing the Yankees, Halas sent his assistant Luke Johnsos into the stands with a note for Mrs. Halas. While awaiting Min’s response, Johnsos looked at the field. He had been a good football player but had never seen the game from this high. He suddenly recognized it as something other than big men in a scrum: from here, it was patterns, the arrangement of pieces. Things that had been hidden—What’s happening in the secondary, that area behind the linebackers where defensive backs guard against the pass? Where’s the safety, the player who functions as a last line of defense?—were revealed. “I must have been standing in the fortieth row,” Johnsos said later. “And I could really see what the defense was doing from up there. It looked crazy. The way they were aligned. There was a big hole in the middle of the field. I ran down to the sideline and I told the coach, ‘Hey, the middle is wide open. I could see it from the stands.’” Halas looked at Johnsos, then looked at Min. He called over his players, issued a few curt instructions. “Coach ordered a receiver to circle back behind the defense line,” Johnsos said. “The quarterback threw him a pass and he went all the way for a touchdown.”

Halas sent Johnsos back into the stands with a pad of paper. He was to study the defense. If he spotted a hole, he would write a note and hand it to a runner, who’d carry it to Halas. But half the time, the note did not arrive until the play was over. Before the next game, Halas had a phone installed in the press box. Johnsos would sit up there with binoculars. When he spotted something, he would call Halas, who had another phone installed by the bench. When Halas wanted to know what the linebackers were doing or how the flanker kept getting free on the deep pattern, he would call the “eye in the sky.” It was a logical innovation, perhaps inevitable, but it changed the conception of the game. A coach was now able to operate from a position of omniscience, the position of a god, where he could linger over each move the way a chess master lingers, his hand resting on the rook, considering each consequence before committing. “If you go to the Folies Bergère in Paris, sit in the front row,” Johnsos said, “but at a football game, sit high so you can see the teams deploy.”

When other coaches figured out what Halas had done, they demanded their own eye in the sky at Wrigley. Halas bitched—it’s not an advantage if everyone’s got it—but complied. He then positioned the Bears marching band behind the visitors’ bench. Every time a visiting coach picked up the phone, the band launched into the fight song—just one tactic in Halas’s war of discomfort and deprivation. “Teams visiting Wrigley Field constantly complained about lack of soap, towels, programs,” Halas wrote. “They put it down to my stinginess. But why not deprive visitors, if doing so upsets them? What better location for the band than directly behind George Preston Marshall, tootling in his ears? And if Curly Lambeau had trouble seeing the play from his specially allocated bench in a far corner, so much the better for the Bears.”

In the 1930s, NFL offenses still operated in the preindustrial spirit of mob ball. The quarterback might call for the snap, but the action was controlled by a halfback who pitched out as he raced along the line, ran it himself, or tossed downfield. Known as the option or the single wing, this offense was easy to learn but offered a limited number of ways to score. It was often three yards and a cloud of dust. But the league changed the rules in the 1930s to make the game friendlier to the pass—the ball itself was redesigned—and it meant terrific opportunity for the coach who could capitalize.

Halas’s greatest innovation came in the 1930s, with the introduction and refinement of the modern T-formation, bastard sons of which still dominate pro football. In this way, Halas and his assistants invented the look of the modern game.

Invented by Pop Warner in 1907, the single wing dominated early professional football. It usually featured a halfback or fullback who took the snap, then raced across the field, cycling through options: he could run, pass, or pitch out. The formation, with its tailback (TB) and wingback (WB), recalls an earlier era of football.

The new alignment was called the T-formation because that’s what it looks like from above: first the center, then the quarterback, then two halfbacks and a fullback in a line behind—the arms of the T. Halas played it at the University of Illinois and used it with the Bears, but those were antique versions. In the 1930s, working with Ralph Jones, he rebuilt the T around the forward pass. The scheme was centered on the quarterback, who was raised onto a kind of pedestal. He would be the master of the new offense, the first among equals. Instead of plunging into the line, he would take the ball from center and drop back, positioning himself amid a circle of guards, who would keep rushing defenders at bay. This is the pocket. It’s like a diving bell, a bubble of air in a violent sea. It was revolutionary: after all, the object of the game is to push the ball forward, advance it down the field. But here was Halas deploying an offense in which the first move was
backward
! Five or eight yards the wrong way, the quarterback setting himself in a collapsing pocket from where, in the midst of the action, he’s supposed to operate like an eye in the sky, make a decision, execute.

Before the snap, the quarterback looks downfield and “reads” the defense, identifying the coverage. Who’s being double-teamed? Who’s been left uncovered? He then shouts out coded instructions, adjusting his players to exploit the mismatches or gaps. If the quarterback spots a weakness in the defense, he is also free to change the play entirely: this is called an audible. Halas was taking advantage of a loophole in the rules, which seemed to picture the offense in static formation prior to the snap. Every man had to be “set” for three seconds. To catch the defense out of position, the quarterback could therefore move a man as long as he was in his stance three seconds before the play. “Thus was born the modern T-formation with man-in-motion,” Halas wrote. “It broke the game wide open. Football became a game of brains. Instead of knocking men down, Coach Jones tried to entice the defense into doing something helpful for us.”

With the modern T-formation, the Chicago Bears elevated the quarterback to a position of supreme importance and invented the NFL offense as we still know it today.

The Bears tried to install the modern T in 1935 and again in 1936, but failed. It was too complicated for the quarterback. What a task! He had three seconds to decide, maybe five. After that, the walls cave in. Three hundred plays, each with its contingencies, but how many would he remember after he’d been concussed? In the past, the quarterback had been just another player; Halas made him paramount. “Physically, he’d have to possess a ballet dancer’s footwork in designed pivots, step-overs and spins and the ability to throw with accuracy and precision from a drop-back set or on the run, and he had to be able to withstand punishment from onrushing linemen. Since the rules at the time forbade a coach from shuttling in plays, the quarterback … also had to be a ‘field general.’” Looking over the playbook, Halas turned to his assistant, Clark Shaughnessy, and said, Jesus Christ, Clark, the quarterback has to be a coach on the field.