Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (7 page)

By 1981, my dad realized he didn’t have enough good pass rushers on the Chicago roster. Sure, he had a young Dan Hampton and the Bears had just picked up Steve McMichael that year, but McMichael was an offensive lineman when Chicago first got him. Linebacker Otis Wilson was a great athlete and middle linebacker Mike Singletary was a rookie, but it was more a bunch of parts that
my dad was trying to figure out how to fit together. From a traditional sense, the fit wasn’t great.

So what did my dad do? Blitz. If you don’t have guys in the front four who can get to the quarterback on their own, you better find other guys who can get there. At the time, my dad also had Doug Plank, a punishing safety who was the prototypical hitter. Like I said, the defense was named the 46 because of Plank, not because of the formation, like the way the 3-4 and the 4-3 defenses got their names.

What my dad created was a system that required really smart players who could react to all the different offensive sets thrown at them. This took time and there were bumps along the way. At the end of the 1982 season, Vince Ferragamo lit up the Bears for 509 yards, what was then the second-highest total in league history. It was the end of the season and it didn’t go over too well, but the players understood that what my dad was trying to do was going to take some time.

Eventually, the Bears got Richard Dent, an amazing pass rusher the team somehow found with an eighth-round pick, and linebacker Wilber Marshall, a truly great, dynamic athlete out of the University of Florida.

Along the way, Singletary and my dad started to figure things out. It was rough. What most players loved about my dad is that he didn’t BS around. He didn’t just play guys because they were supposed to be good. You had to earn it. Rookies were called “assholes,” and most of the time my dad’s critique of their play was limited to the word “horseshit.” My dad was a man of few words, but they were choice words. Even once you got to be a veteran, the best you’d get from my dad was him calling you by your number, like, “Hey, 51, get your ass in gear.” Once you started making some plays, then he’d learn your name.

Just look at how he treated Singletary. Here’s a prototypical middle linebacker, a guy who went to the Hall of Fame, a 10-time All-Pro and a two-time Defensive Player of the Year. It took Singletary nearly two years to get off the bench and start full-time with my
dad. Singletary started most of his rookie season in 1981 and was an All-Rookie player, but my dad was still jerking him back and forth between the bench and the starting lineup until 1983.

My dad spent those two years pushing every button in Singletary’s psyche, needling Singletary again and again so that he’d get every ounce of talent out of himself and become the brains of what was going to be a complicated defense. I know Singletary hated hearing that stuff and he didn’t get along with my dad for a long time. I think he thought my dad hated him, which wasn’t true at all. My dad just liked to challenge him. In Singletary’s rookie year, he was in the game early and made a bad call at the time. My dad pulled him and Singletary spent the rest of the series on the bench. The next time the defense was supposed to go back out there, Singletary went up to my dad and said he was ready to go back in the game.

My dad just looked at him and said, “Son, we’re trying to win this game.” Could you imagine the nerve my old man had? You’re telling a guy as intense as Mike Singletary that he’s not ready to help the team win? Talk about some big stones. But that’s what happens when you grow up in a foxhole. You don’t have time to waste worrying about somebody’s ego. You just have to survive.

Once you earned his respect, he loved you.

Of course, the guy who never loved my dad under any circumstances was Ditka, as I mentioned before. It’s funny, because so many people will tell you to this day that my dad and Ditka are basically cut from the same cloth. Singletary, who ended up being very close to Ditka, used to say how much alike they were. Still, they couldn’t see eye-to-eye. Ditka ran the offense and my dad ran the defense. Ditka always had the basics under control because he had “Sweetness” in the backfield. Walter Payton, probably the greatest running back and guy you’ll ever meet, was Chicago’s running back. My brother and I loved Walter Payton. We studied all the great players. Heck, we knew who Cookie Gilchrist was before we said our first words. In a press conference one time, I said, “Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie” in front of the New York media and they looked at
me like I was from another planet. Then again, they kind of always look at me that way.

Walter was funny. When we were at training camp and I was a ball boy, I used to work with the offense. I was a teenager and he’d joke with me. He’d pull my pants down out on the practice field and tackle me, but he would also show up when we got older at our baseball games. You’d see my dad and a couple of other parents out there in the stands—and then Walter Payton might show up. That’s a pretty neat childhood.

Anyway, back to Ditka. He and my dad just went around and around. It never stopped for the entire four years they were together in Chicago. In November 1985, the championship year, the Bears’ defense was starting to hit its stride when the Bears went to Dallas and just annihilated the Cowboys 44-0. I made the four-hour drive down from Southwest Oklahoma to Dallas to see the game. That was my senior year in college. You know, in college, you see some lopsided games from time to time. Usually that’s where one is from some big school and can recruit and the other team is just picking up a check playing the game, like maybe Oklahoma against McNeese State.

Well, that day in Texas Stadium was as close as you get to Oklahoma–McNeese State at the NFL level. (Unfortunately, so was the ass-whupping we took from New England in the 45-3 Monday Night Massacre.) It was brutal. Dad’s defense was at its best. By midway through the second quarter, the Chicago defense had scored two touchdowns before the offense got in the end zone. The Bears knocked Cowboys quarterback Danny White out of the game twice and rattled backup Gary Hogeboom so bad that he looked like a nervous high school kid. Really, it was almost scary to watch, wondering which Cowboy was going to get hurt next.

The truth is, my dad didn’t like the Cowboys very much. (How ironic is it that my brother is now their defensive coordinator?) It wasn’t so much Tom Landry; it was the whole image of Dallas as America’s team, how squeaky clean they pretended to be and how
much they thought they were better than every other team. For a long time, the Cowboys were good; you have to respect that. It’s just like what I said about Bill Belichick and New England the first year I got to New York: I respect them, but I’m not kissing Belichick’s rings. I’m not bowing down to him.

My dad took it a step further. It seemed like he wanted to take a lifetime of frustration out on the Cowboys in that one game, and he pretty much did. By the second half, Ditka was asking my dad to call off the dogs. Enough was enough. After starting his career with Chicago, Ditka had played for Landry and the Cowboys and even got his start in coaching with Dallas. He didn’t like crushing Landry that way, but even when Ditka asked, my dad told him to fuck off.

That wasn’t even the worst moment between those two. After the Dallas shutout, the Bears shut out Atlanta 36-0. Then came the famous
Monday Night Football
game at the Orange Bowl against Miami. The Bears were 12-0 and going up against the Dolphins and Don Shula, the only team and coach to ever go undefeated, back in 1972. Of course, my dad and Shula already had a pretty good history going by this time. Back in the famous New York Jets Super Bowl win over Baltimore, Shula was the coach of the Colts. Beyond that, my dad was good friends with Ewbank and it was Shula who had taken Ewbank’s job in the early 1960s in Baltimore.

Beyond that, my dad resented Shula more and more because Shula was on the NFL’s Competition Committee at the time. This was just after he had drafted the great Dan Marino, a future Hall of Fame quarterback who was in the early stages of breaking every passing record. In 1984, Marino’s second season in the league, he set a league record with 48 touchdown passes. At the time, that was staggering. Most quarterbacks were lucky to throw half that many back in those days. Marino was in the midst of taking the passing game where my dad was taking defense. Marino and the Dolphins also made the Super Bowl in the 1984 season, eventually losing to San Francisco.

The problem, at least the way my dad saw it, was that Shula was making it easier to take advantage of Marino’s talent. In 1984, the NFL started enforcing the bump rules against cornerbacks and safeties even more strictly, allowing Marino to have more open receivers. My dad saw right through that and used to tweak Shula publicly every time he could.

Now, in this huge game, here they were again. The atmosphere was unreal. The Dolphins again looked like the class of the AFC going up against the Bears, who were clearly the class of the NFC by this time in the season. This game is not just about the history of the undefeated season (a bunch of the 1972 Dolphins showed up on the sideline to cheer the current Dolphins on). It wasn’t just about the rivalry between my dad and Shula. This was a realistic Super Bowl preview with four weeks left in the season.

I have to give Shula credit, because he came up with a good plan of attack against my dad. More important, it was an idea that is not a part of standard offense to this day. That’s where I say that my dad helped change the way offense was played in the NFL, even though he never coached offense (and didn’t like it much, either). Shula had Marino and the Dolphins come out in a base three-receiver set most of the game, spreading out the Bears’ defense. Until that point, the conventional wisdom of most teams that played the Bears was to keep extra blockers in to handle the vast array of blitzes the 46 defense employed. The problem is that my dad always knew that he could bring one more guy than the offense could block. The other problem is that if the Bears didn’t blitz, the offense had too many guys back in to block.

Shula went the other way, putting veteran wide receiver Nat Moore in the slot with Mark Clayton and Mark Duper split wide. While Marino’s final numbers aren’t that awesome (14 of 27 for 270 yards, three touchdowns, and an interception), he hit a bunch of big throws along the way. I mean, you average 19 yards a pass in any game, you’re having a good day. You do that against the greatest defense of all time and you’re having a phenomenal day. By late in
the first half, the Bears were down 24-10 and then they got a punt blocked just before the half. The Dolphins cashed that in for another touchdown and it was 31-10.

That’s where Ditka lost his patience with my dad. You see, my dad refused to play nickel defense when the Dolphins put Moore in the slot. They ended up with linebacker Wilber Marshall or safety Gary Fencik covering Moore a bunch of times, and that was a mismatch. Moore was just too quick. What can I say; sometimes Ryan men are stubborn. At halftime, Ditka screamed at my dad to put in the nickel defense and my dad gave him the usual f-bomb greeting. They started pushing and shoving, and eventually the players had to break them up. The whole thing got into the press eventually after Chicago lost 38-24, but it ended up not mattering.

The fact is, like most of those “Super Bowl previews” that the media likes to sell the fans on every year, it didn’t happen. The Dolphins were good, but they lost to New England in the playoffs that year, getting upset at home. Chicago rolled the rest of the season and the playoffs were like a coronation. My dad’s defense posted back-to-back shutouts in the NFC playoffs before facing New England in the Super Bowl in New Orleans. It was another massacre. Appropriately, the Bears won 46-10. If that wasn’t enough of an affirmation of what my dad did, the players provided the rest. While a bunch of the players carried Ditka off the field, a bunch of the defensive players carried my dad off the field. It was the first time an assistant coach was ever carried off the field like that. Later on, Ditka finally got the divorce he wanted from my dad when Philadelphia hired my dad as its next head coach.

The funny part, in retrospect, is that the Bears’ defense was actually statistically better the next season in a lot of ways. But it wasn’t the same. The Bears went 14-2 in the regular season, but lost in the first round of the playoffs to Washington. In fact, the game against the Redskins really humbled them, and Ditka even complained about the play of the defense after the game.

You think Ditka might have wanted my dad in the foxhole, so to
speak, with him and the rest of the Bears that day? Complicated question. The good news is that Ditka and my dad were recently together at a Bears reunion and they really seemed to bury the hatchet. They acknowledged how good they were for each other and the team. And they have championship rings to prove it.

N
ear the end of my first season coaching the Jets, after we beat Cincinnati in the AFC playoffs in the 2009 season, I gave my dad a game ball. This game was obviously special for a whole lot of reasons—most important, for the team. It showed that all the stuff we talked about during the regular season actually meant something. This put us on the way to the AFC Championship Game. It was the first time the Jets had been there since 1998 and only the third time in team history that the Jets won two playoff games in a season (the 1968 Super Bowl season was the first and 1982 was the other).

For me, sure, it was personally satisfying. I think the reason it meant so much to me is mainly because I felt like I was representing my family, my brother Rob, and most important, my dad. You see, this was our family’s first playoff victory with one of us being the head coach of the team. It’s ironic when you think about it. As great as my dad’s career was, as important as he was to the development of the
NFL, and as long and hard as Rob and I have worked in this league, this was it: our first postseason win with a Ryan man in charge.

See, this was part of the knock. So many people have said for years that the Ryans were great coaches, but they weren’t
head
coaches. The three of us have been part of four teams that combined to win five Super Bowls. All three of us have a Super Bowl ring. In fact, I only have one, while my dad and my brother each have two. Still, my dad had to wait until he was 54 to get a head coaching job. I had to wait until I was 46, and my brother, whose defense was so good with Cleveland last season that they hammered the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints in the Superdome last season, is still waiting.