by Rich Cohen
In the summer of 1986, I got a job driving a van filled with mentally and physically handicapped adults. I could never get the wheelchairs properly secured. By the end of each ride, half those poor suffering souls had slid to the back, where their milky eyes peered out the rear windows. One morning, I was pulled over for racing. The cop did the slow walk. “What did you think you were doing?” he asked.
“Speeding up to avoid an accident,” I told him.
He looked me over: sunglasses, chewing tobacco, football jersey—number 9.
He said, “Jim McMahon would be ashamed.”
I said, “You’re gonna give me a lecture or you’re gonna give me a ticket, but you’re not giving me both.”
He said, “Who do you think you are?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m a Bears fan.”
2
THE WAR ROOM
Jim McMahon hands off to Walter Payton in Kansas City. November 1, 1987
As a writer, I have found the best stories tend to be those closest to me, so close that I do not even recognize them as stories until someone says, “Do you realize how much we’ve missed out on because of the Bears?”
These words were spoken by my wife in the fall of 2011, when, explaining why we could not go to Barbados, I told her, “I need to be home for the Packers game.” She called me crazy, then left the room. I sat for a long time thinking, asking myself, “Am I crazy? Why do I give so much to a team that’s done nothing but break my heart since 1986? I’m forty-five years old. Isn’t there something unbecoming, even ludicrous, about my love of this team?”
I decided to explore my obsession in the only way I know: by reading and watching and interviewing and writing. This would be a book about the Bears, but also about the ecstasy of winning and what it means to be a fan. Why would a person forsake the Caribbean for an afternoon in front of a TV? What drives a fan back into the arms of his abusers again and again? I would delve into the Bears as another journalist might delve into the Amazon. I would die in the jungle or return with the answers.
I started by calling Brian McCaskey, a grandson of George Halas, who founded the Bears and helped organize the NFL. The team is still controlled by Brian’s mom, Virginia Halas McCaskey, who is now in her nineties. There are eleven McCaskey siblings, and the franchise, which is worth over a billion dollars, is the family’s main asset. It’s therefore run with a kind of care that has struck some fans as persnickety. Virginia, whose husband, Ed, died in 2003, is the closest living link to Halas, whose son, George Halas, Jr., passed away in 1979, at the age of fifty-four. When a new player comes to the team, he is seated at Virginia’s feet while she gives a tutorial on team and league history. Brian was a perfect place to start. In addition to being a great guy, he was a fixture in the locker room in the 1980s, where he worked as an assistant trainer. When I asked Jim McMahon about Brian, he said, “Good taper, and the only normal McCaskey.”
Brian is tall and friendly, with blue eyes and a slightly comical manner. He talked as he toured me around the team’s facilities in Lake Forest, a beautiful town about thirty miles north of Chicago. We started at new Halas Hall, a training center set amid acres of gorgeous gridiron. There is a full-size indoor football field, an expanse of turf beneath a web of rafters that mimics the heavenly vault. We walked through offices and conference rooms, lingered before trophy cases and photos of great Bears of long ago. He showed me the screening room where the athletes watch and rewatch every play of every game. He showed me the weight room, the hot tubs, and the ice soaks. He showed me the locker room, where we stood before a locker decorated with a Jewish star and a menorah. “It belongs to Gabe Carimi, a lineman from the University of Wisconsin,” McCaskey told me. “We call him the Bear Jew.” (Carimi was traded to Tampa Bay in June 2013.) He showed me massage tables, MRI machines, and pharmaceutical closets. I ducked into the War Room, which was lined with wipe boards where information on every player in the league was written in marker. It was like the room of an intelligence agent who believes herself on the verge of a breakthrough. “I should have stopped you from doing that,” McCaskey said when I came out. “The coach would have a heart attack if he knew you’d been in there.”
We went across town to old Halas Hall, where the team still practiced in 1985. It’s now the athletic center of Lake Forest College. Run-down and dank, it’s like the gym Rocky returned to when he wanted to regain the Eye of the Tiger. For players, it offered that special kind of scarcity that breeds closeness, that makes a team a team. If the Bears want to win another Super Bowl, they might think of returning to old Halas Hall. There’s a practice field out back that used to flood when it rained. A larger field across a parking lot was just that—a field, choppy and sloped, the cause of innumerable injuries. In inclement weather, the team practiced in a gym, the sort best suited for dodgeball. In the 1980s, being tackled on the hardwood floor was a rite of passage.
McCaskey showed me the racquetball court where Ditka let out the beast—he was known for intensely competitive games—and the coaches’ shower. “Ditka was weird about his hair,” said McCaskey. “He had a special hairbrush and it had to sit outside the stall when he took a shower, with his cologne. One day, the PR guy used Ditka’s hairbrush and walked out with it. So the next day, Ditka comes out of the shower, reaches for the brush, and it’s not there. He went insane, totally nuts. He called a big meeting. He said only coaches were allowed to use the coaches’ shower. If anyone else was caught in those showers, it was Ditka they’d be dealing with. But I liked that shower. I liked Ditka’s hairbrush and cologne. So when the whole thing died down, I started using it again. And one day, as I’m spraying on Ditka’s cologne, the door opens and this body fills the threshold. There was no back door, no way out, and there he is, and there I am in a towel, so I said, ‘Coach, I know what I’m doing is wrong, and I’m sorry, but ever since I started using your cologne, good things have been happening in my life.’ Ditka did that half smile of his and said, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’”
The tour ended in the coach’s office, which was just as I’d imagined it: a big room with a big desk looking out a big window at a football field. If the facility is the body, this is the brain. Standing there, I felt like I was inside the mind of Iron Mike, behind the optic nerve, looking through the wild man’s eyes, seeing the world as he must see it. More than any other sport, football is about the coach, the general with the god complex who wants to map every sequence, prepare for every contingency. “On Fridays, after all the practices were done and the plan had been set, Ditka would sit in here and open a bottle of champagne,” McCaskey told me. “He did it when the team was at its best and did it when the team was struggling. It was what he believed: it’s better to win than to lose, but win or lose you should drink champagne.”
* * *
I read every book and article about the ’85 Bears, written both by reporters and historians. I read Papa Bear: The Life and Legacy of George Halas by Jeff Davis. I read Ditka’s first autobiography, Ditka, as well as his second, In Life, First You Kick Ass. I read McMahon! The Bare Truth About Chicago’s Brashest Bear, written when the quarterback was twenty-six. It seemed as if every Bear did two things after winning Super Bowl XX: open a bar and write a book.
I sat with a pile of DVDs and watched every game the Bears played in 1985. A lot of it was boring. What makes a game exciting? The tension of anticipating the play that will bust open the piñata. Knowing the outcome kills everything.
But Ditka’s postgame press conferences have lost none of their drama. Standing behind a podium, hair slicked back, he looked like a bear and behaved like a bear. His forehead was domed, and his small eyes were set close together. He shifted from side to side, taking his time, deciding which reporter to next raise up and beat down. If a question struck him as stupid, he would grunt and mutter, “next.” He could make “next” sound like a nasty word. Now and then, watching on TV, you’d see a reporter raise his hand, then, fixed in the coach’s gl
are, lower it a little, then a little more, then drop it altogether and stare into his lap. If challenged, Ditka assumed the flat-faced puzzled expression of a bear in a documentary, a grizzly that has caught an interesting smell on the wind, that has reared back on his hind legs, paws dangling, searching for prey. Next. He was a Kodiak rooting through trash on the edge of a national park. He was a grizzly enraged by a swarm of bees. When not kinked into a perm, his hair fell across his face. It was the color of a pelt. Some players believed he actually dyed it orange, streaked it like the ladies in Palm Beach, furthering his resemblance to the team logo.
Yet he was the most common type in the world. Every junior high school has that gym teacher who wants to be called Coach, who makes you run an extra ten laps for being a wiseass, who lines up all his students and accuses them of acting like “a bunch of ladies.” Ditka was that guy for the entire city of Chicago, my own Mr. Kreutzer raised to the highest power.
If the team lost, the press conference was funereal. Ditka spoke in hushed tones. He still chewed gum, only did it slowly, in a stolid South Side, Muddy Waters beat. Da-Da-Da-Ta-Da. Nowadays NFL coaches, not wanting to crush the egos of their fragile superstars, focus on the positive: things to build on, what went right. But Ditka was from an older, harder America and preached a more ancient form of football religion. If asked, on such occasions, “What went wrong?” he might grimace and say, “You saw it. We stink.” Following an especially bad loss, he said, “I’d be surprised if we won another game.”
But if the team won, and they did a lot of winning in the 1980s—during a golden stretch, they went 35 and 3—the press conference was raucous. Ditka was still a bear, only now he was a happy bear shredding through picnic baskets at an ill-tended campsite in the Adirondacks. After the Super Bowl, he wore tailored suits, the big body barely contained by all that finery, but he was simpler before the win: a man in polyester coach pants and a Bears sweater-vest, a winter parka, a knit cap. The better the victory, the faster he chomped his gum, jaw working like a piston as he pointed his way through the hacks: next, next, next. Now and then, he held a press conference on the field, giving fans a chance to heckle. After one game, a fan called out, “Hey Ditkus,” a combination of Ditka and Butkus. Though Dick Butkus was among the greatest Bears ever, a middle linebacker who hit with animalistic fury, Ditka seemed to take the conflation as a terrible slight. He turned on the heckler, threatening him as the reporters laughed. “I wasn’t trying to be funny with the guy,” Ditka said later, “because if I’d’ve gotten ahold of him, I wouldn’t have been funny with him. It had nothing to do with fun.”
After a win in Cincinnati, a fan appeared out of nowhere and intoned, in the way of a prophet, “The Bears will not return to the Super Bowl.” Ditka fixed this man with a stare, then, making a zero with his index finger and thumb, spit out the words, “See that, buddy? That’s your IQ.”
One afternoon, as the Bears left the field in San Francisco, a woman who’d been heckling the coach leaned over the rail and shouted something vile. Ditka plucked the gum from his mouth, wheeled, and threw. It was not an ordinary wad of gum but the sort of mouthful chewed by giants. Eight or nine pieces, an entire pack of Bubblicious worked into a fist, molar marks as deep as tire tracks. For a minute, you could see it in the air. Then it vanished into the heckler’s hair. Her head snapped back. She took the impact like a third-world dictator being dropped by a sniper in a town square. The police threatened to charge Ditka with assault. An officer recovered the gum, which was booked as evidence.
These press conferences were a new kind of theater in a town that had always taken its losing straight, no chaser. But Ditka neither won nor lost quietly. He was an expressive man, a fist pounder, less like the cerebral masters of the game than like his father, a union boss from western Pennsylvania. He said what he thought in the no-bullshit way of the political fixer. When I spoke to Bob Avellini, a Bears quarterback who battled with Ditka, he told me, “If the people only knew the truth about their hero Iron Mike: he called plays like a drunken fan.”
Of course, they did know, and that’s why they loved him. Ditka personified the town and its fans, many of whom were indeed drunk. Speaking before a big game, he expressed the pain and desire of every Bears lunatic: “In the past, we were the hit-ees. Today, we intend to be the hit-ors.”
* * *
I went on the road in search of as many veterans of the ’85 season as I could find. Not just players but also coaches, and not just Bears but also those who played against them, those who delivered the big hits and those who absorbed them: the subpoena servers and the subpoena receivers, the hit-ors and the hit-ees. I spoke to Ron Jaworski, Joe Theismann, Danny White—all quarterbacks pounded by the 46 defense. “Mike Hartenstein got me,” said Jaworski. “He hit me on a Sunday. I woke up at Paoli Hospital in Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon.”
Brian McCaskey listed the Bears he thought I should talk to, then wrote letters of introduction. Other players I approached on my own, including my old hero, Jim McMahon. He was not hard to find. He’s all over Twitter and the Internet. We were soon exchanging messages. (Here’s a typical email: “rich on my way to vegas be bk on mon wont have any free time there its vegas!”) I met McMahon in Scottsdale, Arizona. From there, I hopscotched from Mike Ditka to Johnny Roland, the team’s running back coach, to Dick Stanfel, the offensive line coach, to Tim Wrightman, a tight end, to Tyrone Keys, a defensive end, and so on.
I met Brian Baschnagel at Walker Bros., The Original Pancake House in Wilmette, Illinois. Walker Bros. is an institution, a point of pride for locals, home of table-covering griddle cakes and silver dollar gems. One year, when my mom was sick, I used to stop there with my father every night on the way home from the hospital. It has associations for me, which was the case for everyone I met and everywhere I went with this book.
Take Baschnagel, the floppy-haired receiver known to fans as Bash: when I was a kid playing Nerf, he was the player I pretended to be. It seemed he could catch anything. He was human glue. A great player on the bad teams of the 1970s, Bash had become an afterthought by 1985. You were surprised to find his name on the roster. My God, how old is he? Thirty, thirty-one? He was injured that season but useful as a kind of assistant, a sporty guy in civilian clothes wearing headphones on the sideline. There’s a melancholy to such players: standouts on weak teams who become relics when things change; a star in junior high who plays a bit part in high school. Some head coaches cleanse their rosters of anyone tainted by a failed regime, even the superstars—because of the inevitable mind-set, what all that losing can do to a soul. That’s why God kept the Hebrews in the desert for forty years: he was waiting for the slave generation to pass away. But Ditka admired Baschnagel, whose story was not unlike his own: here was another kid who’d fought his way out of hardscrabble coal country, who took the money but played for love.
We sat in back of the restaurant, 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., where fathers, getting an early start on a day of fishing, were eating with their sons. Brian is one of the lucky few: a handsome midsized man with salt-and-pepper hair, he survived nine seasons in the NFL relatively unscathed. He showed me his hands: no busted fingers, no ruined joints. I asked about Stickum. Along with tear-away jerseys and amphetamines known as greenies, Stickum was a characteristic idiosyncrasy of pro football in my youth: a sap that receivers slathered on their hands, arms, and bodies that helped them hang on to the ball. I once saw Fred Biletnikoff, the Oakland Raiders receiver, catch a touchdown with his shin. “They got rid of it when the quarterbacks complained,” Baschnagel told me. “When they tried to throw, the ball wouldn’t come out of their hands.” (There was a diseased elm tree in front of our house in Glencoe. The plant doctor covered the trunk with sticky chemical goop. Before heading out for a pickup game, my friends and I would press our hands in the concoction, which helped us make catches. If I die before my time, that goop will likely be the cause.)
The dining room got quiet when Bash talked. In Chicago, a Bear is
royalty. Such a man, especially if he’s medium sized and well put together, will be afforded special respect. He’s like a war veteran, a man who went helmet to helmet in the most violent arena. In America, if you want to be physically tested, there’s no better proving ground than the NFL.
Baschnagel was illuminating on the subject of quarterbacks; he made me understand the value of Jim McMahon. Retired athletes tend to be judged by their statistics, by which measure McMahon was good, not great. But what’s not recorded in the numbers is the thing that matters most: his leadership, his effect on teammates. When McMahon was in a game, the Bears always believed they could win. He understood the needs of his players. “I was a receiver, and as a receiver, regardless of your other responsibilities, you wanted to catch the ball,” Baschnagel told me. “That was the only statistic you’d ever have. Jim knew that. We were a conservative offense, especially early in Jim’s career; our strength was our defense and our running game. We had Walter Payton. Sometimes you’d go a whole game without having a ball thrown to you. Whether it was practice or games, you wanted to touch that ball. You wanted your hands on it. We were in a practice one afternoon. It was late in the season, the last drill. We get in the huddle. A pass play is called. As we break, Jim grabs me and says, ‘You haven’t had the ball thrown to you—be prepared.’ We get up to the line of scrimmage and I looked at the defense; they were double teaming me, inside and out. And I’m thinking, There’s absolutely no way Jim’s going to throw to me. I ran hard every play but I didn’t even look back, at least initially. I was double covered. Jim’s read would be to hit a receiver underneath. But as I’m running, I think I probably ought to look over my shoulder just to check. And there’s the ball on its way, zipping between those two defenders. I go up and catch it. And I hear Mike Ditka screaming at Jim, calling him every name in the book. ‘What the hell are you thinking? Brian was double-teamed, the guy underneath was wide open.’ Jim completed the pass, but that didn’t matter to Mike because it was a bad read. Jim just threw his hands up and said, ‘Sorry, Coach, I screwed up.’ And that was it. But Jim knew exactly what he was doing.”
