Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  On June 3, 1975, four months after the draft, Payton and the Bears agreed on a three-year contract that paid $150,000 annually. Including a $126,000 signing bonus, it was the richest deal in franchise history. (Holmes wanted Payton to receive the highest signing bonus ever for a player from Mississippi. In 1971, the New Orleans Saints gave Ole Miss quarterback Archie Manning $125,000.) Payton wasted little time putting the money to good use, buying his dream car, a new gold Datsun 280ZX. Contacted by the Tribune’s Ed Stone, Holmes could barely contain his giddiness. “The major deciding factor was that it has been his life’s ambition to play in the NFL,” Holmes said. “Either offer would have made him financially secure, but one gave him the opportunity to play where he could break established records. He’s got a history of breaking records wherever he goes.”

  At long last, Walter Payton was a Chicago Bear.

  CHAPTER 11

  BIRTH OF SWEETNESS

  IN THE DAYS AND WEEKS AFTER THE DRAFT, WALTER PAYTON HAD TO SWALLOW hard, put on his happiest face, and answer question after question about his new team. He talked of how, as a boy, he worshiped at the altar of Gale Sayers, the magical Chicago Bears halfback who, between the years of 1965 and 1968, was arguably the best player in the National Football League. “Gale Sayers has been my idol,” he said. “I used to follow him, watch him when I could, and see what he did in the papers.”

  Payton was exaggerating about his admiration for Sayers; for a kid growing up in Columbia, Mississippi, in the 1960s, the Chicago Bears were all but invisible. The television in the Payton household was rarely on, and even if it was, Walter had little-to-no interest in following professional sports. He was an outdoor kid, best suited to running along trails and throwing balls and jumping through sprinklers.

  In fact, were Payton better schooled on the recent history of the organization, perhaps he would have thought again and opted for Canada. Or the World Football League. Or a career in special education. Or joining a dance troop in Guam. With a 4-10 record, the Bears had finished last in the NFC Central in 1974, their sixth-straight losing mark. The team’s offense ranked twenty-fifth in a twenty-six-team league, and an unforgivable seventeenth in defense (the franchise had built and protected its reputation on defensive dominance). With Sayers having retired in 1971 and Dick Butkus, the legendarily vicious linebacker, hanging up his uniform two seasons later, Chicago’s roster was a starless collection of has-beens and never-will-bes. Their most noteworthy player was quarterback Bobby Douglass, a fabulous athlete with a cannon for a throwing arm, a club fighter’s toughness, and no idea how to play the game. “We were as bad as football can get,” said Bo Rather, a Bears receiver from 1974 to 1978. “We had a terrible offense, a terrible defense, and no running game to speak of. There was very little ability, and even Vince Lombardi wouldn’t have made much of a difference.”

  Throughout the early 1970s, players who came to the Bears directly from Division I colleges were flabbergasted by the shoddy conditions and subpar attitudes. “It was terrible,” said Wayne Wheeler, a wide receiver who had been drafted out of Alabama in the third round in 1974. “It was like going from college back to high school. I actually wrote [Alabama coach] Bear Bryant a letter asking for equipment, and he sent me brand-new gear because the stuff they gave us in Chicago was so poor. Not only was it used, it didn’t even fit.”

  Since 1944, the Bears had based their training camp at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, a decaying, bug-infested hellhole that, defensive lineman Gary Hrivnak recalled, “made us feel like we were in the army. We didn’t have air-conditioned dorms or a weight room, and the fields were terrible.” Once the season started, the conditions somehow worsened. The team held most of its practices at Soldier Field, its home stadium, which featured a rock-solid artificial turf surface that only hardened as the temperatures dropped. On the days Abe Gibron, the head coach, decided his team needed more space, he loaded the players on a couple of yellow school buses and drove them to nearby Grant Park. “That was the biggest joke,” said Rich Coady, a Bears center from 1970 to 1975. “We’d get off the bus and they’d be throwing the winos off the patch of grass where we were going to work. There were no lines or goalposts, and for conditioning we’d be told to run up a big hill at the park that kids used for sledding. The older guys would run it once or twice, then lay on top and wait until everyone was done. The whole thing was a circus.”

  The ringleader was Gibron. A three-hundred-pound barrel of jelly, Chicago’s coach had been a Pro Bowl offensive lineman with the Cleveland Browns. His gritty reputation endeared him to George Halas, the Bears founder and owner. Yet in his three seasons guiding the team, Gibron’s claim to fame wasn’t winning (his teams went 11-30-1), but eating and drinking. It was once said that if Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Abe Gibron had the face that lunched on a thousand shrimps. While most players were uninspired by his coaching acumen, the barrel-bellied, watermelon-headed Gibron dazzled all with his consumption skills. “He was the first person I knew,” said Ernie Janet, a Bears offensive guard, “who could eat a hamburger in two bites.”

  “Abe and I would go to dinner, and he was known everywhere in Chicago because of how much he ate,” said Bob Asher, a Bears tackle. “I remember going to Greektown with him, and every restaurant we’d pass a waiter would come out yelling, ‘Abe, try this! Abe, try this!’ He ate two full meals on the way to our meal.”

  For fans of comedy and characters, this was wonderful. For Halas and the Bears, however, Gibron’s emergence as the face (and blubber) of a onceproud franchise was nothing short of a tragedy.

  George Halas hadn’t thought of becoming a legend.

  The idea never entered his mind because, in 1920, football was a fringe endeavor, popular with a certain sect of society, but largely ignored. To become an iconic American figure in the sport was no more likely than becoming an iconic shoe salesman or dog walker. Baseball players and boxers were icons. Football players were circus freaks.

  Halas was born on February 2, 1895, the son of a tailor from Pilsen, Bohemia, who immigrated to Chicago’s West Side. George learned football first at Crane Tech High School, then under Coach Bob Zuppke at the University of Illinois, where he also lettered in baseball and basketball while earning a degree in civil engineering. In helping the Illini capture the 1918 Big Ten football title as a senior end, Halas recalled Zuppke once complaining that, “Just as a fellow begins to learn how to play football, he graduates from college and never plays again.”

  The words stuck with Halas, who graduated, then joined the navy and fought in World War I. He was initially stationed at a base in Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and bonded with the other recent college graduates (including two future professional stars, Paddy Driscoll and Jimmy Conzelman) who had played football at their respective universities. The soldiers formed their own team, and emerged as a national power. Because the war had decimated the rosters of collegiate programs, the 1919 Rose Bowl was played between the Great Lakes Navy and the Mare Island Marines. Halas’ team won 17–0 (Halas still holds the Rose Bowl record for longest interception return without scoring—seventy-seven yards), and the military rewarded the victorious players by granting their releases.

  Interestingly, Halas also excelled in baseball, and that same year he appeared in twelve games with the New York Yankees, playing right field and batting .091 with two hits and eight strikeouts in twenty-two at-bats. When the team sent him to the minors, Halas decided to focus on his first love.5

  Though at the time pro football wasn’t much of a game, Halas was intrigued by the possibilities. So, for that matter, was a man named A. E. Staley. As the president and owner of the A. E. Staley Corn Products Company of Decatur, Illinois, Staley thought it could be fun—and potentially profitable—to start his own semipro football team. He did so, and being a man of little ego, named the outfit the Decatur Staleys.

  Staley hired Halas as his first coach, and in order to find opponents the team joi
ned a new league that was being formed, the American Professional Football Association. The Staleys finished 10-1-2 in 1920, but with the American economy tanking, the team’s operating costs exceeded gate receipts by fifteen thousand dollars. Following the season, Staley approached Halas with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I’m afraid we can’t make a go of it here,” he reportedly said. “But I think there is room for another professional team [along with the Cardinals] in Chicago. Take the team there and I will give you five thousand dollars if you keep the name of Staley because it will be a good advertisement for me.”

  Based out of Wrigley Field, the 1921 Chicago Staleys won nine games and the league title, but Halas wanted his franchise to forge an identity of its own.

  The Chicago Bears were born.

  So, for that matter, was the National Football League, the APFL’s snappy new name beginning with the 1922 season. Until his death in 1983, Halas always remembered the first time he realized the NFL had a genuine shot. It came on the morning of January 30, 1922, when he picked up a copy of the Chicago Herald and Examiner and read the headline STAGG SAID BIG TEN CONFERENCE WILL BREAK PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL MENACE.

  The NFL was a menace? Really? “Terrific,” said Halas. “Absolutely terrific.”

  As the decades passed and the league grew from fringe to noticeable to headline-worthy to packed stadiums, the Bears—in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford—became “the early history of the game itself.”

  Halas was Chicago’s owner, coach, publicity director, and head ticket peddler. He also starred as a right end on both sides of the ball and was named to the league’s all-pro squad throughout the 1920s. He invested everything he had (and more) in the team and league, constantly thinking up new ways of generating revenue. Halas opened a laundry, sold automobiles, dabbled in real estate. As Frank Graham wrote in the New York Journal-American , “he organized his players not only into a team but into a promotional outfit.” On Saturday mornings, when Northwestern would host games at its Evanston campus, Halas had his players comb the stands, handing out flyers about the next day’s Bear clash. Years later, when the Great Depression was in full bloom and the franchise was hemorrhaging money, Halas asked his mother to purchase five thousand dollars in stock to keep the Bears afloat.

  In 1925 Halas had the vision to sign Red Grange, the legendary University of Illinois halfback, to a hundred-thousand-dollar contract, then trot the Bears out on a two-month, eighteen-game barnstorming tour, bringing a new level of visibility to the NFL. At the time, Grange was one of the sporting world’s national treasures. If he deemed the NFL worthy of his services, fans would surely follow. They did—he debuted on Thanksgiving Day, and thirty-six thousand spectators jammed Wrigley Field to watch.

  Halas ceased playing following the 1928 season, but he coached the team for four different spans into the late 1960s, winning a remarkable 324 games and bringing the T-formation offense to life. In 1933, Halas, along with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, shattered the monotony of the NFL’s lumbering run-run-run offensive approach by lobbying to make it legal to throw a pass from any point behind the line of scrimmage. He also added—among other things—daily practices, assistant coaches, press-box spotters, training camps, films, the first pro marching band, and first pro fight song (“Bear Down, Chicago Bears”). “Our game has assumed many of the characteristics of George himself,” Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, once said. “Wisdom and creativity, vitality and endurance and that singular trait of all athletes—competitiveness.”

  Halas was responsible for the careers of legends ranging from Sid Luckman, the Columbia quarterback who signed with the Bears in 1939, to George Blanda to Bobby Layne to Sayers and Butkus and, ultimately, Payton. In 1963, the Bears went 11-1-2, capturing the NFL Western Conference championship and beating the New York Giants, 14–10, for its eighth title. Chicago’s defense led the league in fewest rushing yards, fewest passing yards, and fewest total yards—only the third time such a feat had ever been accomplished.

  And then, without much warning, the Chicago Bears collapsed. From 1964 through 1974, the franchise posted two winning records and zero play-off appearances. Their roster, once packed with standouts, was now a crypt for has-beens and busts. “A lot of progressive owners came along and passed Halas by,” said David Israel, a Tribune columnist. “They operated in modern ways, and the Bears refused to change.” The franchise relocated from Wrigley Field to Soldier Field in 1971, and while the move provided the team with a jump in capacity from forty thousand to fifty-five thousand, fans were running out of reasons to watch. A guaranteed sellout for decades, by the early 1970s the Bears were struggling to fill forty thousand seats.

  Whereas once everything Halas touched had turned to gold, now he could do nothing right. The Bears mangled the draft, literally twice failing to make their first-round selections on time, and in 1970 losing a coin flip to the Steelers for the right to select a Louisiana Tech quarterback named Terry Bradshaw. Many speculated Halas, at sixty-eight, had lost the sharpness that once made him great. “George thought he was invincible and immortal,” said Don Pierson, who covered the team for the Chicago Tribune. “He was well-meaning, but he’d lost some acuity.” There were those who claimed that, with all his fame, Halas forgot what it took to be special. “The juices of humanity seem to have been squeezed from him,” William Barry Furlong wrote in The Sporting News. “He smiles as though it hurts. He pats a man on the back stiffly, like uncooked spaghetti.”

  “[Halas],” wrote Furlong, “has all the warmth of broken bones.”

  By the time the Bears selected Payton, they were a forgettable second-tier club. As other teams were starting to construct top-of-the-line weight facilities, the Bears purchased a twelve-in-one exercise machine from Sears. “Guys used it,” said Clyde Emrich, the team’s strength coach, “to hang their coats.” Vince Evans, a quarterback who joined the Bears in 1977 after four years at USC, says his college’s whirlpools, “looked like a Jacuzzi at the Four Seasons,” while Chicago’s “were buckets.” The Bears, wrote Jerry Green of The Sporting News, “had regressed to a desultory, slapstick organization.” Or, as Coady once quipped when asked what it’d take for the team to contend against Minnesota and Green Bay: “A couple of key plane crashes.”

  What many failed to notice, however, was that things were beginning to change. In a shocking acknowledgment that his beloved organization was rudderless, on September 12, 1974, Halas hired Jim Finks, architect of the great Minnesota Vikings teams of the early ’70s, to replace his son, George Halas, Jr., as general manager. For the first time in franchise history, a non-Halas was in charge. “I have the authority to hire or fire anybody in the organization,” Finks said in his introductory press conference. “The Halases have agreed to turn over the full operation to me.”

  A quarterback with the Steelers from 1949 to 1955, Finks’ claim to fame was once beating out an obscure rookie named Johnny Unitas for a roster spot. Upon retiring, Finks served as the backfield coach at Notre Dame for one and a half seasons, then was brought in as a chief scout and assistant coach by Calgary of the Canadian Football League. Within nine months he was the Stampeders’ general manager, and in 1964 he was wooed by the Vikings to hold the same position. When, three years later, Coach Norm Van Brocklin quit Minnesota, Finks hired an unknown CFL castoff named Bud Grant. The move, initially lampooned, went down as a stroke of genius. Grant became one of the great coaches in NFL history, and Finks’ reputation as a gridiron guru was sealed.

  A fast-talking, chain-smoking hard-bargainer, Finks had a confident strut that masked a reputation for being honest and fair. His arrival was greeted gleefully in Chicago, a city fatigued by chronic losing. The headlines spoke for themselves—FINKS: HE’S A REAL BEAR (Chicago Sun-Times); NEW PAPA BEAR (Chicago Tribune); THE BEARS BEAR DOWN (The Chicago Daily News). On his first day, Finks promised every returning employee a fair shake, and he was true to his word. Instead of firing Gibron and his staff midway through a mi
serable four-win season, he waited until after the final game.

  In Gibron’s place, Finks hired Jack Pardee, a gritty Texan who had spent fifteen years as an NFL linebacker before coaching the Florida Blazers to the 1974 World Football League championship game. In the stoic, business-first Pardee, Finks brought Chicago a thirty-eight-year-old up-and-comer who looked to be the anti-Abe in every possible sense. “He has the temperament and disposition to be a successful coach in the NFL for years to come,” Finks crowed, “and is the type of man who can lead the Bears back to where they belong.”

  “It was the first time in years that the Bears seemed to have a clue what they were doing,” said Pierson. “And then they took the next step and drafted Walter Payton.”

  Because these were the Bears, nothing was as simple as it seemed.

  Normally, when a rookie comes to terms late with an organization, he reports to training camp and begins the arduous process of catching up. Payton, however, didn’t have such an opportunity. On June 1, 1975, two days before Payton signed with the Bears, John McKay, USC’s legendary coach, selected him to be on the fifty-four-man College All-Star football squad that would play the world-champion Pittsburgh Steelers in an August 1 exhibition at, coincidentally, Soldier Field.

  At the time, the NFL considered the annual game to be a vital outreach tool, and any man chosen to play was required to do so. As a result, Payton would miss three full weeks of Bears’ training camp to work with the All-Star team at Northwestern University.

  On Wednesday, July 9, Payton arrived in Evanston, pulled his gold Datsun 280ZX up to the front of the swank Orrington Hotel and checked in. Though by now most everyone knew of his existence, there was still an element of mystique to small-school superstars. Among his fifty-three teammates were many of the biggest names in college football—the three men picked ahead of him in the draft (quarterback Steve Bartkowski, defensive tackle Randy White, and offensive guard Ken Huff), as well as marquee stars like USC quarterback Pat Haden, Ohio State defensive back Neal Colzie, and Penn State defensive lineman Mike Hartenstine (the Bears’ second-round selection). Two Jackson State peers, linebackers Robert Brazile and John Tate, also took part.