Payton and Holmes spoke at length about Montreal. Canada was, they both knew, a last resort. The fans were less rabid, the quality of play was merely OK, the United States’ interest in the CFL was subzero. Eddie Payton, Walter’s brother, had spent a season with Ottawa, and although he was one of the league’s better players, in America it was as if he were invisible.
Most problematic was Skalbania—an unknown quantity with an iffy reputation. Holmes assumed he possessed the money, but he didn’t know for sure. “Walter wanted to be a Bear,” said Holmes. “And he wanted to stay a Bear.”
Finally, on July 25, Payton and Chicago agreed to three one-year contracts worth close to seven hundred thousand dollars annually, plus incentives. Normally, a professional athlete would be giddy over becoming his sport’s highest paid player. But not Payton. He signed because it was his only viable NFL option, and upon reporting to training camp refused to gush over the hiring of Ted Marchibroda as the new offensive coordinator or over Armstrong’s insistence that the passing game was about to bloom. By now the happy-happy blather only irritated Payton. All one had to do was look around the locker room. Same quarterbacks, same receivers (minus Scott), a couple of young, inexperienced offensive linemen, and an attitude conducive to failure.
“I learned to be disillusioned that season,” said Tim Clifford, a rookie quarterback who spent the year on injured reserve. “The intensity level in camp was incredible, and as soon as the season started half the players coasted. Those guys were on cruise control. It was embarrassing.”
“The chemistry on that team was horrible,” said one Bear, on the condition of anonymity. “We had some talented players like Walter and Doug Plank and Gary Fencik, but you knew very early on we were going to fail.” Specifically, the player points to a coach who regularly arrived at practices smelling of alcohol, and an incident from training camp, when a high-profile member of the offense allegedly slept with a teammate’s wife. “The guy who caught him beat the shit out of him,” he said. “The locker room was split.”
Though far from an A student at Jackson State, Payton was no idiot. This, he told anyone who’d listen, was not a good football team.
Chicago opened the 1981 season with a 16–9 loss to the Packers at Soldier Field (BEARS, PACKERS PLAY A YAWNER, read the Tribune headline), and followed with a 28–17 setback at San Francisco. In that game Payton—who in past seasons rarely coughed up the ball—fumbled twice, including one at the 49ers’ one-yard line. The team finally won with a 28–17 thumping of lowly Tampa Bay in Week 3, but, after gaining a mere sixty-four yards on the ground, Payton lost it. He could accept losing (as a Bear, he had little choice) and he could accept bad games, but this was too much. The offensive line was borderline dysfunctional, opening dime-sized holes and failing to stay with its blocks. “The linemen were big, slow, and fat,” said Jack Deloplaine, a former Bears fullback. “When I was with Pittsburgh, all the linemen benched well over five hundred pounds. In Chicago, they weren’t even close.” When asked about his inability to gain a hundred yards through the first three games, Payton stepped out of character and pointed a finger at his blockers. “It got to the point where there wasn’t any place to go,” he said. “I attacked the defense. As a result of that, I had guys who were trying to tackle me lying on the ground. I broke my shoulder pads. Look at my [cracked] helmet.” Teammates were shocked. If there was one guy who never blamed others, it was Payton. “Pay me eight hundred thousand dollars,” responded an irritated Noah Jackson. “I’d take some shots. And I sure wouldn’t be talking about my offensive line.”
The following week, after gaining forty-five yards in a Monday night loss to the Rams, Payton was reminded of the time he presented his offensive linemen with gold watches. “This year,” he said, “I’ll give ’em pieces of my body.”
None of Payton’s body parts were absorbing greater abuse than his knees. At the conclusion of most games, he could be found on a training table, one knee covered with three or four ice bags, the other being drained of pus and fluid. The ritual was one Payton dreaded—he was terrified of needles, even when he knew an injection would ease his pain. “No teammate could question Walter’s guts, because they saw him on that table, hurting,” said Fred Caito, the Bears trainer. “I don’t think anybody knows how he played week after week, because the abuse he absorbed would have killed bigger men.”
It wasn’t until the eighth week of the season that Payton cleared 100 yards in a game (107 in a 20–17 overtime victory against San Diego), but by then there was nothing left to salvage. At 2-6, Chicago was far out of the play-off race. With 537 yards, Payton was far out of the rushing race. The fans did not respond well. Jerry Kirshenbaum, the editor of Sports Illustrated’s Scorecard section, gave his Sign of the Year award to a Soldier Field spectator whose banner read CHICAGO HAS MORE DOG TEAMS THAN THE YUKON. After paying $58.40 for two tickets to the Bears’ 24–7 loss to Washington on October 11 (Payton ran for five yards), James Tulley, a thirty-one-year-old school-supply salesman from Rockford, Illinois, filed a small-claims complaint against the organization for “misrepresenting itself as a professional football squad.”
“We were the Bad News Bears,” said Brian Cabral, a rookie linebacker. “At Soldier Field they actually put awnings and a tent over the tunnel we came in and out of to protect us from the beer and stuff the fans would throw on us and Neill.”
Don Pierson, the spectacular Tribune beat writer, began receiving letters from readers demanding Armstrong replace Payton in the starting lineup with Willie McClendon, the third-year backup out of the University of Georgia. “I wanted to play,” said McClendon. “I mean, I really wanted to play and I was frustrated on the bench. But anyone who thought Walter should sit was crazy. He was all we had.”
Payton liked to tell people he didn’t care what others thought, but the sentiment was false. Like most superstars, he longed to be admired and respected. Yet in the midst of a nightmare, admiration and respect were in limited supply. On his weekly radio show, Finks made a shocking decree. “Maybe Walter’s best years are behind him,” he said. “It would be foolish to think his best years are ahead of him. I don’t think we have to feature him as much.”
Payton was all alone. His line was terrible, his coach inept, his GM dismissive. Harper, his best friend, would start two games, the damage from three knee surgeries more pronounced than ever. Evans, the quarterback, threw the ball with J. R. Richard velocity and Steve Blass accuracy. “We had nothing—absolutely nothing,” said Al Harris, the defensive lineman. “But Walter was about pride, and if you said he couldn’t do it, he would find a way.”
During a practice in mid-November, Payton became livid when Hank Kuhlmann, the Bears’ gruff backfield coach, ripped him for a missed assignment, then told the halfback that he’d lost a step. Payton charged at the coach, throwing a wild punch that grazed his nose. Dumbfounded teammates separated the two. “Did we argue?” asks Kuhlmann. “Hell yeah, we argued. I was a taskmaster and he was a perfectionist. But I loved Walter.”
For Payton and the Bears, the year couldn’t end soon enough. They somehow beat Denver 35–24 in the season finale, then stripped off their uniforms as quickly as possible. “Before that game all of our cars were packed and ready to get out of town,” Cabral said. “The last thing we wanted to do was savor that horrible year.”
For the first time since his rookie year, Payton failed to make the Pro Bowl. His 1,222 rushing yards were the second lowest of his career. When asked, Hampton, the star defensive end, said he wouldn’t put a broom to the Bears’ offensive personnel—he’d break out a vacuum cleaner.
Before that could be done, however, an important decision needed to be made.
The Chicago Bears were about to be in the market for a new coach.
CHAPTER 17
A ROSE IN A DANDELION GARDEN
THE LETTER WAS COMPLETELY OUT OF LINE.
Mike Ditka has never admitted as much, but as one who lives according to a strict code of honor and righteousness, he
almost certainly knows this to be true.
Midway through the 1981 season, when the Bears were once again embarrassing themselves, Ditka wrote to George Halas. At the time, the man known as “Iron Mike” was in his ninth year as an assistant with the Dallas Cowboys. Though he loved working for Coach Tom Landry and considered being a part of America’s Team an incredible honor, from afar Ditka followed Chicago football with maddening frustration. He couldn’t understand how one of the NFL’s great franchises—one that had won eight league championships—was now the butt of jokes.
From 1961 to 1966, Ditka starred as the Bears’ burly, rugged tight end, a hard-hat complement to the stylish Gale Sayers. He came to love the Windy City, from the brutal winters and unforgiving winds to the blue-collar fans braving negative-twenty-degree chills to catch a game. Hell, Ditka was Chicago.
So it was that one day, while sitting in his office at the Cowboys’ lavish Valley Ranch facility, Ditka grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper and jotted down a short note to Halas, asking to be considered for Chicago’s head coaching position should it become available.
If there is one ironclad rule that governs coaching searches in professional sports, it’s that you never undercut a peer while he’s holding a position. If you want to vie for a job, fine—just wait until it’s vacant.
For Ditka, however, the opportunity to coach the Chicago Bears transcended all decorum. Once asked by Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick to name the most cherished accomplishment of his two decades in organized football, Ditka did not evoke winning a Super Bowl as a player or as an assistant coach or lasting twelve years as a tight end or appearing in five Pro Bowls. “I am proudest,” Ditka said, “of being a Bear.”
He was born on October 18, 1939, in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Ukrainian immigrants who changed the family name from Dyzcko (pronounced ditch-co in Polish) to Disco to, finally, the rugged-sounding Ditka (writer’s note: imagine Mike Ditka as Mike Disco?). The oldest of four siblings, young Mike grew up in a government-subsidized housing project in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and inherited his famed work ethic from his father, Mike, Sr., a former marine who made ends meet as a steel and mill worker. “We played sports day and night,” Ditka wrote in his autobiography. “In the spring, it was baseball until the sun went down. Football was the same way. Our fingers would crack and break open from playing basketball on the cold and wet court with a wet basketball. It didn’t matter. That’s all we had.”
Like Walter Payton, Ditka was a late bloomer whose childhood was filled with church, mischief, and beatings. Once, as a third grader, he bought a pack of Luckies, marched out to the woods behind his house, took a puff or two, then tossed the cigarette to the ground. When his father returned home from work that night, he asked his wife, Charlotte, why the woods no longer existed.
“You’ll have to ask our son,” she said. “He burned them down.”
The beating that followed was conducted with an old leather marine belt. It was the worst Mike Ditka ever received.
As a sophomore at Aliquippa High, Ditka stood five foot seven and 130 pounds. He tried out for the junior varsity football team as a defensive back, but was kicked off the practice field by coach Carl Aschman after absorbing one too many thumpings. He was ordered by the staff to prove his worth by cleaning the locker room latrines—an indefensibly cruel assignment that motivated the boy to come back stronger, faster, meaner. That summer he grew three inches and gained thirty-five pounds, then made the varsity as a middle linebacker. As a senior, Ditka—a muscular 185 pounds—emerged as one of the state’s top players. “My whole life was based on beating the other guy, being better, being equal to, or just showing that I could be as good as anyone else,” Ditka said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
Ditka went on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he punted and played linebacker and tight end from 1958 to 1960. Were there more talented and polished players across the United States? Unquestionably. Was there a more driven one? No. Pitt’s coaches stopped scrimmaging Ditka during the week, for fear that he would knock out teammates in the lead-up to a big game. “Pound for pound, Mike was as tough as any man I ever saw,” said Jim Traficant, a Pitt quarterback who later went on to become a Democratic congressman from Ohio. “Tough and intense. He’s the only visiting player I ever heard of who got a standing ovation at Notre Dame after rubbing a lot of Irish noses in the dirt.”
Nicknamed “Pinhead” by teammates for his marine-styled crew cut, Ditka was respected for his soft hands (playing in an offense that rarely passed, he totaled forty-five receptions over three seasons) and feared for his Tasmanian Devil temper. When the Panthers trailed Michigan State at halftime during Ditka’s senior year, a cornerback named Chuck Reinhold tried giving a spirited locker room pep talk. Ditka grabbed Reinhold and slammed him against a locker. “Whattaya mean, we’ll get ’em?” he screamed. “You son of a bitch, if you hadn’t missed that damn tackle we wouldn’t be in this goddamned fix!” According to teammates, during another game Ditka punched out two Pitt players in the huddle. “You had to be a winner playing with Ditka,” said Dick Mills, a teammate. “He would have it no other way.”
Selected by the Bears in the first round of the 1961 Draft, Ditka emerged as Chicago’s type of guy, winning the NFL Rookie of the Year award and, two seasons later, helping the team to the league title. He was all black-and-blue, with the crooked nose and blood-splattered jersey to prove it. In 1962, the editors of Look magazine searched for an NFL player who defined ruggedness. In a four-page photo essay titled “Pain Can’t Stop a Pro,” they focused on Ditka. “Football is a Spartan game,” wrote Tim Cohane. “The big, quick, tough men who play it for a living carry on in action with painful injuries that would hospitalize the average man.”
Ditka’s time in Chicago was blissful—he caught 316 passes for 4,503 yards and thirty-four touchdowns and, along with Sayers and Dick Butkus, became a face and symbol of the franchise. Unlike many of his teammates, however, Ditka refused to cower at the sight of the legendary Halas. When, in 1967, Ditka threatened to jump to the Houston Oilers of the American Football League, Halas dismissed him as a traitorous ingrate. Ditka responded with one of the great one-liners in the history of organized sports, accusing Halas of being so cheap “he throws nickels around as if they were manhole covers.”
Ditka was promptly traded to Philadelphia, where he endured two seasons with the lowly Eagles before finishing his career with four solid years in Dallas. Upon retiring after the 1972 campaign, Ditka was hired by Landry. It was the oddest of coaching marriages. Landry was cool and detached. Ditka once famously picked up a table during a card game and threw it into a wall. “All four legs stuck,” recalled Dan Reeves, a former Dallas player. “I said, ‘Man, this guy hates to lose.’ ”
During a game between the Cowboys and Redskins early in his coaching career, Ditka stormed the field, itching to berate an official who called one too many penalties against Dallas.
“Are you a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes?” Ditka asked.
“No,” replied the official.
“No?” Ditka said. “Well, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Ditka spent nine years alongside Landry, studying his every move. The Cowboys were brilliant—they drafted wisely, stressed discipline, discarded those players who shunned hard work.
The Chicago Bears under Neill Armstrong did none of these things.
That’s why Ditka wrote the letter to Halas. Because, more than wanting to coach, he wanted to see the Bears return to their proper place atop the NFL.
On January 20, 1982, two weeks after Armstrong was dismissed, Halas held a press conference in his office. Calling himself a man of destiny and promising to bring Chicago “a winning football team, an interesting football team, and a football team that everybody is going to be proud of,” the forty-two-year-old Ditka was named the tenth head coach in franchise history. His contract, a three-year deal that provided a hundred thousand dollars a
nnually, made Ditka the NFL’s lowest-paid coach. He didn’t care—this was home.
Sitting alongside Ditka was a beaming Halas who, after allowing Finks to call the shots for more than seven years, had had enough. “Jim Finks will be in charge of all information on the draft,” said Halas, eighty-six years old but still sharp and quick-tongued. “And that will be submitted to Mike and me, and we’ll go over it.” (His responsibilities gone, Finks resigned in August, 1983.)
Though Chicago’s fans seemed to be thrilled with Ditka’s return, the media was less enamored. Those few who remembered Ditka as a player couldn’t imagine such a hot head surviving as a coach. In a blistering piece titled “Hiring Ditka Would Be Madness,” the Sun-Times’ John Schulian pointed out that “some of the people who have known Ditka best . . . wonder if there is a punch line to this joke.”
So how did Walter Payton feel? In a word: indifferent. Having suffered through the hope and disappointment of two coaches, the Bears’ brightest star knew better than to immediately buy into Ditka’s bluster about toughness and heart. In fact, for the first time ever, Payton took off all of January. “It’s been a tough year physically,” he explained to the Tribune. Approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, Payton was beginning to increasingly ponder the wisdom of surrendering his body to a franchise that did little to protect it. “Why,” he wondered aloud, “should I sacrifice so much for this team when this team doesn’t sacrifice for me?”
Walter Payton demanded an answer.
He received three.
• First, on April 2, Ditka’s Bears gathered as a team for the first time for a weekend mini-camp on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. When Pardee held his initial meeting, he spoke of will and fight. When Armstrong held his initial meeting, he spoke of family and fun. When Ditka held his initial meeting, he warned the players to be afraid. Be very afraid.
Sweetness Page 32
