Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

by Rich Cohen

  Sammy Baugh marched his team downfield on the first drive. There was something romantic about him … the slow walk, the laconic way. He never got flustered. He was relaxed when he threw. Whereas Luckman released from his shoulder, Baugh extended his arm to its apex, releasing at twelve o’clock, a premonition of the over-the-top style of the moderns. He got his team into Bears territory. On one play, he eluded the rush and found a receiver in the end zone. He hit him in the chest, a beautiful West Texas spiral, but the receiver dropped it. A groan went up from the stands. It would be Washington’s best chance of the day.

  Two plays later, the Bears had taken over and Luckman was thinking through Halas’s plays as he walked to the line. For a quarterback, a lot of any game is played in his head, a stream of consciousness: first I do this, which will make him do that, but if he does that, I’ll go here, which will make him go there and do that, in which case I will do this, unless, of course, they do that, in which case I’ll come back with this, then look for McAfee, and if he’s covered …

  The early break came on the ground. One of the innovations of the modern T was trickery, fakes and feints that disguised the most basic play; half the time, the defense didn’t know who had the ball. Sid called it in the huddle: “Spread left-0-scissors 46.” He hiked, faked right, then tossed to Osmanski, who got tangled up in the line, broke free, then made it to the outside, where a hole opened. He went the length of the field, a perfect run, but it’s the block that opened the hole that people remembered. For years, it was the most famous block in NFL history. It was made by George Wilson, who, according to Luckman, “coming from his right end position, dashed at an angle toward [Osmanski’s] line of flight. Around mid-field … he hurled his body, at full speed, into Malone of Washington, who bounced back into his partner, Justice, and the two of them somersaulted helplessly over the sideline.” In other words, one guard took out two tacklers—in bowling, they call this picking up the 7–10 split. “Watching it,” Luckman wrote, “I assured myself that I’d seen the most wicked block perpetuated by man or beast. When Osmanski returned from his sixty-eight-yard touchdown gallop, he found us slapping Wilson on the back and frolicking around. He couldn’t understand it, of course, because he was the only man on the field who missed the spectacle.”

  Football is Nietzschean. It’s a question of finding a play or a sequence of plays that breaks the enemy. In the 1940 Championship, it happened during that run by Osmanski. “Washington’s hopes began to dampen,” wrote Luckman. “The whole business had happened in 58 seconds.”

  Luckman passed for more than three hundred yards, completing touchdown after touchdown. Fans, who’d come to see a battle, found themselves at a clinic instead, a public demonstration of the modern T-formation. “Everything seemed to click. Even a boner was good for ten yards,” Luckman wrote. Coming back to the bench, the quarterback “found Halas delirious with joy … After we’d rung up our fiftieth point or so, he began to murmur: ‘Wonder what Mr. George Preston Marshall is doin’ at this stage?’”

  “With Luckman calling the plays with the genius of a clairvoyant, the Bears were a perfect football machine,” Time reported. “By the end of the third quarter, the game had become an undignified rout.”

  In the fourth, Halas told his kick holder to kill the play instead of going for the extra point. Nine footballs had already been booted into the stands and he didn’t want to lose any more: Who do you think pays for those balls, smartass?

  Seventy-three to zero—it remains the most lopsided championship game in NFL history. The next morning, New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley began his column, “The weather was perfect. So were the Bears.”

  In the locker room, a reporter asked Sammy Baugh what might have happened if his receiver had made that catch on the first drive. A shift in momentum can mean everything. “We would’ve lost 73 to 7,” said Baugh.

  In the following seasons, most teams in the league adopted some version of the modern T-formation. Halas taught it to anyone who was interested; this might seem like giving away company secrets, but he was generous with ideas. He believed the Bears had come up with a better kind of football that would benefit the league. He wanted to win, but he also wanted to produce a superior product. In the off-season, he wrote a book with Clark Shaughnessy and Ralph Jones, The Modern “T” Formation with Man-in-Motion. He sent Luckman to Columbia and Notre Dame to teach the offense to college quarterbacks. It was complicated, with a steep learning curve. If Halas could get colleges to run it, he would secure a supply of game-ready athletes.

  Within a few years, the only team running the old offense was the Steelers, and they stunk. The single wing had gone the way of the Spanish caravel. In this way, Halas remade not just the Bears but also the game, joining the ranks of Knute Rockne, Alonzo Stagg, and Walter Camp, innovators whose inventions now seem inevitable. In 1941, Halas hired a writer to pen a new fight song, tasking him to take special notice of the team’s recent accomplishments.

  Bear down, Chicago Bears, make every play clear the way to victory.

  Bear down, Chicago Bears, put up a fight with a might so fearlessly.

  We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation, with your T-formation!

  Thus began the great dynastic run of the Bears. For Chicagoans, it would never be as good again. A modern fan, especially if born after 1950, is akin to a modern Roman: deep down we know, no matter how we prosper, that our achievements will always pale in comparison to those of antiquity. Early in the 1940s, the Bears played twenty-four games without a loss. They won their second championship in 1941 and did not lose again until December 1942, when the Redskins got revenge in the championship. Luckman had his best game in 1942 in the Polo Grounds in New York. It was Sid Luckman Day. He threw for close to five hundred yards and completed seven touchdown passes, which remains a record. The Bears got even with the Skins in the 1943 Championship, but it was a different world by then. America had entered World War II. As the nation’s young men went overseas—Luckman joined the merchant marine; Halas spent three years in the navy—NFL rosters were increasingly filled by old-timers, has-beens, never-coulds. Bronko Nagurski rejoined the Bears. He was in his mid-thirties, a kind of Methuselah. He had not played in five years. He had been working as a professional wrestler, a circus performer, a gas station owner, and a tiller of the land. When handed the ball, he’d head upfield, yelling, “Let the farmer through.”

  The Monsters reassembled for one more championship run in 1946, older, slower, thicker, but determined to execute once more. Luckman was like old Picasso, subsisting on savvy. He threw seventeen touchdown passes, which led the NFL. The Bears finished 8–2–1, then played the Giants in the title game. Chicago clinched it in an unlikely way: Sid, kneeling in the huddle, covered in grime, called his own number: Trust me, I see something. He had to repeat himself before the boys agreed: “Bingo, keep it.” He went to the line, looked here, looked there, took the snap, faked a handoff, a beautiful fake, jogged toward the sideline as if to say, The old man needs a rest, then took off, the ball hidden beneath his arm. It was a long moment before the Giants realized what was happening, that it was Luckman, the ancient, who had the dingus. He ran nineteen yards for a touchdown, his feet getting heavier with each step. The Bears won 24–14. If the war had not intervened, that team might have won seven titles. As it is, they won four and must be considered among the best in history.

  Luckman returned for 1947, but he was a beat too slow, a season past prime. I once met a pro baseball player who, pontificating on the fate that awaits every athlete, said, “Some guys go on and on, but others just fall off the table.” Sid Luckman was a fall-off-the-table type. He was a leading quarterback right up to the moment he could no longer convert a single play. During one of his last days on the field, he took a whack to the head that knocked him insensible. That was December 14, 1947, the worst game of his career. The magic was gone. He took himself out with twelve minutes left. After that, he was old and done, just as confu
sed as he’d been at the beginning. “It’s strange how many top-flight stars lose their championship urge almost overnight,” he wrote. “One season you’ll find them hustling like young colts, and the next they’ll appear listless and off the pace.”

  He stuck around a few more years, the coach’s confidant, a monarch emeritus. When a hero gets old, he takes your youth with him. Luckman retired in 1950 but remained a figure in Chicago for decades. He was the best that had ever been, Sid the Great, who still holds just about every important team passing record. If you follow the Bears, you’re familiar with the phrases “not since Luckman,” “maybe the next Luckman.” He was part of Halas’s crew, one of the knock-around guys—Kup, Brickhouse, Sid—sitting at a round table at the Palmer House. He had all kinds of jobs in the years that followed, but the remainder of his life was mostly spent being Sid Luckman. That’s why it’s so hard for a star athlete to move on. No one wants you to, nor will they let you; they need you to be what you were when you were the polestar, on one knee, calling your own number: “Bingo, keep it.” Sid Luckman played football a million years ago but died in 1998, which seems like yesterday. His ghost went out in Aventura, Florida, where the pinochle is high-stakes and the pools reek of country club chlorine.

  6

  THE QUARTERBACK

  Joe Namath preparing for Super Bowl III. Florida, 1967

  Gary Fencik heard this story from Virginia Halas McCaskey, who, as of this writing, is in her nineties and controls the Bears. She began attending games in the 1930s when she was eight or nine, watching from the wooden seats at Wrigley. Her favorite player was a receiver from Vanderbilt named Dick Plasman. He had huge hands. You see it in team photos in which he extends his fingers in the way of a magician about to demonstrate an illusion. If you were a kid, he would be your favorite, too. He was the last professional to play without a helmet. For several years, he was the only bare-headed nut out there, dodging defensive backs, his curly blond hair waving. In a game where everyone else was clothed in leather, he was like a man among machines. The action shots are especially jarring: all those helmeted figures moving in the muck, this lone bare-head among them like the fool without a coat on the coldest day of the year.

  “Virginia Halas used to go see him play in Wrigley Field,” Fencik told me. “The end zone at Wrigley, on one side, was cut short by the outfield wall. On the other side was the dugout. Well, Virginia was there, a little girl cheering for Dick Plasman,” who streaks across the secondary, throws up his hands, catches the ball, then is carried by his momentum into the dugout. Someone screams. Coaches come running. A man pops his head out, waving frantically. A doctor hurries down from the stands. There’s a long delay. It feels endless. Finally, they come out with Plasman on a stretcher. His eyes are closed, his body motionless. His head is wrapped in a bandage and the bandage is soaked in blood. For Virginia Halas McCaskey, well, it was one of those things you experience when you are young, and you’re never quite the same. “She thought she’d seen her favorite player die,” Fencik said. “She thought she’d seen Dick Plasman die.”

  I mention Dick Plasman because you will not see his like again: he was the last of a species, the last of the free-spirited wild men who played the game in the beginning. The war changed everything. The NFL became more professional, better suited to the big market corporate culture that emerged in the fifties and sixties. Football became a different game because America became a different country.

  The crucial shift came as a result of a tweak in the rules. The military draft that began before Pearl Harbor hurt all pro sports, but football more. After all, who was being drafted? Able-bodied men in their early twenties—the exact sort that filled NFL rosters. A football player was usually washed up by thirty. Many gained twenty pounds in their first year of retirement. It’s the same today. Players work like dogs and eat like sharks; then, when they quit, they continue to eat like sharks but don’t work at all. The freshman fifteen? How about the post-NFL forty? Baseball might get by with out-of-shape old-timers but, on a football field, such men were in danger. Back then, the rules required a player to play offense and defense. But few of the old-timers who returned when military conscription devastated the league were in the kind of shape required. Take Bob Snyder, a retired Bears quarterback—he was thirty—whom Halas asked to coach. The invitation was a ruse. Once Snyder was on the field, a football was shoved into his hands. “No way,” said Snyder, “I’m up to about 240 pounds—50 pounds over my playing weight. I’m full of beer.”

  In 1943, after a sorry season in which out-of-shape athletes stood doubled over between plays, huffing and puffing, the NFL decided to change the rules. For the first time “free substitution” would be allowed, meaning players could go in and out of games without restriction. This was done to give the old-timers a chance to recover, but the unintended consequences were dramatic. Now a player could specialize, appearing in a game just long enough to perform a single task. A fullback might be brought in only in short-yardage situations; a runner might play only on kickoff and punt returns. Eventually, football rosters became divided into two teams: offense and defense. “What the rule has accomplished for tactical football is something Halas always hoped for but had not found feasible,” Luckman wrote. “The creation of defensive and offensive units which are switched constantly as the ball changes hands on the field.” Over time, football became strangely regimented, a game of specialists.

  The coaches loved it. Not only did free substitution let them field superior teams, it also gave them control. They’d been banned from shuttling in instructions or calling plays from the sideline. Once a possession started, it was up to the quarterback. But with the rule change, a coach could send in a new play before every down, as long as it was carried by a substituting player. Football became a coach’s game as a result, men with clipboards, men in gray suits and fedoras. The war ended but the new rule stayed on the books.

  The game changed in organic ways as well, evolving with the spirit of the time. It was just different after the war. For one thing, a certain brand of racism became harder to excuse. If 418,500 Americans died fighting for Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, how do you tell the owner of the Rams he can’t sign Kenny Washington because he’s African American? The unspoken agreement that barred blacks from the NFL fell away. Halas denied any such agreement had ever existed—there were black players on the early NFL teams—but in fact a black player had not suited up in twenty years. Some blamed it on George Preston Marshall, who would not integrate the Redskins until he was forced to by members of the Kennedy administration, in an effort led by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. For an owner like Halas, who cared less about race than about winning, access to such a huge pool of untapped talent was a boon. The Bears’ first black player was Eddie Macon, taken in the second round in 1952. The Bears fielded the first black quarterback in the NFL, the perfectly named Willie Thrower, who completed just three passes in 1953.

  But the war’s most astonishing effects on the game were stylistic. This is a theory of mine—I can’t prove it—but it seems to me that football, which has been thematically linked to warfare from its beginning, is especially sensitive to innovations on the battlefield. Within a decade of World War II, football playbooks were filled with lessons seemingly learned at Calais, Dunkirk, Normandy. The NFL was founded after World War I, and the sport, in its early years, was a game of trenches, big men, and mud, a test of wills, a war of attrition. In the 1920s, scores often lingered in single digits. Halas broke the stalemate with the modern T-formation, which came into its own in 1940, shortly after the start of World War II, in which the Wehrmacht pioneered the blitzkrieg, a term retrofitted for use in the NFL. By the 1950s, football had followed the air force’s F-80 jets into the skies. For Halas, the reasoning was probably the same as it had been for Curtis LeMay: Why crawl, when you can rain terror from above?

  Some of this influence was probably conscious, as coaches who read newspapers and watched newsreels borrowed the langua
ge and tactics of war; some of it was unconscious, as coaches were affected by the culture, which in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the military. Over a thousand NFL players had been in the service, some of them in positions of authority (Halas, a lieutenant commander in the navy, spent three years in the South Pacific). For many, it was the defining event of their lives: it’s no wonder they absorbed its lessons. Tom Landry, the Cowboys coach and an architect of the modern NFL defense, was a pilot in the Army Air Force’s 493rd Bombardment Group. He flew thirty missions over Germany and crashed his B-17 in a Flemish field when he ran out of fuel. Vince Lombardi, the dominant NFL coach of the era, perfected his craft at West Point, as an assistant under Army coach Red Blaik. Most weeks, Lombardi carried game film to an apartment in the Waldorf Astoria, which he screened for General Douglas MacArthur, a football nut who plied Lombardi with theories.

  Luckman wrote of playing against Mario Tonelli of the Chicago Cardinals, who survived the Bataan Death March. “I shrunk from 200 pounds down to a 109-pound weasel of a man,” Tonelli told Luckman. “It’s crazy and impossible to picture myself as the same fullback who once ran 50 yards against Minnesota … Fact was, I couldn’t think much about the game at all, watching nine out of ten of my buddies die of starvation and beatings.”

  The war’s influence was especially clear in the emergence of the celebrity coach, a mirror of the celebrity general. D-day gave us Eisenhower and Bradley; the Ice Bowl gave us Landry and Lombardi. Preseason training camp was remade as a kind of boot camp, with barracks, curfews, and ordeals of deprivation meant to break individuals and build teams: a man does not risk his life for an abstraction such as victory, but he will kill for his teammates. Lombardi did not let his players drink water during practice, as such luxuries weaken men. “Football requires spartan qualities,” he explained. “Sacrifice, self-denial—they’re cliché words—but I believe in them with every fiber of my body … Men want to follow. It gives them security to know there is someone who cares enough to chew them out a little bit or to correct their mistakes.” Lombardi perfected the football aphorism, which echoed the slogans of war. Patton said, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.” MacArthur said, “In war there can be no substitute for victory.” Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Ditka emulated this aphoristic style, but, Ditka being Ditka, always overshot the mark. Urging his players to shake off a loss, he told them “The past is for cowards and losers.”