by Rich Cohen
* * *
“Why didn’t you repeat?”
“What’s that?”
“Why didn’t your championship team repeat?”
This was me talking to Ditka over dinner one night. He sat back in his chair, his eyes glittering as he said, “Well, you see, right there, you’ve put your finger on the big question. Why’s it so hard for a team that’s won to win again? Maybe winning is the greatest thing that can happen to a team and also the biggest disaster. It’s never the same after you win.”
8
SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES
Chicago in the funkadelic summer of ’76
I grew up in the 1970s. It was a sad time in my country, my city, and my house. Everything sucked. In my earliest memory, I’m wearing a T-shirt that says IMPEACH DICK NIXON. I have no idea who that is. There are always hearings on TV. It seems as if everything good is over, the best of life consumed—my generation has been left the rind, the husk of a city. Do I blame Jimmy Carter? Of course I do. And Mayor Daley, and Rick Reuschel, and the rock band Chicago. On short autumn days in my town, you could see melancholy rising from the ground. Like sand from the beach, the sadness was in your shoes in the morning and in your bed at night. Chicago, which boomed for a hundred years, had, by the time of my childhood, fallen into gray dissolution, a seemingly endless decline. As Ray Liotta says in GoodFellas, “This was the bad time.”
Start with the crime—that fantastic run of infamy. It had been glamorous in the ’20s and ’30s, Al Capone and Bugs Moran and downtown turf wars. John Dillinger was shot coming out of the Biograph movie theater. Leopold and Loeb, whatever else you might say about them, at least put some thought into it. After Nails Morton was bucked and trampled to death by a horse in Lincoln Park, his friends brought the animal back to the ill-fated spot and whacked it. But by my first year in grade school, this magnificent underworld panoply had broken into a mash-up of nihilistic tribes: Latin Kings, El Rukns. In the newspapers, they were depicted as shapeless mobs creeping out of the slums. Like the ancient hordes, they were coming.
And the housing projects, those carefully arranged monstrosities. The Robert Taylor Homes—bleak beyond bleak. You’d see them from the highway, blank towers and black windows, weedy yards, a man skulking in an alley. In the summer, on game days, the elevated train did not make local stops between the North Side and Comiskey Park but just rattled on through the South Side like a closed coach carrying Russian aristocrats through territory that has fallen to the Reds. What I’m describing could probably be characterized as white anxiety in the wake of white flight, a suburban fear of the city. But for me it was just the world as seen from the backseat of a Buick station wagon. I mean, what does a kid really know?
Mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976. For several days, his face was seen, in the way of a religious miracle, floating above the slaughter yards. While sitting on a storm-grounded plane at O’Hare one October, the man seated next to my father said, “It never snowed this early when Daley was mayor.” When the plane, having finally gotten clearance, broke through the clouds into the sunshine, the passengers cheered. That’s how it was in Chicago when I was small. The sun went away in October and stayed away until mid-April. A lid closed over the city. You had to remind yourself not to panic.
Jane Byrne was elected mayor in 1979. She had short blond hair and the clipped officious manner of someone else’s mom—she wants to punish you but has been forced to acknowledge you’re outside her jurisdiction. She was beyond her depth. She made the city feel ungovernable, doomed. In response to a crime wave sweeping the North Side, she moved into Cabrini-Green. I’m not sure what it was supposed to accomplish: bring attention to the plight of people trapped in that housing project; show the rest of the city, “Look, it’s not so bad!” It backfired when a journalist, having tailed the mayor, reported that she almost never stayed there, and, when she did, was protected by armed guards.
Superrats were said to have taken over entire blocks—slum raised, monstrous. The most impressive, descendants of the Norway brown, were smaller than a husky, bigger than a beagle, with needle teeth, yellow eyes, and graspy claws. They were on the move, colonizing in the way of the ancient Phoenicians, advancing from neighborhood to neighborhood, destroying stuff and grossing people out. News anchors showed maps: where they’d been, where they were, when they’d get to you. And they were coming, as sure as the turning of the earth. I don’t know if superrats were real or if they were a nightmare conjured by the city’s subconscious. I only know that I did worry about them, as did my friends and siblings. At times, it verged on hysteria. One afternoon, my sister, returning from town in our parents’ car, slammed on the brakes, pointed at our dog, Fluffy, a terrier mix who had grown a little paunchy, and screamed, “Superrat!”
We first heard about John Wayne Gacy in 1978. He was a contractor, a serial killer, a clown. He performed at parties and painted clown pictures in his spare time. A body was found in the crawl space beneath his house that summer. Then another. Then another. And so on. The victims were boys around my age, hired for odd jobs. He gives you ten bucks to mow his lawn and no one ever sees you again. I remember watching the news as bodies were exhumed from beneath his house at 8213 West Summerdale near Des Plaines, a town not far from my own. I used to go there to play hockey. (A girl spit on me after one of those games.) Seeing the house was terrifying because it was so ordinary. If you can’t tell the house of the serial killer from the other houses, what chance do you have?
* * *
The White Sox played baseball on the South Side. And though I grew up north of the city, in an area populated by Cubs fans, there was no small number of Sox fans. For the most part, these were the fathers of my friends, men who’d grown up near Comiskey Park. Meatpackers, record producers, traders—they spoke with a nasal twang. Now and then, they took us to a game at Comiskey. One afternoon, as my friend Danny’s father was locking his Cadillac in the parking lot, we were surrounded by young men, one of them carrying a crowbar, which he flipped hand to hand. He said, “Give me twenty bucks, and I’ll make sure no one throws a crowbar through your window.”
As part of a promotion, fans were invited to bring disco records to a doubleheader in July 1979, where radio shock jock Steve Dahl piled and detonated them in center field between games, blowing a hole in the grass and inciting a riot. Fans tore up the place. It was called Disco Demolition. The second game could not be played and the Sox lost in a forfeit. For part of the 1976 season, the Sox played in what are considered the worst uniforms ever: shorts. Even on a bang-bang play, players refused to slide. Jimmy Piersall, the team’s color commentator, went on a Mike Royko television special, filmed at the Billy Goat Tavern, where, in the course of discussing the wives of White Sox players and why they were always on him, Piersall called the wives “horny broads.” He was suspended. Harry Caray, the play-by-play man, quit in protest and was then hired by the Cubs. Ah, the Cubs! My Cubs! They’re always bad, but they were worse in the ’70s. That’s when they acquired Dave Kingman, a gangly slugger who one season struck out 131 times. At a game in ’75 or ’76, in Los Angeles, two deranged fans ran onto the grass and attempted to light an American flag on fire. The match flickered, but Rick Monday, the Cubs center fielder, scooped up Old Glory before it ignited, and carried it lovingly to safety. Then what do the Cubs do? Trade Monday for Bill Buckner.
In Chicago, it all added to a sense that every season was doomed before it began. We had lost, and lost, and would lose again. That’s why my father begged me to root for the Dodgers. He believed a Cubs fan will have a bad life because a Cubs fan will accept losing as inevitable. “And it’s not just the Cubs,” he told me, “but all the teams around here”—my father grew up in Brooklyn. The Sox had not won the World Series since 1917. The Black Hawks had not hoisted the Stanley Cup since 1961. The Bulls had never been champions of the NBA. I once saw a kid with a T-shirt that said, in giant letters, CHICAGO CUBS, WORLD CHAMPS, then, in little numbers, 1908. The Bears ha
d last won in 1963, but that was before I was born, before the Super Bowl, and before football had overtaken baseball in popularity. By the end of that sad decade, many of us had come to believe that winning was reserved for other people in other towns.
* * *
I had just missed the last of the great Bears, the last players who belonged in the pantheon with Luckman and Grange. These men, whom you could almost see in the distance, disappearing like the caboose of a train, had been driven from the field by injury. That’s football—the average running back lasts just over two years in the league.
For starters, there was that personification of football grace, Gale Sayers, a running back who made his Wrigley Field debut in 1965. He came from Kansas—the Kansas Comet, a fleet flash of lightning who could switch direction without losing speed. Deceptively quick, Sayers could wrong-foot a defensive back with his eyes or the shift of his hips. He made the professionals on the other side look clumsy. His best runs unfolded like Coltrane solos. You never knew where he was going, but, once he found a line, it seemed like it had to be that way. It was as if he could see the field from above, knew just when to cut, where to find a path. (“Give me eighteen inches of daylight, that’s all I need.”) He scored twenty-two touchdowns in 1965 and 132 points, rookie records. The films made of him that year probably give the best sense of what Red Grange might’ve looked like in his prime. There have been only a handful of runners like that.
On December 12, 1965, in the mud at Wrigley, in an otherwise inconsequential game against the 49ers, Sayers put on maybe the greatest running performance ever. What was it like? One winter, I played pickup football with friends in a park in my town. It had rained the night before, the rain turned to ice. I was in cleats; everyone else wore sneakers. Whenever I turned, the kid coming at me was carried away by his momentum, gone. I weaved through defenders as if they were highway cones. It remains an outstanding afternoon of my life. I figure it was like that for Sayers times a billion. Halas pulled him after his fifth touchdown, but the crowd kept chanting his name. He went out for a punt return—just so the fans could get another look. You can watch the film: Sayers camped under the ball, hauling it in, sizing up the field, making a move, accelerating—his sixth touchdown. He gained 332 yards, a record. But it was never numbers that defined Sayers—it was the surfeit of grace, the cool of his game. In sports, it’s style we remember. Not Mickey Mantle’s home runs but how he tossed away his helmet when he failed; not Michael Jordan’s dunks but how he slowed at the decisive moment, as if savoring it. Gale Sayers is remembered because he was beautiful.
A few years ago, speeding along Route 35 in Connecticut, I almost ran into a deer, a big buck with a full rack at the peak of autumn. The road was black, the trees were gold. I slammed on the brakes, locked ’em up, skidded. The deer stopped and stared, hesitated, then took off. As the buck got clear of the road, it stutter-stepped before bounding away—it was a kind of end zone dance, an animal telling itself, I did not die today. It was one of those naturally occurring outbreaks of style that the Darwinists could never explain. What’s the advantage in this? The deer running was survival; the deer stutter-stepping was God.
Sayers was banged and twisted from his first day in the pros. It’s human nature: if, in the midst of a brutal world, you see a high-flying thing, you want to crush it. The first serious injury came in his third season. His foot went this way, his leg went that way. Ever tune a guitar one turn too many? The ligaments in his knee snapped. The doctors said he wouldn’t play again, but he worked and worked and came back to lead the league in rushing once more—he’d become a different kind of runner, more ordinary. People know this story from Brian’s Song, a movie about Sayers and Brian Piccolo, who shared the backfield in Chicago. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970. That movie—a story of rivalry, friendship, disease—is etched in the memory of a generation of fans. Billy Dee Williams as Sayers; James Caan as Piccolo; Jack Warden as Halas. It’s a tearjerker. The first notes of the theme song can turn me into a puddle of goo. When I asked members of the ’85 Bears what they knew about the team before being drafted, many of them said, “Brian’s Song.”
“Did you cry when you watched it?” I asked McMahon.
“Fuck yeah, I cried. Do you think I’m some kind of monster?”
Sayers’s second injury came in 1970. It was the other knee. He never could make it back. He retired in 1971. He’d spent less than three full seasons on the field. Sayers was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977. He was the youngest player to ever receive the honor. In case you’re wondering, that’s not good.
Dick Butkus was drafted in 1965, the same year as Sayers. Two picks, two Hall of Famers. He was the flip side of the coin, the other face of the NFL. Sayers was the rainbow, Butkus the thunderstorm. Sayers was the horn solo, Butkus the cymbal crash. It’s this mix of sugar and salt that gives football its tremendous vitality.
In many ways, Butkus was the model for the ’85 Bears, the template the team was in search of whenever it went looking for another hard hitter to fill out the roster. McMichael and Singletary have each spoken of reading Butkus’s book Stop-Action in high school, memorizing passages, wanting to intimidate in the way of Butkus. Whenever a new defender showed up in Lake Forest, he knew he had to play to the level of the original madman. At its best, the ’85 defense operated in the spirit of Butkus, the brutal middle linebacker. He twisted heads, bit people in the pile. Now and then, you’d see a running back raised off the ground, then driven back, feet still moving like the legs of a flipped cockroach. He last suited up a million years ago, but I still hear him barking like a dog, bloody fingers wrapped in gauze, steam jetting from his mouth, monster of monsters. “I didn’t just want to end a play,” he said. “I wanted to rip their fucking heads off.” He was a South Side legend long before he was famous, a man among boys at the Chicago Vocational High School. The lunchroom turned quiet when he entered, the stillness that tells you a shark is gliding over the reef. Even the greasers avoided eye contact. He was dynamite on the field, big and fast with a lust for contact. Loving to hit is not enough. You have to love getting hit, too.
He was all-American at the University of Illinois in 1963 and 1964. He came within a few votes of winning the Heisman Trophy. Halas always paid attention to local products. He wanted to give fans a hero and also thought, all things being equal, a Chicagoan was going to be superior. (When I was a kid, I had a T-shirt that said CHICAGO: YOU GOTTA BE TOUGH.) The Bears took him in the first round. He made All-Pro his first eight seasons. In 1970, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline THE MOST FEARED MAN IN THE GAME. He carried nastiness like a torch, preserving Bears tradition in a dark age.
He had terrible knees and often seemed to be playing on one leg. By 1973, he was like a jellyfish in a puddle: dangerous but only if you step on it. He did not suit up for the 1974 season. According to the AP, Butkus claimed that surgeons as well as a team physician had looked at his knee and basically called it a day. The Bears refused to pay off the remainder of the linebacker’s contract. Butkus said the team was at fault—its doctors and trainers had not warned him of the long-term effects of the cortisone shots he was given every time they wanted to wheel the mad dog back onto the field. Butkus announced his retirement and sued the Bears for $1.6 million. Halas was infuriated but eventually settled for $600,000. Butkus’s number was not retired until 1994, which seemed like an intentional slight.
And yet when Butkus was elected to the Hall of Fame, he asked Halas to induct him. If you can explain this, perhaps you’ll understand the love and hate that drew and repelled players and fans with George Halas. He was cheap, shortsighted, and mean but also genuine, brilliant, and loyal. He was the coach of your youth, the flask-carrying miser who stands for all coaches and all fathers, for authority everywhere. You hated and cursed him but found yourself craving his approval. You don’t want to want it, but you do. When Halas did an event for his autobiography, Butkus stood in line, then handed the book over for
an autograph. “To Dick Butkus,” Halas wrote, “the greatest player in the history of the Bears. You had that old zipperoo!”
* * *
Halas retired in 1968. He’d been in and out of the game a half dozen times. He would leave, but he could never stay away. A season or two after a big press conference—So, this is it, boys, you won’t have Halas to kick around anymore—he’d be back on the sideline, fedora low, cursing through a rolled-up program. But this time was different. This time he was truly and irredeemably old, seventy-three, shrunken, hobbled. He had a bad hip, which made it painful to walk. On game days, after the players had gotten their injections, the doctor shot up Halas, too, deadening the joint so he could function. “Dr. Jim Stack provided some relief at critical periods by inserting a five-inch-long needle through the groin into the hip,” Halas wrote. “He felt around to find where the head of the femur fitted into the socket and injected painkiller directly into the joint. The injection would see me through the game.” But the shots were increasingly ineffective, and by 1967 Halas could not get around quick enough to curse out the referees. “I had to give up running along the sidelines, instructing officials, encouraging Bears, and taunting our opponents,” said Halas, “all activities which were part of the game and appreciated by our fans.”
He spent much of his last season on one knee; at practice, he traveled by golf cart. By then, the consensus was that Halas had stayed too long. He was out of touch with the modern game. In the Chicago Daily News, Mike Royko described him as “a tight-fisted, stubborn, willful, mean old man.” According to Royko, Halas conducted a postgame interview “in his long underwear on a bench in front of his locker sipping from a pint of whiskey.” Halas was outraged: That cocksucker, everyone knows I don’t take whiskey from the bottle. I drink it out of a can. When the criticism became intolerable, Halas finally stepped aside, turning the keys of the machine over to his assistant, Jim Dooley, the first of a generation of pretenders who, in retrospect, seem like nothing but stepping-stones to Ditka.