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

by Rich Cohen

  “I let them know there was going to be change,” Ditka told me. “We were going to win a Super Bowl but a lot of them weren’t going to be with us when we did. I didn’t say it to be cruel. It was just a fact.”

  “There’s three kinds of coaches,” said Plank. “First, there’s the aspirin coach. He’s the guy that comes in and feeds you a bunch of baloney and makes you feel better initially, but nothing changes. Then there’s the penicillin coach. He comes in and fixes almost everything. The problems, the illnesses. But there’s one thing he can’t fix and that’s cancer on a team. What’s cancer? Guys don’t like each other, the offense versus the defense, huge attitudes. You need the third kind of coach for that: the chemo coach. Bill Parcells, Mike Ditka. The chemo coach comes in, man, he’s the new sheriff in town. He’s so powerful by the way he looks, his presence, his actions. If you got a bad attitude, you don’t buy into his system? He doesn’t care who you are—you’re gone.”

  That July, the Bears had minicamp at Sun Devils Stadium in Phoenix, where, in the summer, the grass heats up to 120°. Ditka selected it with care: he did not believe the Bears’ failures had been caused by lack of talent alone but resulted from a losing attitude that can spread from player to player, a disease that must be sweated out. “If you accept defeat, you’re going to be defeated,” he said. “You can be gracious in defeat, but you better be doing flip flops inside. If you’re not churning, you’ll get your ass whipped, that’s all there is to it.”

  When James Scott, a Bears star receiver, showed up late for practice, his equipment was put in a garbage bag and dumped in the hall. He was eventually cut. When Ricky Watts, a second-round pick in 1979, showed insufficient hustle, he was handed his own equipment-filled bag. (Ditka did give Watts another chance, but he was relegated to special teams and never started another game.) The fact that Scott and Watts were talented only emphasized the point: I don’t care who the fuck you think you are—you’re in, or out. Ditka wasn’t just getting players in shape, he was changing expectations. “The culture changed immediately,” said Kurt Becker. “The nonconformists were gone. And some of these were players, guys that had produced. It didn’t matter. If you weren’t with the program, goodbye.”

  The practices that followed were as tough as any in the history of the league. Ditka ran ’em, pushed ’em, challenged ’em. If a guy doubled over, the bile filling his mouth, Ditka would say, “Look at it this way. You could be working for a living. And really, what can you do? I don’t think half of you are smart enough to get a job. We don’t need you. If you want to leave, get a better deal, fine, go.” Some players started calling Ditka “mad dog.”

  “For all the pounding, the most important things were done subtly,” Baschnagel told me. “For example, he gave us two rules. Just two. First, we had to go unsupervised before practice and jog around the field twice; second, we had to do ten chin-ups on our own. If you can’t do ten chin-ups, do ten sit-ups. Those were his rules. And of course we all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, what’s the purpose of that?’ But those were the rules. And he’d watch: Which guys would try to get around doing those two laps and ten chin-ups? Maybe they’d do three or four chin-ups, or pull up after running a lap and a half. The guys that cheated on those two rules weren’t around for very long. I guess his point was that you have to do all the little things to be successful. All he had were two rules; if you couldn’t adhere to those, you weren’t going to sacrifice what was necessary for the team.”

  * * *

  Ditka was in a peculiar position. Though he was the Bears’ head coach, he controlled only the offense. The defense was coached by Buddy Ryan, who’d been hired by Neill Armstrong. When a head coach is fired, his staff usually goes, too. But in this case, when rumors of Armstrong’s ouster began to circulate, the team’s defensive standouts, who loved Buddy, took preemptive action. The Bears had remarkable defensive leaders: Alan Page, a Hall of Fame defensive tackle who now sits on the Minnesota Supreme Court, and Gary Fencik, the Yalie whom Mike Singletary described as “hit man bitch, reader of Kosinski and Fowles, world traveler, blues freak, fluent in the language of love.” As Ditka was writing to Halas, Page and Fencik, who believed the defense had made a breakthrough the previous season, were writing a letter of their own, which they carried around the locker room for every player on the defense to sign.

  Dec. 9, 1981

  Dear Mr. Halas,

  We the undersigned members of the Bears defensive football team are concerned about the future of our team. We recognize that with the disappointing season the Bears have had this year that there may be changes in our coaching staff and/or administration of the team. Our main concern is over the fate of Buddy Ryan and the other defensive coaches … Buddy has maintained the discipline, morale, pride and effort that we need in order to play well defensively, in spite of the fact that we haven’t had much help from the offensive team …

  “We knew Halas was supposed to be tough and not sympathetic to players, but we felt we had built something worth protecting on the defensive side,” Fencik told me, “and saw no other way to protect it. We had to reach out to the owner. We knew there’d be a coaching change, but we wanted Halas to keep the defensive coach. Everybody loved Buddy. We thought the defense was great.”

  A week after Fencik and Page sent the letter, Halas showed up at a team practice, something he hardly ever did. He was a frail old man with blue eyes and a lantern jaw, more skeletal with each passing year. In the summer, he sped across the fields in a golf cart, “but it was winter, a cold, snowy day,” said Fencik, “and we were working out at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, practicing indoors. It killed the older guys because we played on a cement floor. Halas told our coaches to take a hike. He wanted to talk to the defense alone. When they left, he said, ‘I got your letter. Your coaches will be back next year.’” Halas also responded in writing:

  … This is a magnificent letter! It is a beautifully written letter! It is the highest tribute a coach could receive!

  I can tell you without fear of contradiction that this is the first time in the 61-year history of the Chicago Bears that such a letter has been written about a Bear coach … I’m so fortunate to have you boys on my team …

  For Ditka, it must have been maddening. He was head coach but had little control over the defense—he could talk all he wanted but did not have the power to fire Buddy Ryan. The result was a rift between offense and defense, a rift and a rivalry. The squads traveled on separate buses, attended separate meetings, followed separate codes. Ditka and Ryan were often at war. It was not an act: these men truly hated each other. It was the energy behind everything; it was there at halftime, at the beginning and end of each practice and game. “Every now and again, when things weren’t going well on the field, Mike would come by and make some suggestions,” Ryan said. “I’d just tell him to go blank himself, and he’d turn around and walk off.”

  In an unintended, roundabout way, this dysfunction actually helped the Bears: as squad went after squad, every practice turned into a battle and the players drove each other to the heights of ferocity. Asked to name the best team he faced in 1985, Ditka said, “the Bears.” “When you went out for a normal practice, you wouldn’t wear as many pads,” Plank told me, “but when Mike came to town and Buddy was the defensive coordinator, you went to every practice thinking, You know what? A game could break out here at any moment. I’m taking everything.”

  “Our sidelines were a joke during the games,” Jim McMahon told the writer Steve Delsohn. “I bet if people really knew what was going on back then, they would be amazed that we could win. They were fighting each other all the time. Ditka would yell at him to run a certain defense, and Buddy would say, ‘Fuck you, I run the defense, get outta here.’”

  “I give Mike all the credit,” Plank told me. “Not many CEOs could manage circumstances like that. Imagine being the boss of a company and half the employees don’t have to answer to you. But he figured out how to make it
work. He knew the right buttons to push. Sometimes it was defensive buttons to get us angry or drive Buddy up the wall. He manipulated us, figured out how to push us where we had to go. The goal was winning. To do that, we needed to be a unit. If that meant getting players to hate coaches, fine. In the end, he showed an unbelievable ability to change a situation that hadn’t changed since 1963. The Bears had been wallowing in mediocrity for years. It took Ditka along with a defensive coach that became his nemesis to make it work. There weren’t a handful of people on this planet that could have done it.”

  * * *

  For a fan, a new coach is like a new boyfriend. At first, it’s heady talk and promises of you and me, walks in the moonlight, singing telegrams on your birthday, but sooner or later you figure out what this guy is really all about. Ditka arrived in 1982. By the end of his first season, most of us had realized he was insane. Now, when he appears on television and occasionally turns up in movies, what you see is a parody: Ditka at seventy-four playing Ditka at forty-four—a cartoon that, even in the memory of most fans, has replaced the coach as he was in ’82, flipping off reporters, kicking benches to smithereens.

  Rick Telander, a Sports Illustrated and Sun-Times writer who lived in a house beside Halas Hall, tells a story in the book he wrote with Ditka (In Life, First You Kick Ass) about a construction worker who, while patching Telander’s roof, got into it with the coach. Telander heard the construction guy say something, followed by a few shouted words. A moment later, he came downstairs, “terrified.”

  What’s wrong? asked Telander.

  “Ditka yelled at me.”

  “What did he yell?”

  “‘Use your hammer, not your mouth, jackass!’”

  Ditka was moody and tantrum-prone. After a loss in Baltimore, he punched a wall, breaking his hand. Before the next game, he waved his cast at his players, saying, “Win one for Lefty.” Jerry Vainisi admonished Ditka, saying, “Your technique is coach by crisis. You always have to have some crisis to overcome. It diverts attention from the game. The players don’t understand it. They think you’re crazy.”

  “We call him Sybil after the girl in the movie who had all those personalities,” said McMahon. “Mike will be calm one minute, then throw a clipboard the next. People don’t understand that, but we do. The players figure he’s just going from one stage to another. He’s merely Sybilizing.”

  Jim Finks described Ditka’s method as “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

  Over time, a team takes on the personality of its coach. If he’s strong, the team will be strong. If he’s weak, the team will be ineffectual. But what if he’s insane? Ditka’s temper galvanized many Bears, got them hustling and hitting. But it was different for the skill players. What fired up the bruisers could be the undoing of a passer, that gridiron aristocrat who must do more than pound his way through. Even Ditka’s admirers acknowledge that he was a terrible handler of quarterbacks. He bullied, shouted, undercut, threatened, punished, and chewed them out in front of teammates—in other words, he treated them like he treated everyone else. But a quarterback is not like everyone else. He’s a delicate instrument, a jockey riding his own sense of self-confidence, out there on an audible and a spiral. “Ditka called plays we didn’t even have,” Bob Avellini told me. “I’d signal time-out, walk over, and say, ‘Mike, we don’t have that play.’ And he’d shout, ‘Shut up, and run the fucking thing.’” The list of quarterbacks terrorized by Ditka is illustrious: Bob Avellini, Mike Tomczak, Rusty Lisch, Jim Harbaugh.

  “One time, we were on our own one-yard line,” said Avellini. “We had ninety-nine yards to go with three seconds left in the half. Ditka sent in a play. Willie Gault is the split end. Ditka said, ‘Throw the bomb.’ I said, ‘The defense is laying off thirty yards. There’s nothing good that can possibly happen from this. I can take a safety, get stripped … what’s the best that can happen? A thirty-yard completion?’ He said, ‘Just run the fucking thing.’ Another time, we were supposed to run a sweep right. I saw something so I called a sweep left. It went for thirty yards. I get back to the sideline and Ditka is pounding his fist, slamming his clipboard. He’d rather have a shitty play that he called than a play that actually succeeded.”

  Avellini continued, “Everything he did was based on fear. It works for a short period but you can’t continue on fear. I remember the first practice. We’re running a two-minute offense. I threw the ball right where I was supposed to, but one of the guys ran the wrong pattern: it got picked off. I was supposed to run the whole two-minute offense but Ditka said, ‘Avellini, you’re out.’ I said, ‘What about the guy that blew the pattern?’ Ditka said, ‘You want to pack your bags and get the hell outta here?’ I said no, but at least I stood up to him. When we got back to the locker room, the guys all said, ‘Bob, that was great.’ I said, ‘Yeah, guys, thanks for backing me up.’ I was always walking a tightrope. He’d threaten me: I’m gonna cut your ass. I’m gonna cut your ass. I went in against Green Bay when McMahon got hurt. I didn’t even have a chance to warm up. I threw an incompletion. When I get back to the sideline, Ditka says, ‘I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ ass.’”

  In a game in Seattle in 1984, Ditka told Avellini that under no circumstances was he to audible—that is, change the play sent in by the coach. Even if he saw an opportunity, the wide receivers wouldn’t hear the change. The Kingdome was probably the loudest stadium in football. The Bears got to the goal line. Avellini was under center—he saw something. “I hear Ed Hughes, our offensive coordinator, say, ‘Oh, no,’ said Ditka. I yell: ‘What is it, Ed?’ He says, ‘That son of a bitch is audible-izing.’”

  Avellini threw to a receiver who was supposed to be in the corner of the end zone but wasn’t because he hadn’t heard the call. The interception resulted in a Seattle touchdown.

  Ditka: “Bob comes out of the game, and I say—I’m trembling—‘Bob, why would you do that, son?’”

  Avellini: “Well, I thought—”

  Ditka: “Don’t THINK!”

  After several deep breaths, Ditka went on: “Bob, if you ever do that again you will never—ever—EVER—play another down for me! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?” On another occasion, under similar circumstances, Avellini did the same thing with the same result. When he got back to the sideline that day, he was greeted by Ditka in full Ditka: “Don’t you like me, Bob? Don’t you like your teammates? Do you think we’re stupid and don’t give you good plays?”

  When Avellini tried to explain, Ditka shouted, “That’s it, you’re done!”

  “Then he looked at me,” Ditka remembered, “and said, ‘You never liked me anyway.’ I was going to kill him. Right there. Tear his flesh off like a jackal. I was so mad my neck veins had veins!”

  Avellini finished his career with the New York Jets.

  In a game against the Chargers, Ditka swore at quarterback Rusty Lisch—he had fumbled—until he was out of breath. A few minutes later, when the Bears got the ball back, Lisch refused to play, saying, “I don’t think I can go in after the way you talked to me.”

  “Hey Rusty,” said Ditka, “I was kidding!”

  “I got mad at Lisch for carrying the ball like a loaf of bread,” Ditka explained. According to several players, Mike Tomczak, the Bears’ third-string quarterback in 1985, was ruined by Ditka. “He once told me he was getting treatment from a sports psychologist to help him deal with the harsh criticism he received from Ditka,” Dan Jiggetts wrote in “Then Ditka Said to Payton…” “He said the sessions helped him maintain his personal confidence and perspective.”

  Of all the Bears quarterbacks of the 1980s and ’90s, only McMahon figured out how to handle Ditka, which is probably why only Mac won a Super Bowl. “T-Czak, T-Czak, I always told you how to deal with Ditka,” McMahon said, laughing. “You just look him in the eye and say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ If you did that, he’d leave you alone.” McMahon was a goof, a talented flake who simply did not take it to heart when the coach blew up. He’s just Sybilizing. He let even the titanic rages
flow around him, leaving his inner quarterback compass untouched. Ditka called a play, Mac changed it, the Bears scored, Ditka went nuts. “He was the perfect quarterback for that team,” Danny White told me. “First of all, when they needed a big play, he’d come through. He could throw down the field and had a hell-bent-for-leather approach that matched the team. But it was his temperament that was crucial. McMahon was the only quarterback who could put up with Mike Ditka. He would not let it get to him. Because McMahon was just as crazy as his coach.”

  * * *

  Ditka met Halas once a week, master and protégé lingering in the fading light of a December afternoon. Prospects, plays. Till the very end, the old man had ideas. The body fails, but the brain keeps churning out solutions. In Ditka’s first game as head coach, the Bears were on the Detroit 1-yard line with seconds left. They had two chances to get into the end zone for a tie, handed off both times, and failed. When Ditka got to his office the next morning, there was an old playbook sent over by Halas. It was opened to the QB sneak. From then on, that’s what Ditka called whenever he got near the goal line.

  Though he was an old man by then, Halas still took time to mentor select members of the team. He was a teacher at heart, which is why he took so long to leave the sideline and what made it so hard when he did. “I stopped in after a game when the offices were downtown,” Plank told me. “I had a visit with [general manager] Jim Finks. George Halas stuck his head in and said, ‘Doug, I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes if you have time.’ So after I got done with Finks, I sat with Mr. Halas. He started talking about general things, what was happening on the team, then went into our most recent game. I was amazed by the detailed nature of his knowledge about each play. He picked up key things, crucial things, I’d missed. He’d say, ‘Doug, on that long pass, their second possession in the third, I noticed that you started about twenty feet off the hash mark. But if you cheat a little, move five or ten steps closer to center, I think you’ll get a helpful jump. Also, Doug, I thought you could have been wider on that punt return; it would have given you a better angle at the block.’”