by Rich Cohen
“Fuck off,” Buddy told him. “It’s my defense, Ditka.”
“Dad never could stand Dallas,” Buddy’s son Rex said recently. (Rex Ryan is the head coach of the Jets.) “He wanted a beat-down. He wanted to kick their ass.”
Ditka: “What was it, 44–0 or something? And we’re still blitzing at the end of the game? That makes a lot of sense. I had to tell [Buddy], ‘Quit blitzing, what the hell you gonna accomplish? You knocked out two quarterbacks.’ I mean, it’s crazy. And that game was embarrassing to me because there’s no man in football I had more respect for than Coach Landry. It was just our time. We were a better team than them, period. Let it go at that.”
As Dallas fans streamed out of Texas Stadium, Wilson and Marshall started barking on the sidelines. John Madden, calling the game for CBS, said, “My God, they’re barking like dogs down there.”
The final score was, in fact, 44–0. It was the first time the Cowboys had been shut out in fifteen years. On the way off the field, Ditka shook Landry’s hand and said he was sorry. “Don’t be,” Landry told him. “You have a heck of a football team.”
“I felt good, but I also felt bad,” said Ditka. “Here we were, doing what we could only dream of doing. And yet it was the worst thing. We had our picture taken before the game, Coach Landry and me, with our arms around each other. This was the guy I’d learned everything from.”
Hampton found Everson Walls after the game, the cornerback who’d said, “You guys haven’t played anyone yet.” “And you know what,” said Hampton, “we still haven’t.”
On CBS, as the camera sweeps the stands in a final goodbye, a fan holds a sign that says CHICAGO BEARS: YOU LOOK MAHVELOUS!
11
A RACE TO THE QUARTERBACK
Linebackers Otis Wilson (55) and Wilber Marshall (58) closing in on Dallas quarterback Danny White. November 11, 1985
Of all the ’85 Bears, I was probably most excited to interview Gary Fencik. If anyone could explain the team, I figured it would be him. Here was a man of two worlds: the world of the suburbs, a public school world of penny loafers and paisley, and the hyperviolent world of the NFL. Fencik seemed like a kind of undercover agent, a medium-size man in a big man’s game. He attended Barrington High School; his father was an assistant principal. He graduated from Yale and got an MBA at Northwestern. He’s spent his post-football life in private equity, in the exact kind of job occupied by every kid I knew growing up. He lives in Lincoln Park, in the exact kind of apartment where I might live if I lived in Chicago. He looks like the guys I grew up with, too. Ditka is a bear with ruined hips. Otis is a killer in a tracksuit. Plank has titanium shoulders. Dent is broken-down and walks like John Wayne in The Searchers. But Fencik is a regular guy, handsome, with dark hair and a bent nose. He’s you raised to the highest power, a kid who wished the same wish, only his came true.
Size has a lot to do with it. The dimensions of professional football players set them apart, mark them as a distinct species. Hampton was six five, 264 pounds when he played. McMichael was six two, 270. Dent was six five, 265. Today’s players are still bigger. In some cases, much bigger. You cannot imagine yourself playing in their game. You’d have to be nuts. But when I met Fencik for brunch, I was gratified to see that, depending on my shoes, he and I were roughly the same class. The Bears listed him at six feet, 194 pounds, but I’d put him closer to five eleven. Nor was he terribly fast when he played. Fencik was, in fact, an average-size American who had a talent for making big hits—he sped up when a normal person would slow down. “Deluding yourself, that’s the trick,” he told me. “You have to work yourself up into such a state that you forget just how much bigger than you some of these guys are.”
“And that worked?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, but not all the time,” he said, laughing.
He thought for a moment, remembering. “One night, after a game, I met up with Dan [Hampton] and Steve [McMichael],” he said. “They were hours ahead in terms of relaxing. After I had a couple beers trying to catch up, maybe a couple too many, I told Dan, ‘I bet, if I were as big as you, I could whip your ass.’ It made him crazy. He picked me up like a two-by-four and lifted me over his head and started shouting, ‘But you’re not as big as me! You’re not, you’re not!’ He threw me down onto the floor. It really hurt. Then McMichael picked me up and cradled me and said, ‘Hey, Hamp, be careful, you’re going to hurt the little fella.’ That’s when you realize, these guys—well, they’re great, but they’re also very strong. I had some big friends.”
Fencik was the hiker who had fallen in among grizzlies, the fan who’d gone through the looking glass but would always remain a fan. He rooted for the Bears as a boy, reading up on Butkus and Sayers, filled with Super Bowl dreams. He was a good player in high school, “not great,” he said, “but I got better at every level. We had a good junior team at Barrington. The quarterback went to Arizona State, the wide receiver ended up at Minnesota. I got recruited simply because I was in film with those guys—it’s the only reason college coaches happened to see me.”
Fencik visited Yale in the spring of 1972. The white stone, the ivy—he fell hard. “There was just something about Yale that went beyond football,” he told me. “I wandered around and looked at everything and thought, Oh boy, I really want this experience!” He played both ways freshman year, a receiver on offense, a safety on defense. Junior year, Coach Carm Cozza limited him to offense. “I had the longest reception in Yale history,” he told me. “We ran a halfback option against Princeton from the one and I went ninety-nine yards for a touchdown.” He was drafted by Miami in the tenth round in 1976, “the only team that had gone back and seen film of me playing defense. They said, ‘Look, you have no chance of playing receiver in the NFL, but you could possibly make it as a defensive back.’”
In those days, a draftee would sign that first contract as soon as it arrived in the mail and not think about it again until a year or so later, when he realized he’d been screwed. But Fencik happened to be taking a class taught by Howard Cosell. I mention this partly to give a sense of the distance between Fencik’s college experience and that of, say, Payton, who attended Jackson State. “It was a seminar with twelve students,” Fencik said. “Every week Howard would come in with someone from sports. We had Pete Rozelle address us. We had Bob Wood, the president of CBS. We had Bob Woolf, who’s considered one of the first great sports agents. He represented Larry Bird. On draft day, Howard invited me to New York. The Giants had just signed Larry Csonka and I remember walking in Manhattan with Cosell, Csonka, and Csonka’s agent. I had dinner with Howard and his wife, then Howard had a car take me back to New Haven. When I got the Dolphins contract, I asked Howard what to do. He said, ‘I’ll have Bob Woolf take a look.’ Bob made a few fixes, gave it back, and said, ‘Now it’s fair.’
“I was excited to be going to the Dolphins,” Fencik continued. “They were just a few years off their undefeated season. Bob Griese was the quarterback, Mercury Morris was the halfback. They had the great ‘No-Name Defense.’ I worked like a dog in training camp. I ruptured my lung the first month—broke a rib, which popped the thing. They didn’t tell me about that rib in Miami. I only found out when I was with the Bears. I got hurt during a drill and went to the locker room for X-rays. The doctor asks, ‘When did you break your rib?’ I go, ‘Never.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you busted a rib in the last couple of months.’”
Miami cut Fencik in the last weeks of preseason. You think the final roster has been chosen, that last bullet dodged, then get a tap on the shoulder: Coach Shula wants to see you, and bring your playbook. (In football, the playbook is like the briefcase with the nuclear codes; it must never fall into the wrong hands.) Miami had traded for a veteran safety, making Fencik redundant. Shula later described the release as among the worst decisions of his career.
Jerry Vainisi contacted Fencik and asked if he wanted to come by Halas Hall and try out. The Bears were always looking for hometown prospects, players fans cou
ld identify with. “I was on my way to become a baby banker in the Citibank management training program in New York when they called,” Fencik said. “I was going home to see my parents anyway, so I figured, what the hell, and went for a one-day tryout. The next thing I know, I’m sitting with Jim Finks and he’s welcoming me to the team. My God, after all those afternoons in Wrigley Field, I was a Bear! When Finks flipped through my Miami contract, which the Bears had to honor, he was perplexed. He said, ‘No rookie gets all [these guarantees]. Who the hell did this for you?’”
Fencik appeared in thirteen games his first year, mostly on special teams. By his second, he was a starter. He played safety beside Plank, who trained the Yalie in the school of big hits. They came to seem a perfect pairing, a duo in the way of Captain & Tennille. (Plank told me that fans still call him “Gary Plank.”) Fencik stood up receivers, Plank finished them off. Late hits, low hits, high hits: they were dirty and mean, carrying on a Bear tradition of operating on the legal line. They were known as the Hit Men. Plank was knocked out of the NFL in 1982. Fencik continued alone. Well, not alone—Plank’s spot was taken first by Todd Bell, then by Dave Duerson, but it always seemed like Fencik was alone without Plank. When Fencik, appearing in “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” called himself “the Hit Man,” it made me sad. Hearing it, you could not help but think of the other hit man who got injured a few seasons too soon.
Fencik played twelve years in Chicago, beginning in the dark days when the team was an embarrassment. Thus, he was in the perfect position to understand how the team became what it became, how, on defense, it went from mediocrity to maybe the best ever. When I asked about this—“I mean, how the hell did it happen?”—Fencik smiled. “Well, now you’re talking about the 46,” he said, “and if you want to understand the 46, you’ve got to start with Buddy Ryan. Remember, I’m the guy that wrote the letter that saved Buddy’s job. I’d always remind him about that.”
* * *
Buddy Ryan grew up outside Frederick, Oklahoma, on a farm in desiccated country ringed by low hills. The family lived in a four-room house without plumbing. He was up each morning before first light, dragging himself to the barn to milk the cows—an antiquated, old-time American childhood. Scarcity was his god, as having nothing makes a boy tough. Years later, at training camp, he’d stand in the bathroom and watch the prospects shave. He looked for those who shut the faucet between swipes of the blade. The kids who let the water run were fancy boys and could not be trusted; those who conserved grew up with well water, far from town, and were the sort who would play in pain. The rougher the childhood, the more promising the recruit.
To defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, you were either an adjective or a number. Here he is with number 55, Otis Wilson, celebrating a victory over the Giants in the second round of the 1986 playoffs.
Buddy played high school football, a tough number who punched above his weight. At sixteen, he joined the National Guard. He needed the money—$40 a month. “Then the sumbitches went and mobilized us,” he told Sports Illustrated. This was during the Korean War, when the fighting was hot. He arrived in the vicinity of the 38th Parallel in 1951. At night, he walked the perimeter of camp, a pistol on his hip, his mind filled with formations. Everything about the army, from the barracks to the men marching in rank, reminded him of the game. He was promoted to master sergeant, where he learned to haze the privates, shout in their faces, break ’em down and build ’em up—it was the way of the army, and, long ago, before the sports agent and the union, it was the way of the NFL.
Buddy led a platoon in Korea, saw action, then went home. The G.I. Bill put him through Oklahoma A&M, where he played guard on the football team. A big mouth, he loved nothing more than giving the boys a hard education, turning them from a rabble into a unit. Less than a year after graduation, he was hired to coach a high school football team in Granville, Texas. For Buddy, it never much mattered if he was leading seventeen-year-olds or pros—coaching was the thing, building the unit, taking the hill. Ed McCaskey might ask God to convert the Communists, but Buddy was going to force conversion at the point of a gun, a free runner, a blitz. Everywhere he went, his defenses hurt people, and his teams won games. By 1960, he was climbing the ranks, eventually becoming the defensive coordinator at the University of Buffalo. According to the former Cleveland Browns coach Sam Rutigliano, “Even then, Buddy Ryan was the kind of guy who’d pull the trigger before the target was up.”
In 1968, Buddy was hired as defensive line coach of the New York Jets. He’d stay with the team for several years, but the epiphany came in his second season, as the Jets were preparing for Super Bowl III. Buddy spent the week in meeting rooms, listening as the game plan was laid out by head coach Weeb Ewbank. In describing his strategy, Ewbank kept stressing the same point: We’ve got to protect our quarterback Joe Namath. He’s the key. We lose him, it’s over. “If we gotta block eight, we block eight, but Namath doesn’t get hit.” After about the ninth repetition of this speech, a synapse fired somewhere in Buddy’s brain. The quarterback! If Weeb will give up so much to protect this one player, he must be the key. If he protects with five guys, I’ll rush six. If he protects with six, I’ll rush seven. No matter what, I must kill the quarterback! “This clearly made an impression on Buddy,” Jaworski wrote. “He figured that if Weeb thought it was so important to keep Namath from getting hit, then, as a defensive coach, Buddy needed to come up with whatever he could to hit the quarterbacks of other teams.”
The story of Buddy Ryan is the story of this one big idea; the rest is commentary, the steady unfolding of packages, formations, and schemes as the coach fiddled until he found the best way to concuss the quarterback.
In 1974, he took a job with the Vikings, where he helped build the defensive unit that came to be known as the Purple People Eaters. In 1976, he was hired as the defensive coordinator of the Bears. Buddy was forty-five, a barrel-chested, theory-stuffed genius. He wore wire-frame glasses and was constantly sticking his finger in the faces of his players, yelling, smirking, or brushing the sandy hair from his fierce eyes. It was in Chicago that he finally got a chance to flesh out his ideas, mold his troops, run the show.
In many ways, Buddy never stopped being a master sergeant, a hard-ass of the break-’em-down-and-build-’em-up variety. He knew all the tricks of the cult leader, how to sweeten the hours of pain with a scrap of praise, a hand on the neck, a tap on the helmet at the end of practice. In Chicago, he put himself at the center of worship. He was charismatic, intense. You’d follow him to the edge of your strength and sanity because you wanted to be acknowledged. It did not matter where you were drafted or how much you got paid: Buddy made you earn your spot. Everyone started at the bottom, where you were mocked and humiliated, name-called and worked over, until he could see you had broken and were ready to submit. Then he remade you into a killer, a kamikaze who would fly into the aircraft carrier. “Buddy operated by numbers,” Plank told me. “There were no names. You were either an adjective, and not a very complimentary one, or you were the number on your jersey. I was 46. Being a number was an honor. It meant you weren’t an adjective. Here comes this master sergeant from the Korean War and he started to develop and encourage pride in being part of a special unit, a defensive squad.”
“Buddy had a grading system when we watched film,” the linebacker Jeff Fisher, currently the head coach of the St. Louis Rams, told the writer Steve Delsohn. “He either said nothing about you, which meant you did your job. Or he said you were horse shit, a dumbass, or an asshole. If you were horse shit, you missed a tackle. If you were a dumbass, you made a mental error and let up a big play. If you were an asshole, you were probably going to be on the streets pretty soon.”
Singletary: “The NFL didn’t have limitations as to what a coach could do back then, so Buddy would break a man down of everything he had, then allow him to build himself back up. There is something psychologically brainwashing about this process.”
Singletary added a kicker that t
ells you he was among the brainwashed: “Underneath it all, you knew that Buddy loved you.”
“He would beat you down, beat you down, beat you down, then build you back the way he wanted,” Jim Morrissey told me. “I’d have done anything for Buddy Ryan.”
Asked when the defense coalesced, every Bear identified the same moment. “It was in ’78, Buddy’s first or second year with the team,” Plank said. “We hadn’t played well the day before. In fact, the defense had been pushed around. Buddy came in smoking a pipe, looking serene. We went into the defensive meeting room. Now, there’s a line used in the military: they don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Buddy was breaking down the game. Then he stopped and looked at us and said, ‘You know what? I’m just disappointed. I thought we were better than that. I thought we would give more effort.’ He said, ‘If there’s one thing that I have a hard time with as a coach, it’s turning on a film and seeing players playing below their ability.’ And as he was talking, a tear rolled down his face. I’m getting emotional just remembering it. We became a family at that moment. After that, whatever he asked us to do, no question, we’d do it.”