by Rich Cohen
Only later did we learn the truth: McMahon had hurt his back not in the game but while sleeping on a water bed. Years ago, when I went to a neurologist complaining of numb fingers—I thought I had a brain tumor—he told me that I was suffering from a condition known as park bench palsy, a name derived from hobos who passed out on benches with one arm hooked over the top. It’s also called honeymoon palsy, as it’s common among new husbands, who, not wanting to be rude, let their brides sleep all night on their outstretched arms. Mac had suffered water bed palsy: a win over the Patriots, a drunken debauch, a stumble upstairs, a swoon into the watery waste, followed by hours of dreamless sleep in the most awkward position.
He showed up at practice in a neck brace. It was the sort of monstrous thing you wear when trying to turn a fender-bender into a life-changing lawsuit. Ditka took one look at him and said, “You’re not playing.” This was Tuesday, and the game was scheduled for prime time Thursday. McMahon did not accept Ditka’s decision. Asked about the game, he smirked and said, “There’s no possibility I’m not playing.”
“The one problem [McMahon] had was with authority,” Ditka wrote. “He had a problem with his father, he had a problem with his Brigham Young coach, and he had a problem with me. Authority figures. He was defiant just because he didn’t want to be known as a conformist, or a guy who would listen. He sure as hell didn’t care about being the All-American boy.”
Mac showed up at his next practice in street clothes and sat in the bleachers with Joe Namath, who was interviewing the Bears quarterback for ABC. McMahon would not miss a chance to hang out with Namath. This was Mac’s spirit guide. “I never was a hero-worshiper, or jock-sniffer, or autograph-seeker,” McMahon wrote. “I liked Mickey Mantle, I think Jack Nicholson is super […] if there’s one person I identify with in sports it’s Namath.”
At the end of practice, when the press asked if McMahon would play, Ditka was more emphatic than ever: Did you see him up there? No fucking way. He then cited a rule in the manner of a judge citing legal precedent: “If you don’t practice, you don’t play.”
“That’s a high school rule,” said McMahon. “There’s no possibility I won’t play.”
Most of us believed the Ditka/McMahon feud was phony, ginned up for the press in the way of a subplot in professional wrestling. But when I floated this theory to Steve Zucker, then McMahon’s agent, he said, “I was the go-between. I put the fires out. Believe me. It was real. They wouldn’t talk to each other for weeks. But it was like father and son. They wouldn’t talk but they loved each other. Sort of. In a way. They respected each other. They were both very stubborn men.”
McMahon was told not to dress for the game, but there he was, in uniform, throwing spirals before kickoff. The Bears were in their white jerseys. Mac wore an Adidas headband to keep the hair out of his eyes, his bottom lip fat with chewing tobacco. He was concentrating on each toss, focused in the way of a fighter pilot who swallowed a handful of greenies in the hangar. Ditka, commenting on how sharp Mac seemed just two days out of traction, said something like, I don’t know what they gave him, but he came flying out of that tunnel.
Interviewing NFL veterans, I sometimes felt like the kid talking to Clint Eastwood’s broken-down gunfighter in Unforgiven:
KID: Was you ever scared in them days?
MUNNY: I don’t remember, Kid. I was drunk most of the time. Give me a pull on that bottle, will you?
The ABC cameras found McMahon on the sideline, and, having found him, seemed reluctant to pull away. Mac was a star—he had that on even his worst days. Frank Gifford of ABC said there was no chance McMahon would play. Ditka had characterized his role as “Catastrophe Quarterback.” Namath wasn’t so sure. Boy, I don’t know, Frank. Jim told me there’s no chance he won’t play.
The game started, then dragged. It got boring. The defense did what the defense did, but Steve Fuller, who started at QB for the Bears, could not produce. It was three and out, three and out. Most drives ended in a punt. The Bears defense began to lose faith. You could see it in the way they jogged onto the field after yet another failed possession. In the third quarter, the Bears were losing 17–9. And there seemed no prospect of putting up more points.
Meanwhile, McMahon was following Ditka up and down the sideline, talking, yelling, demanding: Put me in! Put me in!! Ditka ignored him the way a big dog ignores a yapping little dog until the yapping becomes intolerable, at which point he’d respond with a few ominous big-dog barks: No I won’t put you in! Do you know why? Because if you don’t practice, you don’t play! This feud was more exciting than anything happening on the field; it was a high school soap opera, the coach driven mad by the flaky quarterback.
In the second half, McMahon had his helmet on and was playing catch on the sideline. Frank Gifford said McMahon was warming up on his own: Ditka won’t let him play. You felt just how badly Ditka wanted to win without McMahon. He hated how talent seemed to give the quarterback permission to do whatever he wanted. In the last minutes of the third quarter, Minnesota took on the air of a team mopping up. It was all over. “The offense was sputtering, doing nothing,” Ditka said. “I could see that Walter was not himself. And all of the time, as we were falling behind, McMahon was bugging the shit out of me. He was pouting down on the bench, then he was standing behind me, then he was following me around like a puppy. I turned around and almost stepped on top of him. ‘Put me in,’ he was saying, ‘I can play. I’m fine.’”
Ditka finally threw up his hands and said, “All right, just go.”
McMahon fastened his chin strap and ran into the game. From that moment, he would always be conflated in my mind with Shane, the reluctant gunfighter forced back into the fight, the man who, by his presence alone, changes everything. As soon as he got onto the field, you could sense a change in the weather. “Jim rolled in like a gunfighter strutting into Dodge City,” Singletary wrote. “You could see the whole offense pick up.” The running backs, the linemen, the receivers—they lifted their shoulders, their chests filled with air. Believing you’re in it, that you have a chance—it makes all the difference. “Every good starting quarterback has got that confident arrogance—‘I’m better than everybody else,’” said McMichael. “When I talk about the difference between Jim McMahon and Steve Fuller, I’m not talking about athletic ability, I’m talking about presence—the kind of person who everybody knows is around. It’s like when you’re at the high school dance and the most popular girl walks in the gym, all eyes turn to her.” McMahon took a knee in the huddle, grinned, and said, “All right, boys, we’re going down that field and getting six.”
For McMahon, these few moments at the center of the world, at the still point of the spinning globe, made the rest of it—early mornings, practices, Ditka’s tantrums—tolerable. Not being sure about McMahon’s physical condition, Ditka sent him in with a conservative play: a screen pass. But when the quarterback got to the line, he noticed something. Having noticed something, he called an audible. That is, he changed the play. Ditka, on the sideline, having been turned into a spectator, cursed, threw his clipboard. McMahon stumbled as he took the snap and came very close to falling down. Later speculation attributed this stumble variously to his back, to being rusty, to the drugs that lit him like a Christmas tree, even to the aftereffects of a long night of partying. “I don’t know if I should tell this on him,” McMichael wrote, “And I don’t want [to say] anything negative about the boys in this book, but he wasn’t supposed to play, remember. So yeah, he’d been out all night. Smelled like alcohol, you know?”
McMahon righted himself, then set up in the pocket. A Vikings tackler got through and was heading for number 9 with all the steam of a free runner. He would have ended the play, maybe the game, but, at the last moment, Payton, freelancing his way into the action, took the rusher out. This incredible block—Sweetness launching himself into the knees of a man twice his size—shows what made Payton one of the best backs in football history.
Payton
had given McMahon an extra moment and he used it to find Willie Gault deep downfield. A screamer, a high flyer. Gault snagged it on the run. Just like that, Shane had picked off the first of the bad men, the leather-clad phantom hiding in the shadows on the balcony. One play, seventy yards, touchdown.
When McMahon got to the sideline, Ditka grabbed him, got in his face, and said, “Tell me, what fucking play did I call?”
“Screen pass.”
“Then why the fuck did you do that?”
“’Cause Willie was open.”
It was not just the offense that McMahon brought to life; it was the defense, too. “I’ve never been around another quarterback that had that kind of effect,” Plank told me. “He made everybody better, not just the receivers and tight ends, but the linebackers and safeties. He’d be head-butting the guys as they went onto the field.”
On the Vikings’ next possession, Wilber Marshall picked off a pass. A minute later, Mac was back on the field. Ditka sent in a running play. Mac saw something. He called an audible. Ditka kicked over a cooler. Mac rolled left, then hit receiver Dennis McKinnon in the chest as he crossed into the end zone. Two plays, two touchdowns. Bears 23, Vikings 17.
The Vikings came apart after that, took penalties, made mistakes. Is there a moment in the movie when some of the actors realize they’ve been cast as the bad guys? McMahon threw a perfect strike to Gault his next time on the field, but Gault dropped it. That was the rap on Gault: soft, he gave up the ball at the hint of contact. McMahon ran for a first down. “Gutsy little man, isn’t he?” said Gifford. “Pinched nerve and all.” A few plays later, McMahon found McKinnon in the end zone. He later described the audible that led to that score as “another sandlot maneuver.” If I had known then what I know now, I’d have quit watching sports that day. It was never going to get better.
I snapped a mental picture of McMahon in the fourth. He was watching from the sideline as the final seconds drained off the clock on one of the great performances: seven passes, three touchdowns, 166 yards—in seven minutes. He’d taken off his helmet and fortified himself with another plug of chew. His hair was pushed back and he looked tough, with a three-day growth of beard. You could tell that he was admired, loved and admired, the sort of guy who would dominate even those nights when he was not around; everyone would laugh when his name was invoked, smile and say, “McMahon, that crazy fucker…”
* * *
I knocked on the door. A television, which had been blaring news of an outrage on the other side of the world, switched off. There were voices, then the door opened. A dark-haired woman shook my hand, then stepped aside, revealing a bald, medium-size guy in his midfifties. He was haggard, beat up in the way of a dockworker in his tenth year of early retirement. He was wearing a tank top that revealed sloped shoulders and shapeless arms, the arms of a once powerful man who, at some point, decided to take a rest, and liked it. The shirt was engaged in a dialogue with itself. In big letters, it asked GOT MILK? In smaller letters, beneath, it answered: GOT POT.
He nodded at me, then smiled, revealing the plug of tobacco tucked in his lower lip. After shaking my hand, he spit in a cup. His eyes were buggy. “Come on,” he said. This was my first physical contact with Jim McMahon. On some level, I probably wrote this book just to meet the quarterback. I followed him to an office in back of the house. Mesquite and cactus, Weber grills, sauna and steam, sunshine all winter—Mac had forsaken Chicago a decade before, sold his house, moved to Scottsdale to one of the adobe mansions that run beside the low brown hills.
When I asked Steve Zucker what McMahon wanted from him as an agent, he said, “Jim wanted just one thing: enough money so that, when he stopped playing, he’d never have to work again.” Here’s how Mac described that fantasy in his autobiography, published when he was twenty-six: “And when I retire, maybe I can fulfill another dream. You know how Golf Digest lists the top hundred golf courses every year? I’d like to just get on a plane and play them, one after another. What a way to live.”
McMahon played his last NFL season in 1996 for Green Bay, where he spent most of his time on the bench. He’d been brought in as a mentor for Brett Favre, a sort of Merlin to teach the boy king the dark magic. That’s football: first you’re young; then, if you’re lucky, you’re old; then you’re gone. He made it back to the Super Bowl with the Packers in 1996 but refused to play. (“[Coach Mike Holmgren] asked if I wanted to go in, but I said no,” Mac told me. “I said, ‘I played in this game when it meant something. I’m not going in to mop up.’”) For a time, Mac hosted a golf tournament in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the Barefoot Classic, its only requirement being that players compete without shoes. Now and then, he shows up on a sports channel. In a particularly strange episode of Reel Fishing, he was seen drinking all afternoon, then peeing off the boat. In 2003, he was pulled over by the police in Navarre, Florida. He’d been weaving. If you compare the way McMahon reacted to the way Ditka behaved after he’d been stopped, it tells you everything: Ditka cursed, threatened, then signed the ticket “Fuck you Jack.” According to the AP, McMahon told his arresting officer, “I’m too drunk. You got me.”
“He was pretty well wasted,” Officer Henderson agreed.
We spent two or three hours in his office, drinking beer, chewing tobacco, and talking. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops. He sat in a swively desk chair. His computer glowed. His shelves of memorabilia—footballs, awards, pictures taken on red-letter days, the young McMahon covered in grime, the old McMahon posed with presidents—looked down. His dogs came in—two Doberman pinschers who ran around smelling everything and a poodle who seemed to be in charge of the operation. Mac’s girlfriend refilled drinks. Her name is Laurie Navon. McMahon has her name tattooed in Chinese characters on his arm. He has a gold hoop in his ear. He had houseguests. You could hear their happy voices in the distance, by the pool. Now and then, Mac seemed impatient to join the party, but mostly he had nothing but time.
He was unrecognizable when I first saw him, or nearly so, but as we talked, the years fell away and I found myself in the company of the quarterback I’d followed so zealously. This McMahon and that McMahon are the same person after all—the same house after a hundred years in the rain, when the ivy has penetrated the tuck pointing and the broken window lets the wind wreak havoc.
We talked about Chicago and the suburbs. McMahon has four grown kids and told me how strange it was to sit in the bleachers at his kids’ games where every eye followed him and all the fathers seemed to want something. “The parents were a pain in the ass,” he told me. “Especially the hockey parents. I actually got into a couple of … well, they weren’t altercations, no punches were thrown, but words were exchanged. I’d try to sit away from everybody. I didn’t want it. They tend to mouth off. I remember when my son was ten or eleven, playing in one of those rinks where you can stand behind the goalies. There were four or five fathers beating on the glass and I thought I saw a guy flip off the kids. Sure enough, a minute later, I see my son whack the glass—the guy is flipping him off. After the game, my son comes out of the locker room, and I see him jawing with somebody. I look over. It’s the same guy. He’s about six three, in a business suit, glasses, buddy-buddy with his friends. I tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, tough guy, what’s your problem? Why are you flipping off little kids?’ He says, ‘I didn’t flip off your son, Jim. I flipped off the other kid.’ I said, ‘Does that make it right, asshole? I should beat the shit out of you right here.’ I almost hit him but thought, No, I can’t. So I asked my son, ‘Do you want to kick his ass?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ dropped his bag, walked up, and jacked the guy in the chest, knocked him into the glass. The guy took a step toward my son. I said, ‘You take one swing, pal.’ He just stood there. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ turned to my boy, and said, ‘Let’s go.’”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I asked about audibles—why did he call so many audibles? Was he doing it just to drive Ditka nuts? “Nah,” he sai
d, “that was a side benefit. Truth is, there were times when our offense was just not producing. Unless you did something, it wasn’t going to happen. That’s why, any chance I got, I’d throw it.”
“Was it fun?”
“Was what fun?”
“Playing.”
“Fuck yeah, it was fun as hell,” he said, smiling. “But if you’re not playing, if you’re injured or backing up or whatever, that sucks. My last couple years, I didn’t play much at all.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sundays were great,” he said. “That’s the only part of the game I miss. The week of work, dealing with the media and all that shit—don’t miss none of it. Hanging out with the boys, being in the locker room—that’s what you really miss. ’Cause they were some funny sumbitches. But I don’t want to be young again. Have to do all that shit again. Feel that pain again.”
McMahon gripped his right shoulder as he said this, thinking. While trying to untangle a knot with a fork when he was nine, he stabbed himself in the eye, permanently damaging his cornea. In Chicago, we used to joke that only the Bears would draft a half blind quarterback. When asked why he always wore sunglasses, even indoors, he would blame this childhood injury, saying it left him acutely sensitive to light. I always figured that Mac came up with the story to explain why he wore sunglasses indoors. After all, he didn’t wear them during games, even on sunny days. But now, sitting close, his eyes did seem funky. He doesn’t really look at you when he talks—he looks at a vanishing point over your shoulder.