by Rich Cohen
“I still feel the pain of the game every day so I don’t need to miss it,” he went on. “I like doing what I do now, which is pretty much whatever I want. Didn’t make a lot of money in the game, but I put four kids through college, so I did all right.”
At his peak, Mac earned close to $1 million a year, his income significantly supplemented by endorsements. Every time you turned on a TV, there he was, hawking another product. He was lucky enough to be represented by Steve Zucker, who protected and increased the quarterback’s money. According to Celebrity Net Worth, McMahon is currently worth $15 million, which makes him an exception among retired football players. Most of them struggle to earn for the rest of their lives.
“What’s your typical day?” I asked.
“I get out of bed around ten. When it’s nice out, which it usually is, I’ll go lay by the pool for an hour or two. Check my mail. Watch some TV. For the last six weeks I had [a postsurgical] boot on, so I couldn’t play golf. But now that I can play, I’ll get out and play a little bit more.”
“How are you holding up physically?”
Every player I asked this question responded with a catalog of woe.
“Not good,” said McMahon. “My shoulders, my elbows, my knees—they’re all pretty much gone. I’m probably going to need a new knee. They said if I screw this one up one more time, I’ll have to get another. My shoulders and elbows are what really bother me. I got memory issues. I got a deterioration in my neck, my upper neck, a compressed disk. And my lower back, lower spine, it’s all degenerating.”
The memory issues—that’s what I wanted to know about. McMahon had joined hundreds of other former NFL players in a class-action lawsuit to force the league to take responsibility for the long-term effects of all those concussions and head blows. In recent years, doctors at the Brain Bank at Boston University have made a convincing case that many if not all football players will suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, a disease that destroys parts of the brain. Symptoms include memory loss, depression, dementia. In recent years, several former players with the disease have committed suicide.
At some point, every conversation I had with a retired player turned to “the disease.” Dave Duerson, an All-Pro safety on the ’85 Bears, who suffered from CTE, killed himself in 2011. Duerson’s former teammates spoke of the disease with a wounded sense of betrayal—they’d been betrayed by their team, their league, even their own love of the game. Here were men who played a rough sport they knew would extract a price in hip replacements and artificial knees, but to find out, twenty years after retirement, that it might also take their personality, their mood, their memory, their mind? In the end, you forget your own name. And there’s no test, no way to know if you’ve got it until they do the autopsy.
When I asked McMahon about the lawsuit, he said, “Which one? I’m a plaintiff in this concussion case and I’m also doing a workmen’s comp case and a disability or line-of-duty case. And then I’ve got my limo driver case. We were in a limousine coming back from Tahoe, and our driver fell asleep, went off the road, fuckin’ … we should be dead.”
“How’s your memory?”
“Sometimes, I come into a room and have no idea why I’m there.”
“That’s not good.”
“They gave me this memory test, a list of fifteen things, and they’d say, ‘What do you remember of those fifteen?’ I’d get two or three. And I’m like, ‘Damn, you just told me that shit!’”
Whatever the state of Mac’s brain, he’s a pleasure to be around. When asked about a specific moment or play, he lights up. We spent the afternoon talking about his past.
* * *
Jim McMahon was born in Jersey City. When he was in grade school, his family moved to California. When he was ten, a coach arranged all the kids who’d signed up for Pop Warner football in a line on a suburban field. Each kid was handed a football and told to huck it, heave it as far as you can. There were wobblers, wounded ducks, scorchers. The coach walked until he reached the most distant ball, picked it up, walked it back, then handed it to McMahon, saying, “You’re the quarterback.”
Like Ditka, he was a high-intensity boy. When he was twelve, he was kicked off his Little League baseball team for smoking. In high school, he was suspended for vandalism. When he was sixteen, his family moved to Roy, Utah. McMahon was the kid from nowhere, the smartass who, at the end of the summer, turns up on the high school field and blows them all away. He could hit a man at thirty yards. He was tough, too, small but fearless, ready to shove the ball down the throat of a player twice his size. A kid like that attracts scouts. They sit in the stands with notepads, behaving like men at an auction.
In the spring of 1976, McMahon made the puzzling decision to attend Brigham Young, the Mormon university up the road in Provo. Why would a high-intensity boy who’d already been in trouble put himself under the jurisdiction of the Mormon honor code, which forbids tobacco, alcohol, premarital sex, and everything else Mac loved? He blamed his dad, or, more simply, his father’s desire to watch him play. It was the last time, he later said, that he’d let anyone else influence his decisions.
McMahon threw his first touchdown freshman year and started as a sophomore. He would set fifty-five records at BYU and pass for more yards than any other quarterback in NCAA history. He was small and his arm was just good enough, but he had an uncanny sense of the game. Looking at a defense, he could quickly cycle through every possibility. “You could see in college he was one of those savants,” McMichael wrote, “who takes a snap and as he’s backpedaling has deciphered where to throw the ball already.”
McMahon was trouble at BYU. It was not just that he violated the Mormon code, but that he seemed to take cavalier joy doing it. Reports were constantly making their way back to the dean: McMahon has been chewing tobacco on campus, as if Joseph Smith had never been martyred; McMahon was drinking at a party, as if the secret book had never been found in upstate New York; McMahon has been sleeping at his girlfriend’s apartment, as if Brigham Young never led the faithful through the mountains. There were threats, second chances, probationary periods, then, finally, after the 1981 season, McMahon was expelled. He was told he might return someday, later, not now, to earn the credits to take a degree. It confirmed what McMahon always believed about authority: Ditka swears his religious devotion, then calls Mac a motherfucker every Sunday; BYU suspends Mac for violating the honor code, but only after they’ve gotten every possible bit of service out of his heathen body.
When I asked McMahon the hardest he’d ever been hit—he was a rag doll, known for taking a pounding—he did not have to think. “In college,” he said. “We were playing New Mexico. Linebacker by the name of Jimmy Carter. I won’t forget it, ’cause Carter was the president at the time. He knocked the fuck out of me. I was looking left. I was supposed to have protection on the other side. The blocker was a sophomore. He blew the assignment. Just as I’m getting ready to throw, Carter’s helmet hit my wrist, and my own fist hit my chin. Then he picked me up and dumped me on the back of my head. I was out for ten minutes. But I got up. Or they said I did. They said I got up and walked to the sidelines and fell down. Then I was out again. That’s the last thing I remember till Monday. But they said I went back in and played. I missed like two series. I couldn’t remember the plays. I couldn’t call them. That’s what they said. I’d just call a formation and say, ‘Get open quick.’ They said I picked the defense apart. They said it was easy.”
The Bears took McMahon with their first pick in 1982. He was not the biggest or the fastest, and his arm, well, I’ve told you about his arm, and his eye, and his attitude, but Ditka tended to go for the guy who struck him as a player.
“We thought we were getting close and we needed a quarterback, and he was the best,” Bill Tobin told me. “We liked his toughness. We liked his aggressiveness. And he was a winner. He had that bowl game he won—that was pretty special. And he fit our mold. See, one thing that we never let bother us
in our draft room was size and speed. We liked them big and fast, but we would break the mold and draft players as opposed to specimens. McMahon was not tall and he wasn’t a great passer. He didn’t have a superquick release. But he was a winner.”
Halas seemed to like McMahon at first. “I’m well pleased,” he said after the draft, “as this quarterback seems to have ‘the touch.’” His optimism turned to scorn when McMahon dragged out contract negotiations. Mac finally went in to meet Halas. “He was kind of crotchety,” McMahon told me. “I’d been sitting outside the office for an hour. I finally asked the secretary, ‘What am I waiting for?’ And she said, ‘Mr. Halas is taking a nap.’ I said, ‘Well, wake him up, I got things to do.’ When I got in there, he said I was asking for too much money, though even if they met my terms, I’d still be one of the lowest-paid quarterbacks in the draft. ‘If we give you two hundred bucks a game, you’re overpaid,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a bad arm, a bad eye, bad knees, and you’re too small. Maybe you should go to Canada.’ So I asked, ‘Then why the hell did you draft me, old man?’”
By the early 1980s, Halas, having prospered with the television deals that have made the NFL fabulously profitable—the league generates $9 billion a year—was a wealthy man. In addition to the Bears, he owned several side businesses. And yet, perhaps conditioned by early years of struggle, he fought for every dollar. McMahon finally agreed to a four-year deal starting at $60,000, ending at $100,000. Paltry for the time, it’s shocking when compared to today’s salaries. In 2011, quarterback Michael Vick signed a six-year deal with the Philadelphia Eagles for $100 million, then had a terrible season. (In the course of ten games, he threw twelve touchdown passes and ten interceptions; his team finished 4–10 and his coach was fired.) But if players from the ’80s and ’90s feel they missed out, they’re aware that the players from still earlier eras looked upon their $100,000 contracts with stupefied envy. When it comes to big money, everyone believes he arrived a generation too soon.
McMahon made his entrance in the summer of 1982. “[He] walks into Halas Hall and he’s got a beer in his hand and a six-pack under his arm,” Ditka said. “I think it was Miller, but it might have been something else. He has a wad of tobacco under his lip, too. First thing he says is, ‘I was getting dry on the way in.’”
There had never been anyone like him in Chicago, a city where heroes were often of the role model variety. For those of us attracted to rebels and mavericks, he offered a way into the game. By my sophomore year in high school, the walls of my room were covered with pictures of Mac: in a headband, a wad of chew in his lip; cursing Ditka; jogging into the end zone with unhurried ease; set up in the pocket like he has all the time in the world, an inspiration for all those who want to stay calm amid the storm of life.
He was terribly out of shape—this resulted partly from his own nonchalance, partly from his holdout. He’d been drinking on the beach long after the other guys had taken up the spartan ways of the season. The team introduced him with “the Bears Mile,” an annual event at which, as the press snapped pictures, the squad ran around the track. McMahon was a mess, huffing and puffing. By the end, he stopped running altogether—it was the last time the team would ever invite reporters to watch the players run. “I remember his first year,” Ditka said, “he ran a mile and a half in almost 13 minutes, walking the last part, looking like he was going to puke and die, finishing behind everybody but our very heavy offensive lineman Noah Jackson—but he was on board. I read that in 1984, even with his lacerated kidney, he’d gone out for Halloween with his teammates, dressed as a priest, drunk. He had a Bible with him, and I guess when you opened it, there were photos of naked women inside. Well, this was football, not religion.”
“I was his roommate in the first minicamp,” Tim Wrightman told me. “We were rookies. It was before the season. We weren’t even signed. It was three days. Sunday was the last. He goes out Saturday, then comes rolling in at three o’clock in the morning, blind drunk. He throws up till about six thirty, then we go to practice. Jim somehow fights through it, then, at the end, Ditka says, ‘Okay, we’re going to run ten cowboys.’ A cowboy was a sprint down the field, a walk back—a hundred and ten yards. Any other quarterback would have said, ‘It’s minicamp in May, it has nothing to do with the season; my hamstring’s a little tight, I can’t run those.’ But Jim did every one of those cowboys, then threw up. That’s why guys loved him as a captain and a leader. He didn’t take shortcuts. If he partied, he didn’t expect to get special treatment. It made you realize how tough he was—that’s why guys respected him and loved playing with him.”
Whenever I asked McMahon’s teammates to describe him as an athlete, they laughed. “As an athlete?” said Kurt Becker. “Horrible. He couldn’t scramble. He had a good arm but not a great arm. He wasn’t a pinpoint passer. But he did have knowledge of the game. That was his biggest attribute. He knew who was going to be open before the ball was snapped. He wasn’t a great specimen by any means, but he could read a defense.”
“He didn’t have the strongest arm, but he could get it there,” said Brian Baschnagel. “He had a great touch on the ball. He always put it where it needed to be in relationship to the defenders. Sometimes the ball would wobble, but his throws were easy to catch.”
Emery Moorehead: “He wasn’t going to hit a guy sixty yards down field but he would scramble and see somebody and have the strength to get it there. He knew the game inside out. That’s why he was able to stay in the league so long.”
Tim Wrightman: “Physically he doesn’t look like an athlete. He’s soft, pasty. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He couldn’t throw a spiral. Believe me, I caught lots of his passes. They never looked right. But he could read the defenses and he always found a way. He would switch the ball into his left hand on the goal line as he was getting tackled and throw it left-handed for a touchdown. He was just win at all costs. And he was smart. The guy could read defenses, and, most importantly, he was the only quarterback that could get along with Ditka.”
Ditka tried to revamp the Bears offense when he took over. “He came in with a scheme that was finally something other than Payton left, Payton right, Payton on the screen pass,” Moorehead told me. “That had been going on since Walter arrived. There was no diversity, no motions, everybody knew what was going to happen. It was pretty pathetic.” Ditka added deep routes and trick plays, but the offense remained woefully conservative. “It was boring,” McMahon said. “We ran the ball, not what I was used to. There wasn’t a whole lot to be successful with at quarterback for the Bears. There was nothing to do. You get to throw on third and long. If you’re lucky enough to get a first down, you keep playing. It was frustrating.”
Mac changed that: he would run Ditka’s plays only until he recognized a mismatch or a flaw in the defense, at which point he called an audible. This gave Ditka fits, but it finally made the Bears dangerous. But McMahon’s greatest contribution was leadership. Even on bad days, the team played better when he was on the field. With number 9 in the game, they always believed they could win. “It was his personality, the fact that he’d fight,” Plank told me. “If we needed a yard, he’d go headfirst. If it meant jumping off the ledge, he was going to jump off a ledge. I think the defenders looked at him and said, ‘Wow, we wish he was on our side.’ He was just one of those guys.”
“He played with total abandon and he’s not big,” said Fencik. “He took a beating.”
“Everybody rallied around him because he was willing to do whatever it took,” said Moorehead. “Even though he only weighed 190 pounds, he was just as physical as our linemen. He would deny the plays Ditka sent in, be like, ‘Nah, that ain’t gonna work.’ Then call a play of his own. And of course everybody really wanted to make that play work. Nine times out of ten, McMahon made the right call.”
“Jim knew what he was doing,” Ditka told me. “A lot of guys with audibles didn’t. If you knew the game and studied the game, it didn’t bother me if you wanted
to change something. Nobody said the play I called was the best in the world. But I called it based on what I’d seen on film and everything.”
McMahon became the starting quarterback November 6, 1983, a week after Halas died. It took him time to find a rhythm, but by the middle of the following season, he’d become as effective as any other quarterback in the league. His impact is overlooked: Mac was playing in the era of masters like Marino, Elway, and Montana. He never put up big numbers—probably no QB could have with the Walter Payton Bears—but he had a talent for scoring when the game was on the line. He didn’t have the most passing yards, but he led in the only statistic that matters: wins. In one stretch, from 1984 to 1988, the Bears went 35 and 3 in games that McMahon started. There used to be a saying about Rocket Richard, the great hockey player: he’s not the fastest, but there’s no one quicker from the blue line to the goal. That was Mac. He could feel the end zone the way a surfer can sense the proximity of the sea: if it was on the wind, it made him wild. Though Halas was partly correct about McMahon—bad eye, weak arm—the quarterback did have the quality that Papa Bear prized above all others: the old zipperoo.
As we talked, McMahon kept making the same point about the ’85 Bears: amid all the hysteria for the defense, the offense is not given its proper due. “We scored the most points in the NFC that year, and the second most in the league,” he said. “We held the ball almost forty minutes a game. Tough to beat when you score that much and don’t give the ball back. And it gives the defense a good long break. You can’t win with just one side of the ball. Marino proved that in Miami. They had a great offense but couldn’t stop anybody. If you don’t perform on both sides, and have a good kicking game, you’re not going to win championships.”