by Rich Cohen
This feeling of melancholy, this loss of altitude or inspiration, it’s felt not only by players and coaches. Fans experience it, too. I got up early the next day with a pit in my stomach. What now? Where to? I had gone out full and would return empty. I packed in silence. Lederer did the same. We caught a cab to the airport and got back on the Bears Charter, but the exuberance was gone. We flew home in silence. The superfans were sunk in their own girth. Even their mustaches seemed sad. It was the feeling you get on Sunday night after a long weekend times a billion. I looked out the window. What is this life? I asked myself. What does it mean? Why does every minute pull me away from everything I love? I went back to Glencoe. I finished high school. I finished college. When I was offered a job in New York, I went to my friends and told them I would take this job but only for a time as I did not want to live on the East Coast. I wanted to spend my life in the city I loved, Chicago, and, in case I got turned around, they had to call and remind me, otherwise I would be unhappy even if I thought I was happy. They said they understood and promised to call but of course they forgot. I got drunk in New York and made a fool of myself on several occasions and I met the love of my life and got married. I wrote a book, I had a kid, then another, then wrote another book, then had another kid, then moved to Connecticut, then, just like that, I was forty, then I was even older. In that whole time, the Bears never did win again. I missed Chicago but I did not go back. Nor did I get answers to the questions I had asked myself on the plane that day. I had come home after the Super Bowl and lived my life, hopeful that things might work out for me as they had worked out for the Bears. Fencik, McMahon, Hampton, Ditka, McMichael, Payton, Fridge, Marshall, and Gault—they had cured me of the defeatism of the Chicago fan. They had saved my life.
17
WHAT WENT WRONG
The Bears at Soldier Field on October 15, 1989, on their way to another season without a Super Bowl
How good were the ’85 Bears? Where do they stand historically?
The offense ranked second overall that season, and yet, despite the protestations of Jim McMahon, they were nothing special. A great running back a few years past prime, some good receivers, an exciting quarterback, but not in the same league as Joe Montana’s 49ers or Troy Aikman’s Cowboys or even Sid Luckman’s Bears. Which is fine; they didn’t have to be. The ’85 Bears were about defense, and, if you go by statistics, you’d put them at the top, maybe the best. Over sixteen games, they gave up 198 points, which amounts to just over 12 a game. They intercepted thirty-four times, more than double the number of picks they threw. On seven occasions, the defense yielded fewer than ten points. They were even better in the postseason, when competition is supposed to stiffen. They did not allow a single point until the Super Bowl. They did give up a touchdown late in that game, but many of the starters were on the bench celebrating by then. Not long ago, ESPN’s now defunct Page 2 put together a list of the best NFL teams ever: it had the ’79 Steelers at seven, the ’91 Redskins at four, the ’62 Packers at three, Don Shula’s undefeated ’72 Dolphins at two, and the ’85 Bears at number one.
It was more than the numbers. It was the quirkiness, the personalities—Danimal, Fridge, the Hit Man—a star quality that transcended the sport; it was the speed of the defense, the game-stopping hits, the collisions, the knockdowns; it was the dread that hovered over the enemy sideline, the way McMichael stood midfield, staring at the wounded gazelles; it was Marshall leaping over the line, Dent busting in from the blind side, Fencik sneaking up on the blitz, Singletary reading the quarterback and shouting signals in the way of a samurai.
Now and then, a sports commentator, speaking of a raucous stadium, will describe the crowd as the “twelfth man.” For the Bears, the aura that surrounded the defense, the fear that preceded them, was not a twelfth man but a whole bunch of nasty fuckers who were going to beat you up as your mom watched. It’s what Hampton meant when he said the Super Bowl was over on Wednesday, five days before kickoff. Because he looked into the eyes of the quarterback and saw a stunned deer. Other players, pro athletes who had excelled at every point of their lives, feared that Bears defense as they had feared nothing since their first days of Pop Warner football. As Howie Long told Lyle Alzado in the parking lot outside Soldier Field: I haven’t taken a beating like that since grade school.
At times that season, it seemed as if the Bears had solved the problem of football, had cracked not just an opponent but the sport. They were on the same field as the other teams but were not playing the same game. It was tanks versus cavalry, dancers attempting pirouettes amid a pack of rabid dogs. That’s a reason the Bears are not always mentioned when people speak of the best Super Bowl teams: teams are remembered for great games, barn burners, back-and-forthers with last-minute drives. There were no such situations for the Bears that year: every game was a mismatch, a thrashing. That’s what made Marino’s performance against the ’85 Bears so remarkable, why Shula called it the best half of football he’d ever seen.
The Bears sent nine players to the Pro Bowl that season: Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, Dan Hampton, Otis Wilson, Richard Dent, Mike Singletary, Jimbo Covert, Jay Hilgenberg, and Dave Duerson. Thus far, four members of the squad have made it into the Hall of Fame: Payton, Hampton, Singletary, Dent. Five if you include Ditka. “It was a collection of oddballs and characters,” Cris Collinsworth told me. “McMahon, the Fridge—they were never less than fun to watch. Unless you happened to be playing against them. In that case, they were scary. If only that team had repeated, they would be considered the greatest of all time.”
It was something I heard again and again: if only that team had repeated.
In fact, the handful of teams usually considered the best did repeat, which is why they’re called dynasties. Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers won NFL championships in 1961, 1962, 1965, and 1966, before winning the first two Super Bowls; Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers won three Super Bowls in the 1970s and another in 1980; Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys appeared in five Super Bowls and won twice; under coaches Bill Walsh and George Seifert, the San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowls in the 1980s and ’90s. Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots appeared in five and won three.
It did seem as if the Bears were poised to repeat: not only had they beaten everyone else, they did it with great athletes deployed in a defensive system that gave opposing coaches fits. They also happened to be the youngest team in the NFL. McMahon was twenty-seven. The Fridge was twenty-three. Dent was twenty-five. Hampton was twenty-nine, ditto Wilson and McMichael. Mike Richardson was twenty-five. Marshall was twenty-four. What’s more, in the off-season, the Bears drafted a great running back from Florida, Neal Anderson, who could take pressure off Payton, who’d begun to slow. A running back at thirty-two is like a normal person at ninety: no one’s taken more punishment.
If you had found me that spring and asked, “Hey, tough guy, how many Super Bowls do you think the Bears will win?” I’d have said seven. As of training camp 1986, it looked like nothing but blue skies and trophies ahead. “I thought somebody just invented this giant merry-go-round, and we were getting on, and we were going to ride it forever,” said Ditka. “Then it all sort of ended.”
The Bears remained an elite team for years, winning the NFC Central five times in six seasons. They lost only three games in 1986, but one of them was in the first round of the playoffs. After they posted the final score—Washington 27, Chicago 13—a gloom settled over my city; the sun was boxed up and carried away. The Bears won their division in 1987, 1988, 1990, and 1991, but no matter how well they did in the regular season, something always went wrong in the playoffs—it gave the era a doomed melancholy, a feeling of what-if and should have and almost. In Chicago, winning is a miracle; losing is forever. “It amazed me we didn’t win four of them,” McMahon said. “We lost eleven games in four years, but only got to that one Super Bowl.”
It’s one of the timeless questions in Chicago: What went wrong with the Bears?
&nb
sp; There are many answers, many theories, many schools of thought. Here are some of the most compelling.
One: it was Buddy. He’d been the great motivator, the god each defensive player was working toward as well as the mad scientist turning the levers. When I asked Tyrone Keys why the Bears fell short in 1986, he said, “Buddy didn’t come back. The defensive line coach didn’t come back. None of the coaches from the defense were there. So the team went 14 and 2, but the chemistry was gone.”
Ditka hired Vince Tobin to replace Ryan. Tobin had been coaching in the USFL and happened to be the brother of Bears general manager Bill Tobin. Vince continued to use the 46, but it became just another package. Then he refined it, trying to make a system that was unsound and irrational a little more ordinary. Vince Tobin was a rational coach, a man of percentages. He was never going to blitz eight straight plays, nor was he going to leave a receiver uncovered in a crazed attempt to open a new can of quarterback. Though the defense remained the best in the league statistically, they lost some of the mad-dog unpredictability that had terrified opponents. They were respected but not feared in the same way.
At times, Tobin seemed less interested in winning than in distinguishing himself from his predecessor. Whenever I mentioned the 46, he corrected me, saying, “I prefer to call it the Bears’ defense,” or, “Please, not the 46: the Bears’ defense.” Here was a manager brought in to return a guru-driven system to the straight and narrow: keep the good things, rein in the excesses, but the 46—excuse me, the Bears’ defense—was all about excess. Once it lost that edge, quarterbacks started looking downfield. “Before I took the job, Mike said, ‘I don’t expect you to run Buddy’s defense; run any defense you’re comfortable with,’” Tobin told me. “So I brought my own playbook and philosophy, because I wasn’t Buddy Ryan. Then, in almost every category in ’86, we were actually better defensively than they’d been in ’85.”
Every category except the only category that matters: Super Bowl wins.
When I asked Otis if the defense was indeed better in ’86 than it had been in ’85, he said, “Hell no. No aggressiveness. Vince always said, ‘We bend but don’t break.’ So, in other words, you’re a boxer fighting Mike Tyson and this guy is telling you to let Tyson punch you in the face, then, when you get a shot, take it. But by that time, you might be flat on your back. And when he blitzed, it was predictable. Inside the 20 everybody knew we were coming. So they’re sitting waiting on you. It was a totally different defense after Vince came. We tried to make it work, but his shit wasn’t going to work. If Buddy had just said, ‘I’m going to humble myself and stay here for two or three more years,’ we could have won three Super Bowls.”
Steve McMichael (seated left), Dan Hampton (seated right), and William Perry filming a McDonald’s commercial in November 1985
Two: it was the players. They lost their focus, went soft, bought into the hype. It was the Super Bowl itself that undid them, the narcotic of winning, the trophy and the parades and the party that erupted in every room they entered. In short, the Bears sold out. “We had the same players as the year before,” wrote Payton, “but not the same desire, not the same hunger.”
You’ve seen it in a hundred movies, every time some yokel wins the lottery or strikes oil: how quickly he forgets who he is and where he comes from—he leaves in denim and returns in velvet. During the off-season, when they should have been training like Spartans, several Bears, including McMichael and Perry, went on the road with the World Wrestling Federation, appearing in capes and tights, spangles and glitter boots, standing on the third rope, calling out Jake the Snake Roberts. By the end of 1985, ten Bears, including an offensive lineman, had their own radio shows. (If you pay attention, you’ll notice that most NFL dynasties come in small markets, where there are fewer temptations.) By the first preseason game of 1986—played in London—Ditka had given up the sleeveless sweater-vest and coach pants that defined him as part of a style-starved breed. A Chicago clothier, spotting an opportunity, had begun to dress the coach. It was double-breasted and tweed from there: cuffs, pleats, snap-brim caps. Ditka opened a bar called City Lights, then a restaurant. It seemed every player owned an eatery. Mike Tomczak, a backup quarterback, opened T&T’s in Joliet with guard Tom Thayer. Payton had two bars in Schaumburg and another out where the sun meets the corn. Fencik opened the Hunt Club on the North Side. McMahon opened Arena, a restaurant in Northbrook. Even Kevin Butler, the kicker, had a restaurant.
Ditka castigated his players for their spirit-sapping overexposure. Stay off the goddamn TV! Which explains one of the big complaints about the coach: hypocrisy. The fact is, Ditka did more commercials than the rest of them combined. He endorsed a plethora of products in the ’80s: Peak Antifreeze, Dristan, Budget Rent A Truck, Talman Home Federal Savings and Loan, Hanes, Campbell’s Soup, Chunky Brand. “He’d tell us to stay off television, then he’d turn around and do the commercials he made us turn down,” Otis said. “When we did that ‘Super Bowl Shuffle,’ he told us he’d never, ever do a video. Then, all of a sudden, he comes out with the ‘Grabowski Shuffle.’”
The nadir of the sellout was the Fridge on The Bob Hope Christmas Special:
HOPE: They said you can bench-press 465 pounds. Is that true?
PERRY: Yes. I get a lot of practice by lifting myself out of bed in the morning.
PERRY: People are making me out to be a lot bigger than I am. You know what that’s like, don’t you?
HOPE: Careful, Fridge.
Three: it was the 46 defense. Simply put, other teams cracked it. This was an endless topic of conversation in my interviews. Whenever I asked, “How do you beat the 46?” I’d get back a carefully considered answer. The introduction of the 46 was an evolutionary step in football. Beating it was therefore about more than the Bears: it was about the game, a sport that each of these men, even those who’ve been seriously damaged, love. They discussed the riddle of the 46 as an old general might discuss Patton’s solution to Rommel. “Against that great defense, you wanted to play a very simple game,” Jaworski told me. “The Bears weren’t going to score a lot of points and you weren’t going to score a lot of points, so don’t take risks. Try to be close in the fourth quarter, then go for a big play.”
“The best way was to block eight people, then send out two wide receivers,” said McMahon. “That’s what the Redskins did to us in ’86 and it’s how you beat the defense. If they’re going to put pressure on you, block everybody and make your corners chase two guys around all day. As good as our guys were, they still couldn’t cover all day long. If you don’t get to the quarterback, the whole thing falls apart.”
“That defense changed the way the game is played,” Ditka told me. “’Cause if you bunch up your offense, the Bears’ ’85 defense would kill you. The solution was to spread everyone out. You do that, you can see where the guy is lined up without a blocker, hiding. Then pick him up. That’s why, in today’s game, guys line up from sideline to sideline. It’s how they solved the Bears’ defense.”
The Spread Offense. Variations of the spread are almost as old as football, but Mike Ditka told me it became a rage in the 1980s and ’90s, in part as a response to the 46 defense. If you spread the offensive players out from sideline to sideline, the guards and tackles can see where the extra rushers are hiding and pick them up. Versions of this offense have come to dominate the game.
“No matter how smart a coach or a scheme, the other guys eventually catch up,” Jaworski explained. “You got all kinds of guys studying this stuff all the time. Coaches and scouts, everyone. Finding that weakness, that tip, that hint that could beat it. It’s a game of adjustment. In the off-season, what these coaches do is remarkable. The time they put in, searching for the answer. So, by the end of the ’86 season, the other coaches had figured out the 46.”
* * *
Four: it was McMahon. I heard this again and again. McMichael: “We could have been the team of the decade if McMahon stayed healthy.” Fencik: “’86 was an i
nteresting year; we wanted to prove it wasn’t just Buddy. But we didn’t have McMahon.” Baschnagel: “I think Jim alone, because of the injuries, was the reason the team didn’t win multiple Super Bowls.”
“Not having McMahon was key,” Morrissey told me. “We talk about the defense, but there was no one better than McMahon—no one better at knowing where his teammates were, where the blocking schemes were, how to find the open receivers.”
It was not just McMahon at quarterback the Bears missed. It was McMahon as a leader. When he was in the huddle, the players always believed they had a chance. As a result, everyone performed. It was a different team with him on the bench, which is where he spent most of 1986.
The play that ended his season still makes me mad. I was a freshman in college, watching at a friend’s house on Prytania Street in New Orleans. The Bears were playing Green Bay. A Packers defensive tackle named Charles Martin had a white hand towel tucked in his waistband. In black pen, he’d written numbers on it, the jersey numbers of Bears he intended to take out. It was a hit list, the kind Nails Morton used to carry when he was working for Al Capone. McMahon’s number was on the top. Early in the game, Mac made a bad throw, which was intercepted. But what matters is what happened after, long after—it seemed like five seconds, a football eternity. Martin grabbed McMahon from behind, lifted him like a doll, and drove him into the turf. It was the dirtiest play I’d ever seen, strangely disconnected from anything happening on the field. McMahon landed on his throwing shoulder, which had been reconstructed. He lay in writhing agony. Martin was ejected, but if I had the power of a mullah, he would have been executed. “It wasn’t even a football play,” Steve Zucker told me. “It was a criminal act.”