by Rich Cohen
McMahon was slow to return to the starting lineup. Ditka sought ways to pressure him, get him back on the field. Ditka was not the only one to consider McMahon a malingerer. At a meeting, Hampton accused Mac of putting his own interests above those of the team. Look at my knees, look at McMichael’s back! Don’t you think we play hurt? “We’ll do it without you,” Hampton said, “just stay out of our way.” Ditka congratulated Hampton for saying what no one else had the guts to. That November, in what seemed like a ploy to motivate McMahon, the Bears acquired Doug Flutie from the Canadian Football League. Flutie had been a star at Boston College, the author of perhaps the most exciting football play in NCAA history—in 1984, Flutie defeated the University of Miami 47–45 with a last-second Hail Mary pass—but many considered him too small for the NFL. What’s worse, he was cute: apple-cheeked and flip-haired, a kind of Michael J. Fox of the gridiron. He seemed an especially bad fit for this collection of night-crawling ne’er-do-wells and was hazed from the first. Flutie’s Chicago sojourn was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, short. “[The guys] felt like he was a usurper to McMahon’s throne, so he wasn’t going to be accepted,” McMichael said. “Somebody even started calling him Bambi, not the manliest nickname in a football locker room. I don’t know who started it, but I have to admit it fit. You know, the little Bambi deer, how deer run around—he was kind of a prancer back there.”
For many Bears, the breaking point came in November, when Ditka, perhaps trying to make a point about acceptance, had the Fluties over for Thanksgiving. Instead of taking the hint—Doug is here to stay—most of the players had the following reaction: Ditka never asked me to his house! “When Ditka had Flutie over for the holiday, Jim went bananas,” Zucker told me. “Hell, they all went bananas.”
“Why did they bring in Flutie?” I asked McMahon.
“Nobody could figure it out,” he said. “Fuller was here, Tomczak was in his second year. And both of them played. I think Ditka did it to get rid of me. He was hoping Flutie would win big and then he could ship me out.”
Flutie never did produce for the Bears and was soon gone.
McMahon took a few snaps in the ’86 playoffs, but the Martin hit had changed the trajectory of his career. McMahon shrugs it off, but you can tell it bothers him. When I said it seemed like Martin’s hit came five seconds after the whistle, he said, “just over three seconds.” Charles Martin knocked McMahon into a parallel universe, where most of his career was spent in rehab or on the bench. In the course of fifteen years in the NFL, McMahon started just ninety-seven regular season games.
“Whatever happened to him?” I asked.
“Who? Martin?”
“Yeah.”
“They suspended him for the rest of that season. He ended up going to the Houston Oilers. Then, about five or six years ago, he died.”
* * *
Five: it was Michael McCaskey. The players never respected him. He was Yale, sports coats and slacks, pleats and paisley. “Mike McCaskey is a new breed of owner who favors blue shirts, red ties, and an uncluttered desk,” wrote Singletary. “His piercing blue eyes contrast nicely with his distinguished gray hair and expensive suits. He is a man who enjoys using words like finite and continuum. And the sound of his own voice.”
The way McCaskey walked the sidelines at the end of the Super Bowl, the way he hung around the locker room, the way he clung to the trophy—it rubbed players the wrong way. It was as if he was saying, “I did it,” while most of the guys considered his contribution less than critical. “I can still see him getting off the team bus back in Chicago, holding up that trophy like, ‘I am responsible for this,’” McMichael said. “My ass. It was George Halas, Jim Finks, Jerry Vainisi, and Mike Ditka. Michael McCaskey had no input whatsoever.”
At one point or another, every Bear had a run-in with McCaskey. “Finally, I couldn’t control myself,” wrote Singletary. “‘Have you ever played football?’ I screamed. It startled him. But he composed himself, saying, ‘Why yes, I played when I was in college at Yale. I was a wide receiver.’”
“[My agent] still talks about it to this day, and I swear I don’t remember it,” McMichael said, “but he says when the negotiations ended on the last contract I signed, I got up, leaned over the desk, and [told McCaskey], ‘I’d like to hit you right in the fucking mouth.’”
The players thought McCaskey was cheap—that was the complaint. You saw it in the Super Bowl rings the president ordered for his team. Compare the Fridge’s ring, on display at the NFL Hall of Fame, to those purchased for players on other championship teams: Bears rings are flimsy and jewel-deficient in comparison. Asked about it, McCaskey offered the sort of explanation that made McMichael want to hit him right in the fucking mouth: “Oh, we plan on going and getting a lot more of them, so we want to have money to buy more.”
At times, it seemed as if McCaskey had made a calculation not uncommon to the descendants of great men: mediocrity is better for business. If you win, everyone wants more money—you have to buy rings and get tickets and give bonuses. And the egos! And the headaches! Who can afford it? Nine players in the Pro Bowl means nine guys who expect to be paid like All-Stars. McCaskey began to balk at the demands. “The team is the only asset our family has,” he told Singletary. “It’s a fact of life that the Bears cannot reach into other pockets. We have to take a finite pile of resources and be fair in meeting our obligations.”
The McCaskeys are in fact an anomaly in the modern NFL. Unlike for most other owners, billionaires who purchased their clubs as a kind of lark or fantasy league hobby, the McCaskeys’ wealth is the franchise. If they seem overly careful with money—this has been less the case in recent years; the Bears spent as much as anyone in 2012—it’s because they have to be. It’s not just the win/loss record at stake but also the financial health of the family.
Of course, most fans could not care less about the fiscal state of the McCaskeys. To them, the truth seemed plain: the Bears would not pay, the players left, the team collapsed, not quickly, but in the glacial way of the Ottoman Empire. It started with Willie Gault, who went to the Raiders after the 1987 season. He was twenty-seven and had years of big plays left. Just like that, the Bears lost their deep threat. Next came Wilber Marshall, an outside linebacker many considered the Bears’ most physically gifted player. He went to the Redskins when he was twenty-six. Otis Wilson went to the Raiders. Jay Hilgenberg went to the Browns in 1992. McMichael went to the Packers in 1994. “We started getting real smart,” Ditka told me. “We were going to get rid of the people we brought in. Gault left, McMichael left, Marshall left. We lost these guys because we chose not to sign them.”
“They didn’t trade them,” Zucker explained. “They just let them go.”
When I asked if it was about money, Zucker laughed and said, “That might’ve had something to do with it.”
For the Bears, McMahon had been the crucial piece, the trickster soul. They didn’t win before he turned up with his six-pack, and they have not won since. But McCaskey didn’t like Jim McMahon, and, in the end, he would not live with Jim McMahon. No doubt, it was the quarterback’s fault. He could not help but rebel. In 1986, when asked what position his team should draft for, McMahon went on TV and said, “owner.” Then, a few weeks later, he published his autobiography, McMahon!, in which he mocked McCaskey. “If he had his choice, he’d have 45 players with no personality, no individuality at all,” wrote the quarterback. “Michael McCaskey would like a bunch of robots. Then, everything would go along peacefully. You might not win many games, but at least there wouldn’t be any headbands…”
“I think I might rather retire early than play the rest of my career for the current president of the Bears,” McMahon writes later in the book. “He doesn’t have any qualifications to operate the Bears, except his name. He went from Yale to Harvard to running his own consulting firm to running the Bears. He took over as president and chief executive officer in November 1983, and before he got his feet wet, he was jumping aroun
d our locker room in January of 1986, with a Super Bowl trophy.”
When McMahon showed the manuscript to his friend the Bears kicker Kevin Butler, Butler begged him to cut the stuff about McCaskey: “Dude, it’s your boss. And your boss may be a lot of things, but he’s still your boss.”
“I love Jim to death,” Kurt Becker told me. “Him and I are very good friends. We were roommates and everything. But, I mean, some people try to be crazy, but that son of a bitch actually is crazy. He really is. He’s nuts. Who trashes the company they work for?”
In 1987, the Bears drafted Jim Harbaugh, a quarterback from Michigan, in the first round. That’s when McMahon knew his days in Chicago were numbered. “They never liked Jim,” Zucker told me. “They couldn’t control him. When I saw that the Bears drafted Harbaugh, I knew what it meant. I went over to camp. It was ten o’clock at night. Ditka was there. He took me aside and said, ‘I was so mad with that pick, I quit the Bears for twenty minutes, but then asked myself, “What do you really want to do?” And that’s coach the Bears, so I unquit.’” McMahon was traded to San Diego in 1989. “At first, he was happy,” Zucker told me. “He wanted a trade. But it was the worst thing for the Bears, and it was the worst thing for McMahon. He was made for that team, and the Bears were never the same.”
“They called me at my house in the morning and said they traded me,” McMahon said. “I hadn’t even gone to work yet. They just said it on the phone: Hey, we’re going in a different direction. I said, Yeah? Fine. So I drove in, got all my shit, and left. That was it. I didn’t see Ditka in person. Those last couple years, it wasn’t good anyway. We hardly talked. I wasn’t going to press the issue. I had nothing to say to him. I just got my shit and drove away. That was it.”
“Gault was gone, Marshall was gone, McMichael was gone, McMahon was gone,” Ditka told me. “I will coach whoever is there. I’ll play the hand I’m dealt. But one thing I know for sure, you can’t win by subtracting. We brought those people in for a purpose, and you defeat that purpose when you let them go. In most of the cases it was about money. With McMahon, it was about conflicts and personalities with the owner. Well, if you don’t understand the game, and how to keep people happy, and how to keep a championship team intact, you got a problem.”
This moment—the news that McMahon was packing for San Diego reached me by radio—marked the end of the era. I continued to watch the Bears, but I no longer cared in the same way. My father says the key to life is “to care, but not that much.” Well, for me, this was the beginning of not that much, which marks the beginning of adulthood, the place where the coastal shelf falls away and the water turns dark blue. McMahon played another eight seasons in the NFL—in San Diego, in Philadelphia, in Minnesota, in Arizona, in Green Bay—but it was never the same. The days of his wandering had begun. It was never the same for us either. You can root for a team, but you can love only a player.
* * *
Six: it was Ditka. He was too intense, pushed too hard, chewed up his players like he chewed up his gum. As for the quarterbacks, only McMahon had been able to perform for Ditka, because McMahon didn’t take it personally. The rest—Tomczak, Harbaugh—were driven to a breaking point, a crisis in which they either imploded in a dark room or exploded on national television.
You can build a team with the whip, but after a time, especially after they’ve won, you need to find another motivation. This goes back to what Plank told me about the three kinds of coaches: the aspirin coach, the penicillin coach, the chemo coach. Ditka was a chemo coach, which is what you need for a team with cancer. But after the chemo coach cures the cancer, and the team wins, what does he do? Delivers more chemo, because that’s who he is—the guy with the chemo machine—which, in the absence of cancer, kills healthy tissue: first the quarterbacks, then everyone else. “If you’re a chemo coach, once a team gets on track and starts winning, don’t keep choking it out,” Plank explained. “You got the right guys—let them do their thing. You don’t even need discipline because they’re self-disciplined. But Mike continued to be strong willed, determined—all the things that made him great in creating the Bears led to his downfall.”
Ditka never transitioned from building to sustaining, never figured out how to sit back and ride. Everything was life or death and Stop being such a fucking pussy and move, move, move! Even when the core players got older, he kept running them till they puked. The Bears had the hardest practices in the league, which several veterans told me played a role in their shortcomings: they’d been overworked, had nothing left for the playoffs. “We could’ve had a dynasty, but Ditka cared more about power than about winning,” Otis Wilson told me. “My way or the highway, that was his mentality. He wanted to make people submissive. We were playing football. I’m going to do my job. You don’t have to worry about me. But I’m not going to kiss your ass.”
Ditka was wearing himself down, too. You can grind the gears for only so long before the clutch burns. He couldn’t control his temper. One screwup or mistake, one wiseass comment from the press, and it was asterisks and lightning bolts. “Ditka was a guy who broke racquets in rage when he played racquetball against Cowboy staff members,” wrote Rick Telander. He made his receivers “run, and when they didn’t run right, he swore at them. He challenged them to fight … He turned red. He turned purple.”
After a particularly vigorous racquetball game at Halas Hall in 1988, Ditka lay on a bench in the locker room. He couldn’t breathe. He was having a heart attack. He was forty-nine. Ed McCaskey seemed almost gleeful. “He was a prime candidate,” he explained. “He eats what he wants, drinks what he wants, smokes what he wants, sleeps when he wants.” Ditka was back on the sideline in two weeks; he promised to control his temper, said he was done with yelling. That lasted until the first stupid audible. He’d coach for several more years, but now everyone realized that Iron Mike could die. “You knew he was going to flare out at some point,” Danny White told me. “Nobody can go on at that pace. He’s either going to have a breakdown, or he’s got to get out of the game. Landry coached for twenty-nine years, but you can only do that if you have a calm demeanor and a balance in your life, something other than football. But to Mike, football was life. And it’s not something to base a life on. It’s not dependable. That’s what Walter [Payton] said about the fame and fortune of football: it’s vapor. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Somebody breaks the records, the money gets spent, and it’s over before you know it.”
18
MUCH LATER
The ’85 Bears and the First Fan. Obama called it the best day of his presidency. (Obama with the jersey. Buddy and McMahon holding the Super Bowl trophy. Ditka standing, with shades, still looking like a Bear. Kevin Butler and Emery Moorehead behind the coach and to his left. Richard Dent in the back row, eleven o’clock from the president.) October 7, 2011
The ’85 Bears never got their White House visit. Shortly before the team was to meet President Reagan, the space shuttle Challenger exploded. January 28, 1986: the first disaster we watched again and again on cable. It goes up, curves as the sky changes from blue to black, sends out a plume of smoke, then blows apart. It was the day after I’d returned from New Orleans, but the game suddenly seemed like it had happened a million years before. The White House visit was canceled and never rescheduled. It was just one of those things. In 1997, when the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers visited Bill Clinton in the White House, McMahon, that team’s backup quarterback, wore his Bears jersey. “I talked to my coaches and teammates before we went and told them, ‘Look, [the Bears] never got to go, so I’m going to represent our guys.’ Only Fritz Shurmur had a problem with it,” McMahon told me, “but I think that’s ’cause he was with that Rams team we destroyed in the playoffs.”
Barack Obama moved to Chicago in 1985, where, just a few years out of college, he fell for the Bears. How could he not? The team, its coach and its ethos, was everywhere. He became a fan and even got to know Dent and Wilson—they worked out together at th
e East Bank Club. When Obama ran for the Democratic nomination in Illinois’s First Congressional District—he was defeated by incumbent Bobby Rush—Dent and Wilson publicly supported him.
In 2011, shortly after the twenty-fifth anniversary of Super Bowl XX, President Obama—“First you’re working out, goofing with a guy, then, a minute later, he’s the president of the United States,” Wilson told me—invited the ’85 Bears to finally make their visit to the White House. It took Brian McCaskey several weeks to track everyone down, but that spring fifty or so players, coaches, and executives converged on O’Hare, where they boarded the team plane for Washington.
So here they came: Gault and Dent, Otis and McMichael, Suhey and Ditka and Buddy, some huge and fat, others fit and fine, stalwarts together again. McMahon was bald, concussed, ancient, dazed but exactly the same. “It was a time warp to twenty-six years ago,” Tim Wrightman told me. “Nothing had changed. The Bears don’t have alcohol on team flights anymore. I don’t know if that’s because of Ditka’s incident or what. They just don’t. So McMahon showed up with three cases of beer. I love Jim. He can get away with stuff the rest of us can’t. He was wearing this T-shirt—I have a picture of me with him in it—and printed on it was an erect penis that looked like it was coming out the top of his pants. That’s what he was wearing to the White House under his button-down. He was going up and down the aisle of the plane, pulling people aside and showing them, and the stewardess is going, ah-ha-ha, so funny. If you or I were to do that, they’d have the sky marshals waiting to arrest us in Washington.”
A bus took the team first to a hotel, then from the hotel to the White House with police cruisers leading the way. “I had so much fun,” Baschnagel said. “To be with those guys again, to get pampered again. The chartered flight, the escort. It was incredible.”