The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest

by Ditka, Mike

  Now the thing about McMahon was he was out there on his own, too, and he’d drive you crazy with audibles. But he could read a defense, he was a master at seeing the field, and he could sense the blitz.

  So we had a chance with Jimmy Mac. Thing was, would the little turd survive? In 1984 he missed seven games plus the playoffs with everything from a hairline fracture of his hand to a bad back to that kidney thing.

  In 1984 when we played the Raiders, it was about the most brutal game I’d ever seen. I told my players we had to beat them, it was the only way to get to the next level, to prove to ourselves we belonged. The Raiders knocked out Jim, could have killed him with that kidney injury. And we knocked out their quarterback. Guys were getting carried off the field left and right. I think the Raiders even had to put Ray Guy, their punter, in at quarterback. But we won 17–6 over the mighty Raiders. Our defense kicked ass. Our record was 7–3, but McMahon was done for the year, and we couldn’t sustain. You gotta have a quarterback. I realized that.

  McMahon was back now, and I prayed he would last. I know I was frothing at the mouth half of the time early in my career. He annoyed me so much—I swear he would wear stupid clothes or say crazy things on the sideline or to the press or grab the mike and blabber on the team plane or go out and get plastered, just to make me boil.

  But I knew this. If you’re going to be the bully, you have to beat the bully. And the bullies were everywhere.

  And we needed this crazy quarterback. We were 1–0, just getting started.

  GAME 4

  Chicago 45, Washington 10

  Electric Gault Lights a Charge

  For most of the first quarter against Washington, the Bears looked like anything but the high-powered bunch that had blind-sided the Vikings in the last game. They were out-gained 141–2, and Walter Payton was on the way to a day that would give him 6 total yards on seven carries, one of the worst days of his career. They finished the afternoon with their fewest rushing yards, passing yards, and first downs of the season, and they heard a smattering of boos. Jim McMahon was 0-for-4 and threw an interception in the first quarter.

  But they finished the day 4–0 after handing the Redskins their worst beating in nearly 25 years.

  What happened was another turning-point play, again involving Willie Gault, as it had on the first McMahon miracle touchdown in Minnesota. With the Bears trailing 10–0 after a Mark Moseley field goal early in the second quarter, Gault took a Washington kickoff at his own 1-yard line and turned loose some of the legendary speed that made him a unique weapon for a unique team.

  His touchdown sparked a 31-point blitz in the quarter as the defense completely shut down Joe Theismann’s offense. After the Gault touchdown, the Redskins managed a total of one yard in their next three possessions, leaving the Bears with field position that set them up to score on drives of 14, 22, and 36 yards. McMahon passed to Dennis McKinnon 14 yards for a touchdown, followed that with a 10-yard TD pass to Emery Moorehead, then caught one of his own on a 13-yard heave from Payton.

  Mike Richardson and Gary Fencik nail Art Monk, who coughs up the ball.

  Jim McMahon grabs a touchdown pass from Walter Payton in the second quarter.

  What the game represented was the third time in four weeks that the Bears had rallied to win after trailing by more than seven points, and the result gave the Bears the NFL lead in scoring. The Redskins outgained them 376–250, but the Bears were beginning to dominate offensively as much with McMahon’s passing as with Payton’s running.

  McMahon threw a third touchdown pass in the third quarter, finding Payton for a 33-yard score, and Dennis Gentry ended the scoring with a one-yard dive.

  Washington had been a critical game in the 1984 playoffs, in which the Bears discovered and began to believe that they belonged on the same field with some of the NFL’s best. Now they had gone a step further and confirmed that they were one of the NFL’s best in their own right.

  Chicago 45, Washington 10

  SEPT. 29, 1985, AT SOLDIER FIELD

  BOTTOM LINE

  31-point 2nd quarter turns deficit into win

  KEY PLAY

  Willie Gault’s 99-yard kickoff return for a touchdown. The play kick-started the Bears on a 31-point second-quarter outburst.

  KEY STAT

  The Bears scored on five consecutive possessions in the 2nd quarter.

  Walter Payton, who gained only six yards rushing, bangs off a pair of defenders.

  Remembering ’85

  DAVE DUERSON

  No. 22, safety

  “My dad is my hero. My dad’s decorated—two Bronze Stars from World War II, fought in the 3rd Army Signal Corps directly under Patton. He spent a lot of his time behind enemy lines.”

  “So when I went to work for Buddy Ryan, it was like a joke. Buddy Ryan and Mike Ditka couldn’t intimidate me. Buddy certainly had attitude, but his was self-serving. Very much so. You were either one of his guys, or you weren’t. In my case, I wasn’t.”

  “Buddy just absolutely hated my guts. Hated my guts. I called my dad when I first got drafted and I told him, ‘Dad, I didn’t graduate from college to go through this.’ My dad believes that every male child should do two years in the armed services. I tell you that as a precursor. So he says to me, ‘Well, it sounds to me like you’re in the army.’ So I said, ‘OK, Dad, I’ll talk to you later.’ Short phone call.”

  “Every day Buddy would tell me he was waiting for me to screw up one time. So I played through that whole season with the defensive coordinator telling me that he was rooting for me to screw up so he could get Todd Bell back. So I became an All-Pro myself.”

  “I think [Patriots quarterback] Tony Eason knew [Super Bowl XX] was over the second series. Absolutely. He picked himself off the turf on each play of the first series and the second series. Their offensive line couldn’t handle our guys. With all the things we were doing at the line of scrimmage, we were calling out their plays before they could execute them.”

  “I was projected to go to Parcells with the 10th pick in the first round. He took Terry Kinnard instead. I was talking about the importance of law school. It was never just football for me. It cost me two rounds in the draft.”

  “I think we should’ve won three Super Bowls. But they started shipping guys out.”

  chapter V

  Bodyslams and All-Day Suckers

  The New England Patriots were coming to town. Coached by Raymond Berry, the Patriots had won their first game and had a fierce defense and a workable offense directed by third-year quarterback Tony Eason. Nobody knew that New England might figure into the Bears’ journey somewhere else along the trail. For now all that mattered was keeping the dream alive, the quest.

  One issue that popped up again during the week was the sometimes harmless but sometimes nasty rivalry between the Bears’ offense and defense. A fight had broken out in practice midweek between offensive guard Mark Bortz and defensive tackle Steve McMichael. Actually, there had been two fights between the men. Fights can show intensity and desire. But they can also show pettiness and lack of respect. Ditka was a little worried about this last mini-brawl.

  I guarantee you I never moved three feet when the fight happened between Bortz and McMichael, and I don’t think Buddy moved, either. It wasn’t that I wasn’t concerned, but some things have to be settled without a lot of interference. And what could I do, anyway?

  McMichael, that’s just the way he was. He was a tough Texas boy, a free agent we picked up because he had tons of heart. He was a little out there at times. They said he wore his clothes in camp until he had a pile of dirty stuff, then he’d just turn the pile over and wear it all again. One of his hobbies was rattlesnake hunting. But he would get in your face and never shy away from anything. I love Steve McMichael. Bortz was quiet, a six-foot-six, 270-pound guy from a little town in Wisconsin, who had been a defensive player and co-captain at Iowa. He was a defensive lineman before he switched to offense in the NFL, so maybe that had the two of
them going a little bit.

  One problem we had was we were always going against our own defense in practice, and sometimes they were so fired up that we couldn’t get a damn thing accomplished. I’d yell at Buddy, “For Chris-sake, we’re not playing the Bears next week!” But there was tension—football is a mean game—and those defensive players had great chemistry and great pride. Buddy had them cranked up like assassins. They’d run that “46,” and it was like there were 50 killers on the line ready to slit your throat.

  But then—and I think it may have been a week or so after we had bailed out the defense against Tampa Bay—we finally got the defense’s respect. The exact date of a lot of these things gets blurry. It wasn’t like I was keeping a diary, and after coaching the Bears for 11 years, I may get some things jumbled. But you don’t forget the moments that jump out at you, the ones that changed things. At any rate, we were at practice, no media was around, and McMichael was mouthing off to the offensive line. Who knows who he was pissed at. But Jim Covert just grabbed him and body-slammed him. Now I love Steve, as I’ve said. He never complained about anything, fought through any pain he had. And he was a tough guy. But Covert was a high school wrestler in Pennsylvania who had pinned all but one of his opponents his senior year. He was quick and agile. He was one of the quietest guys on the team. He’d been an English major in college. He’d gone to Pitt, my old school, and he was best friends with Danny Marino. But he could be pushed only so far, and you did not want to mess with him.

  He slammed McMichael, who would go on to be a pro wrestler—one of those guys hitting other guys over the head with folding chairs and brief-cases—and it showed the defense we weren’t taking any more shit off them. It ended as quickly as it began. There was silence for a bit, and then I blew the whistle and said, “Let’s get back to practice.” You’d be surprised how much that ended the crap.

  I coached the offense. Buddy had the defense. That’s just the way it was. But a team doesn’t have two sides, it has one. And the respect has to go back and forth, between everybody. McMichael made our guys better by the way he practiced. Nobody liked it at times. It wasn’t a picnic out there. It was not a walk in the park. We were in pads every day up until Saturday.

  The point is we had an offense that controlled the ball for a reason. We knew that if we gave our defense enough time to rest, they could go out and be animals. Who gives a damn if you won 40 to 30 or 10 to nothing? Actually, I like 10 to nothing. So our offense led the league in first downs and time of possession by design. We needed respect. Just as our defense already had respect.

  Buddy was tough on his guys. He ran them, had them do ladder drills, ups-and-downs, and there were times when I’d have to tell him to stop. My offense was conditioned, too, but like with the receivers, they ran their asses off all practice long, so what was the point of running them at the end? But Buddy believed in those whistle drills for his guys. They hated them, but they never, ever quit, because they knew the reason for doing them. The defensive guys were as tough at the end of games as they were on the opening series. They were in shape. Buddy had their total attention and total respect.

  As a coach, it was never about me. I had a bad temper and I got crazed at times, but what I wanted was to win. And when a team wins, everybody wins. It’s about challenging the other team, doing everything you can with every bone in your body, because losing is rotten. When I got traded from the Eagles to the Cowboys, I went from being a pretty good individual player to being a team player, because I realized my value was not in catching 60 passes a year—they had guys to do that. What they needed from me was to angle block, pass block, take out linebackers for the runners behind me like Calvin Hill or Duane Thomas or Walt Garrison or Dan Reeves, whoever was carrying the ball. I understood how important I was to the team, not how important I was to myself. That Super Bowl championship ring the Cowboys won in 1971, when we beat Miami 24–3, sure felt good on my finger.

  I suppose, right from the get go, teamwork and foresight by other people were part of my pro career. In college I’d played both ways, and the teams that wanted me—Washington, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco—were going to make me play linebacker. But the Bears took me, and the Old Man said, “You’re a tight end.” Did anyone know what a tight end was back then? Not really.

  The whole idea of a big guy in close catching a lot of passes was kind of new. We played the Eagles in 1961, and a linebacker named Chuck Weber grabbed me and threw me down. He lined up right over me and forced me outside, and I couldn’t do anything, and then he’d force me in, and the middle linebacker would knock me on my ass. Sometimes both of them would pound me, hold me down. I told Halas, “Those guys are holding me, Coach! Pushing me in, out—I can’t do anything.”

  He and Luke Johnsos—the wide receivers coach, but really the offensive coordinator, even though we didn’t have those titles back then—discussed this, and then Halas said to me, “Flex out two to five yards. Put the outside guy on an island. See what he does with that.”

  So I flex out on some of the pass plays and some of the runs, almost like a slot. What happens when I run a slant now? If I’m blocking the linebacker on a run, he’s already out of the play. He’s not gonna be a factor. We did it, and it worked. I mean why run through someone when you can run around them? Well, okay, sometimes you just gotta knock the crap out of a guy, because it is football, and kicking ass is fun. But how many great players are you going to intimidate?

  You think you could intimidate Chuck Bednarik? Hah! Break his arm off and he’d throw it at you. How are you going to intimidate Ronnie Lott? Or Dan Hampton? Or Mike Singletary or Walter Payton? You might beat them, but you’re not going to intimidate them, not because they’re scared of what you’re doing. Hell no. You beat the yolk out of people. But you outsmart them, too.

  I had run-ins with guys like the Packers’ Ray Nitschke, that bald guy who tried to tear my head off constantly. I had run-ins with a lot of great players. I hit them high, I hit them low—and they hit me that way, too. Bill Pellington, the Colts’ linebacker, was wearing my ass out one game. He was slugging me, and I was slugging him. And finally I ended up with this cloth thing on my arm with a hunk of lead at the end, like a freaking weapon. I ran to the official and said, “That sshole’s trying to kill me with a chunk of lead!”

  The ref grabbed it out of my hand and said, “Gimme that, you idiot. It’s my flag!” He threw it at us and it hit my arm. I was so embarrassed.

  Pellington looked at me and said, “Ditka, I don’t need lead to beat your sorry ass!”

  Anyway, the Patriots game—Game 2 of the regular season—begins and our defense is back to what it should be, an attacking force. The offense had come from behind in the Tampa Bay game to win that one, and now the defense is returning the favor.

  They’re going after Eason and the Patriots runners like they’re free beer. It was kind of funny, because on Friday I happened to see this stupid-ass thing called the Dunkel Rating in a newspaper that was lying open. I also saw that our defense was ranked 23rd against the rush, even though it had led the league in rushing defense the year before. One game. Fricking statistics! And this Dunkel thing had the Bears rated only 12th best out of the 28 NFL teams. Fine. Screw ’em all. Dumb-Ass Rating is more like it. We’ll see how it ends.

  McMahon started off the game with a 32-yard touchdown pass to Dennis McKinnon, who was still battling back from off-season knee surgery. Dennis was a skinny guy, but like the guys I loved on this team, just tough and nasty, and he’d give you everything he had. That 7–0 lead was all we needed. New England couldn’t do a thing against our defense. They had 27 yards rushing, and Eason got sacked half a dozen times and threw three interceptions. They wouldn’t have scored at all except for a mistake on coverage when fullback Craig James caught a little pass across the middle and outran Wilbur Marshall for a 90-yard score in the fourth quarter. We were up 20–0 before that, and we won 20–7. Take away that pass and they only had 116 net yards. We had 369.


  What I liked was the Patriots had six sacks the week before, and they got none against us. Our offensive line of Tom Thayer, Jay Hilgenberg, Keith Van Horne, Jimbo Covert, and Mark Bortz was developing into a cohesive unit. It’s so important to have that communication and camaraderie when blocking, the same guys lining up together day after day, knowing each other’s traits and techniques and personalities. We had that working now.

  The Patriots keyed all game long on Payton, who was a little beaten up going in, and he only gained 39 yards. No problem. That opened up other things, including 37 yards rushing for backup Thomas Sanders and a TD run for Suhey. We also got two field goals from our rookie kicker Kevin Butler, a fourth-round draft pick out of Georgia. Butthead’s addition had meant I had to let vet Bob Thomas go at the end of the preseason. Butler went on to set an NFL rookie scoring record in 1985, so Bob knew what he was up against. But I loved Bob Thomas. He was a great guy. Butler wasn’t any more accurate, but he kicked off much deeper, so there was nothing I could do.

  I didn’t like cutting Bob. I never liked that part. I sat down with him, and it was miserable. It’s the hardest thing you do as a coach. When I released defensive lineman Mike Hartenstine after 1986, it broke my heart. But there’s a time when it has to happen, and you’re the only one who can do it. Nobody teaches you how. I watched Coach Landry do it, and I watched him break down. I’d hear him tell a coach, “I’m keeping this man because he’s a better football player, but I’m cutting a man who has so much more character.” Oh, it hurt him!