by Ditka, Mike
Still, Fuller deserves some credit. Not only did his offense outrush Detroit 250–68, he also out-passed Eric Hipple 112–73 and threw no interceptions to his opponent’s two. Fuller also scored the first and last touchdowns on bootlegs. He did this without starting flanker Dennis McKinnon or starting tight end Emery Moorehead, who joined McMahon on the sidelines with injuries.
During warmups, McMahon tossed a few left-handed passes but did not test his right shoulder. It would be up to Fuller to lead the Bears for the next two games, in which they would post their most overwhelming victories … until the Super Bowl.
Chicago 24, Detroit 3
NOV. 10, 1985, AT SOLDIER FIELD
BOTTOM LINE
Bears’ offense clicks even without McMahon
KEY PLAY
Steve Fuller’s one-yard TD run in the first quarter. Playing in place of the injured Jim McMahon, Fuller also scored the Bears’ final touchdown.
KEY STAT
The Bears outgained the Lions by an overwhelming 360–106 margin.
An injured Jim McMahon watches from the sideline.
Remembering ’85
STEVE MCMICHAEL
No. 76, defensive tackle
“This thing isn’t going to die out, this ’85 Bears thing, baby. We were entertainers, you understand? We were entertainers as well as a great football team. That’s why everybody remembers us in the pantheon of pro football. We could’ve been the team of the decade if McMahon had stayed healthy. But he didn’t.”
“I knew there was going to be something special downtown when we left the airport and all the exits from O’Hare to downtown were blocked off. There was no traffic. There was no traffic even waiting to come on where it was blocked off. So I knew everybody was downtown.”
“Mike Ditka brought the ‘Monsters of the Midway’ back to Chicago. They’d been gone since Dick Butkus. That’s why he’s beloved.”
“Listen, baby, we were vicious. That’s the Cro-Magnon that Hampton talked about, and teams were scared to come in here and play us.”
“I’m not talking about scared whether they were going to win or lose. I’m talking about scared if they were going to get out of the game walking or on a stretcher.”
“When Wilber Marshall hit Joe Ferguson in Detroit, ooohhh, my goodness. You can’t do it anymore, but it was legal back then. Ferguson was out before he hit the ground, and how I knew he was out was Richard Dent, like a referee in boxing, he picked up Ferguson’s arm and let it go and it just flopped back down.”
“I think we put out six starting quarterbacks that year.”
“They gave me the paper that we wanted Halas to keep Buddy no matter who the coach was, and I signed it, even though Buddy wasn’t playing me yet. That’s the kind of respect I had for him. I wanted him to stick around long enough for him to put me in the game and play me. Then I knew I’d done something. I was proud of myself when that happened.”
“One of the best games I played in pro football was that year against the San Francisco 49ers in Candlestick Park. I got a game ball and we beat them 26–10. That’s when I knew we were going to win the Super Bowl, because they were the defending world champions, they were there in all their glory, they didn’t have any injuries, it was in their house, and we whipped their (butts).”
“Buddy would give us a little speech before the game and walk out of the meeting, and Dale Haupt, the defensive line coach, would run the projector and we’d watch one more reel of film. Well, the night before the Super Bowl, Buddy got up in front of us, and the last thing he said before he walked out of the room was, ‘No matter what happens, you guys will always be my heroes.’ I knew he was gone. Tears in his eyes, you understand?”
“After he walked out and closed the door, I stood up, picked up the metal chair that was under me, those folding chairs, and threw it into the blackboard that was right in front of me. It was like a movie special effect. I was trying to shatter the board. All four legs impaled the thing and just hung there. The room erupted. That’s when Hampton clubbed the projector and said, ‘This meeting’s over.’ And we all filed out yelling and screaming. That fever pitch that started right there kind of carried through till about halftime, and we’d already blown the game out.”
“I might not ever be in the Hall of Fame, but there’s guys in there that are, and I’ve whipped their (butts).”
“In every Shakespearean tragedy, there’s some comic relief, and that’s what William Perry was for us.”
“‘Mongo’ I got from the Bears’ practices and fighting all the time.”
“You know why most wrestlers have long hair and it’s flowing? It sells better when you sell the fake punch.”
“All-Pro, Super Bowl champion, Monster of the Midway. That’s the triple crown, baby.”
chapter XII
We Can Do Almost Everything, but Maybe We Can’t Dance
The Indianapolis Colts didn’t stand a chance. They were the Bears’ next opponent, at Soldier Field, and they weren’t a very good team. And the Bears were seething. The final score was 17–10 Bears, but it wasn’t that close. Chicago had been leading 17–3, until the Colts scored on a 61-yard pass late in the fourth quarter. Other than that play, the Colts gained only 24 yards and made one first down in the second half. Walter Payton rushed for his ninth straight 100-yard game, extending his NFL record. And praise be! Jim McMahon played the entire game.
Next up were the New York Jets, a 10–4 team that featured long-haired and flaky defensive end Mark Gastineau, known for sacking quarterbacks and doing a spastic celebratory dance afterward. Ditka had called the Indianapolis win “ugly,” and the game against the Jets was no beauty, either. It was close until Kevin Butler made his third and fourth field goals of the game in the last four minutes. The Bears won 19–6. Everything seemed tainted since the Miami loss, but still, the fact was there: the Bears were a 14–1 team.
“By the end of the season if you said ‘Refrigerator,’ people didn’t think of a place to put food. They thought of a huge guy who ate food. That’s how famous he was.”
—Ditka on William Perry
There were so many great players on that 1985 team, and I sometimes wish I could just tell the world how much they meant to me. Take Butthead. Kevin Butler was like one of the guys. You may say, so what? But kickers are often very unusual people. They’re guys who are hard to have conversations with. If you’re not careful, they’ll start crying or calling for their mother. That’s if you can even understand what in the hell they’re saying, because they’re usually from Austria or somewhere. But Butler was born in Savannah, Georgia, and he went out with the guys and par-tied and was a football player, the real deal. I liked him. Of course, maybe I wouldn’t have liked him so much if he couldn’t kick straight. But in that Jets game alone he had four field goals. Not real long ones, but needed ones. And he was automatic. Twelve points. Not bad.
William Perry was settling in, doing whatever we asked of him. People might have thought I was all over the map, using this kid like I was. But in the Jets game he picked up a fumble and ran with it seven yards. He may have looked like a barrel rolling across the floor, but he was moving pretty good, in my opinion. I’d already talked to the press about wanting him to run for a touchdown, catch a touchdown pass, and—here was the big one-throw a TD pass. It was fun, but here are two things. One, by doing that it made the other team have to prepare for him and maybe forget about what was really important. And two, I could have done the same thing with 10 other guys, but it wouldn’t have worked. It worked with William because he was a good enough athlete and a good enough person to handle it. By the end of the season if you said “Refrigerator,” people didn’t think of a place to put food. They thought of a huge guy who ate food. That’s how famous he was.
You think I was eccentric? You think I was intense? Hell, I remember coming back from a loss up in Minnesota when I was a rookie. Coach Halas got on the intercom at the front of the airplane and said, “You’re nothing but
a bunch of c---s!” I think Michael McCaskey, his own grandson and president of the team, once said I was a lot calmer than Halas.
I suppose I was a product of where I grew up and how I grew up. My dad was old school, absolutely. He was a former Marine. He never went to battle, but he was a Marine. He worked on a railroad that serviced J & L Steel in Aliquippa, which is one of the mill towns up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. My dad was a car repair man, a welder. A burner is what we called them. His dad was a burner, too, did the same thing.
Dad would come home, and his clothes always had holes in them from the sparks. He had burn marks on his hands and arms, but that’s what he did. He was self-taught. I think he went to the seventh grade, at most. But he could do any crossword puzzle I’ve ever seen. He had a great vocabulary, and with that limited education he became president of his union. Although he defended the workers, he wouldn’t defend somebody who wouldn’t work. You slept on the job? I got news for you. Pop Ditka was on your ass.
We are Ukranian. My father was born here, but his parents came over from the old country. People called us Polacks, mostly, or Hunkies. I don’t know why they couldn’t come up with Ukies. We weren’t a close family, and it was because my dad was tough. He was tough with my mom. And he was tough with me. He got on me hard, but he didn’t go after the other kids. I was the oldest, and I had two brothers and a sister. I was talking to my sister the other day, and I said, “Dad never touched you, did he?”
And she said, “One time when I was a sophomore or junior in high school I said something to him, and he slapped me.”
I said, “I never thought he slapped anyone but me.”
I know he never touched the other two boys. But he was rough with me and my mom. When you see that as a kid, it bothers you. But then in retrospect you understand that he was raised like that, and that’s what he knew. I blamed him for a lot. I didn’t like him, basically, until I went off to college and lived away from home. All of my buddies got to do stuff, but I could never be out past nine o’clock until high school. There was a reason why he did it, but I didn’t understand his motives until the end: he didn’t want me working in the mill. He wanted me to get an education. We kids were going to have a better life than he did.
It took a long time for that to sink in, to explain things to myself, but the more I understood, the better it got. At the end we used to talk a lot, and we had a great relationship even though it was from a distance. It’s like that song, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” by Harry Chapin. When I had time for him, he had no time for me. When he had time for me, I had no time for him. That’s the sadness of getting old with your kids. You can’t go back and undo things. But, really, we went from being strangers to being friends by the end.
He died 11 years ago, at 80, while I was coaching in New Orleans. He had hardening of the arteries, and he was a four-packs-of-Lucky-Strikes-a-day guy from the time he was 12 until he quit cold turkey at age 59. Twenty-one years without a smoke, which was pretty good. And he used to go crazy when Diana would light up a cigarette in front of him. He’d shake his head and say, “I’d give anything to have one of those!”
“When I went nuts on teammates or players, it was only because winning was so important to me.”
—Ditka
I was the firstborn, and probably he was hardest on me for two reasons: because I was the oldest and because I deserved it more than the other ones. I had a knack for getting into stupid trouble. Nothing malicious. But if there was something stupid to do, I’d be one of the guys doing it, and I’d always end up getting blamed. I’ll give you an example.
One time me and my buddies went to the library during the holidays just to mess around. They had a Christmas tree up, and we stole a couple of ornaments. Why, I don’t know. We were dumb-ass kids. So we have these little glass ornaments, those colored balls, and we’re running down the street playing catch with them, throwing them back and forth. You know how light they are, and the wind is blowing. So I throw one, and the wind catches it, and it hits a kid right above his eye. I hit him pretty good. The glass shatters, and he’s cut, and there’s blood pouring down his face, and he freaks out. He has to get about six stitches.
Me, I have to go to school and tell the nun what happened, and she beats the crap out of me with a ruler. Then I have to go home and tell Dad, and he beats the crap out of me. That’s the way it was. I got my butt beat a lot. Now the nuns, maybe they were mean. But I think it was their job to teach you discipline and order, and they didn’t allow any messing around. The ones I had, anyway.
Did beating me make me change as a person? No. But it taught me to fear doing something wrong. If you’re afraid to do something wrong, you’ll avoid it because you don’t want your ass whupped. Funny thing is, as a coach I don’t believe in it. I know the nuns did, and my dad did, but I don’t. I believe that if you’re fair with people, you’re up front with them, you talk to them, it’s better than force. Still, the only way they deterred me from doing even stupider things as a kid was by punishment.
When I went nuts on teammates or players, it was only because winning was so important to me. I got on some guys pretty bad at Pitt, for instance, and I’m not proud of that. But I really couldn’t think of another way. I couldn’t do it Landry’s way. Of course, I didn’t know Landry back then. Even Lombardi couldn’t have been like Landry. Lombardi was Lombardi. I was myself.
The world can judge you how it wants. I remember we went to London in the summer of 1986. We were playing an exhibition game against the Cowboys at Wembley Stadium for all these ga-ga Englishmen, and we are the rage of the island. This was the NFL’s big push into Europe, going global. People had T-shirts with the Fridge on them, No. 72, running with the football. They’d sprint right past Walter Payton to get to Perry. Everybody was famous, though. Willie Gault had stuff going on, and Matt Suhey visited the stock exchange, and, yes, Walter was very important. But he wasn’t literally huge, like Perry. The cover of Sports Illustrated even showed Fridge with the Cowboys’ “Too Tall” Jones standing next to one of the Queen’s Royal Guardsmen. I said in a press conference, “I have the best running back in the history of the game, and all you want to know about is a lineman!”
So anyway, back to 1985. Around the time of our Jets game, Gastineau was getting all of the pub. That didn’t bother me. He was a good player, but the New York media made him a lot better than he was. I mean, he couldn’t carry Dent’s or Hampton’s jock strap. He’s got a sack dance? Why would you want to do that if you’re good and you know it? What does waving your arms around have to do with anything? Look at me, I’m great! Prove it by playing.
People said I was doing too many off-field things? My team was? If you still play hard on Sunday, which is when the games are played, that’s all that matters. If the players can make a few bucks off the field, good. As for me, I was fully dedicated. To the critics, I said screw you. Besides, I wasn’t doing that much, mostly just the TV show with Johnny.
We had one more regular-season game to go, against the Lions, who were an average team. It was there in Detroit, in their stupid dome, but if we played our game and never made mistakes like in the Miami game, we couldn’t be beat. Before that game the Pro Bowl teams were announced, and we had eight guys make the roster—Payton, Hampton, Dent, Covert, Hilgenberg, Singletary, Wilson, and even Dave Duerson, who was shocked as shit. They all deserved it. But so did Fencik and Van Horne and Marshall and about five other guys.
Some of the hoopla came from another thing, though. A bunch of the guys, 10 of them, including Payton, Fridge, Fuller, and McMahon, had used one of their off-days to make some kind of rap video. It was Willie Gault’s idea, I think, along with some producer. Willie had asked me to be in it, but I’d taken a pass. Dancing? Singing? Are you kidding? You can laugh, because I’ve done a lot of nutty stuff, such as wear a tuxedo in a “wedding portrait” with my “bride,” Ricky Williams, and act in a soccer movie. But I didn’t give a crap about this thing. Plus, I remembered what
that nun had said to me about singing. I didn’t even know what this video was about, but real soon I see these giant ads and it’s called “The Super Bowl Shuffle”!
My God, we have another regular-season game to play and then we’ll have to win two more games in the playoffs just to go to the Super Bowl. Talk about jumping the gun. But hey, I admired the guys’ confidence, if that’s what it was. A lot of people already hated us. Like I seemed to be saying more and more: screw ’em.
So we go to Detroit and we win our finale 37–17. Dennis Gentry—little Pinkie—runs a kickoff back for a touchdown, the first against the Lions in five years. And Wilbur Marshall hits quarterback Joe Ferguson so hard right under the chin that you can see Ferguson is unconscious even before he hits the turf. When Wilbur got fined later by the league, I thought it was bullcrap. I mean, the refs hadn’t even called a penalty.
It was an odd game. Even though we won pretty easily, the game bothered me. It was blah. I was certain a good team would beat us, maybe embarrass us. Well, I wasn’t certain of that, but I feared it. I couldn’t get the Dolphins game out of my mind. William Perry even picked up a fumble and ran until somebody jumped on him. But it didn’t matter.
The locker room was very quiet. Everybody knew we had only one goal now that we no longer could go undefeated. And this little win had nothing to do with it. “Maybe we shouldn’t do too many ‘Super Bowl Shuffles,’” I said to the media. I didn’t mean that. But I didn’t want this thing to get away from us. I was tense and cranky.