The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest

by Ditka, Mike

  “I don’t think I would have that Super Bowl ring if not for Mike Ditka. Without question. When he came in, I don’t know if we really understood what it took to win in the National Football League, the sacrifice that was necessary, the importance of teamwork. He instilled that toughness that we needed to get over the hump.”

  “Next to us winning a Super Bowl and meeting some of the guys I met, that period of time coaching at Trinity College was probably the greatest period of my life. To come in there and start a football program at 28 years of age and be an African American head coach at a Christian college was a great time.”

  “The birth of my kids and the lady I married—those are experiences I wouldn’t change for anything in the world.”

  chapter XIV

  Cannons Don’t Fall out of Trees

  It was on to New Orleans for Super Bowl XX.

  The Bears’ opponent was the New England Patriots, who had won the AFC championship by upsetting the Dolphins 31–14 in Miami. That score was a shocker, but Pats quarterback Tony Eason had been remarkably efficient in the game, completing 10 of 12 passes for three touchdowns. The Bears had beaten the Patriots 20–7 in the second game of the season, as everyone distantly recalled. It seemed like years ago. And in truth, over four months had gone by since that hot day at Soldier Field. Teams change. They learn, they peak, they flourish, they wane. There are injuries. Luck grows. It runs out. But the Bears could not fear the Patriots. The wreckage they had just caused in the playoffs was unprecedented. Nobody had tossed two shutouts before. Fear the Pats? As much as they feared Pat the Bunny.

  Ditka had warned his team about getting complacent, however. He didn’t want the players getting caught up in the hype. He didn’t want them getting overwhelmed. He wanted them even-keeled, in their fashion. He quoted what his former Dallas Cowboys teammate Duane Thomas had once said to Super Bowl reporters: “If this is the ultimate game, why do they play one next year?”

  “I had told all the guys from the beginning of the year that the only thing that would be acceptable to me, to all of us, was to win the Super Bowl.”

  —Ditka on 1985

  Before the Bears actually traveled to New Orleans, however, they visited the now-completed bubble in Champaign, Illinois, staying for a week of pre-New Orleans intensity on the University of Illinois campus. They had things to work on, because everyone said the Patriots had improved since the start of the year. Well, they had to improve. Indeed, the Pats finished up leading the AFC in takeaways with 47 and then got a stunning 16 more in their three playoff games. On offense Eason had been hurt in the sixth game, and the offense was handed to veteran quarterback Steve Grogan. New England had flourished under Grogan, winning its next six games, before Grogan himself was injured. Eason took over the starting role once more, but the Patriots did not falter under him this time. They continued on with their improved running game and an opportunistic, attacking defense.

  The Bears tuned their defense in Champaign and set in motion Ditka’s plan for offensive attack: be aggressive, take chances, be prepared to use Payton as a decoy if the Patriots made stopping him their sole focus. Whatever—never make the same mistake as in last year’s NFC Championship Game. Do not sit back and let things happen. Make them happen.

  Buddy Ryan was rumored to have been talking with the Philadelphia Eagles about their head coaching position, but he denied it. “I’m more excited about getting ready for the Super Bowl,” he said. “That’s what my mind’s on right now.”

  Ryan’s defense had finished the regular season ranked first in the NFL in turnovers, yards allowed, and points allowed. Everything that meant anything. “It would be an irreplaceable loss to this team,” said Singletary of Ryan’s possible departure. “It would take a long time to recover from his loss.” The middle linebacker continued on in his somber, yet impassioned tone. “He’s more than a coach. He’s a leader, a father, and a friend.”

  Oh, and McMahon was injured once more. This time it was his lower back and upper buttocks. He was injured when he slid to the turf feet first in the Rams game, a signal for the defense to lay off, and still was steamrolled by a defender. “I got a serious pain in the ass right now,” is how Jimmy Mac gently put it.

  I was thinking about the class of 1983 when I looked at this team, all the rookies who joined the team in what was my second year as coach. That was some year for our draft. Eight of the guys we picked were starters—Jim Covert, Willie Gault, Dave Duerson, Tom Thayer, Richard Dent, Mark Bortz, Mike Richardson, and Dennis McKinnon. I mean, those are good players. You can say what you want about coaching and schemes and all that, but you need the horses to run the race. Ask any coach at the elite level, and if he’s truthful, he’ll say, “Yeah, we had the studs.” We had ours. I’m the first to admit it. I had the best football players on the best team I’d ever seen. We went off to New Orleans feeling confident, to say the least.

  I had told all the guys from the beginning of the year that the only thing that would be acceptable to me, to all of us, was to win the Super Bowl. It was a progression that we had to hold to. Develop a good team, develop the offense, the defense, develop the bonds, the teamwork, move forward, and when we got there, grab it all. Coming close would mean nothing now. We had been close. And I looked at that Dolphins game, that 38–24 loss. They weren’t better than us. We stunk that day. I would have loved to have played them in the Super Bowl, to kick their ass, just to show everybody. But the Patriots beat them before we got a chance. So what can you do?

  That Monday Night game haunted me, to be honest. Miami couldn’t have beaten us unless we didn’t adjust to their offense. They weren’t a better team than we were. I salute them for beating us, but they weren’t nearly as good as we were. We had to do nothing to compensate for their offense for them to win. And we did nothing. I’ll tell Buddy Ryan that, I’ll tell anybody that. I’ll go to my grave saying we played stupid defensive football.

  What we did now was, we got all our work accomplished in Champaign. We studied and prepared and ran our drills, and we had our game plan laid out like a map. It was something I learned when I was with the Cowboys. I learned it from Tom Landry. Dallas went to a lot of Super Bowls, and there had always been two weeks between the NFC Championship Game and the final game. Tom put everything in that was needed in week one. He said then when you get down there you can tune it, you can tweak it. But you don’t rebuild it. Super Bowl weeks are crazy enough. Why try to fight it? I mean, you know who the other team is, what they do. They’ve just done it for 18 games. They’re not suddenly going to turn into something they’ve never been. You can get into a lot of trouble by trying to reinvent the wheel.

  You know your players. You believe in what you’ve been doing. They believe in it. When we finally packed up and flew to New Orleans we had the right philosophy and the right feeling, and we never changed a damn thing once we got there.

  “McMahon, I think what you have to understand about him—whether you love him or hate him—is that he was one of the most competitive people on the planet.”

  —Ditka on McMahon

  We were not all perfect friends, don’t get me wrong. As I may have mentioned, I don’t believe Hampton and McMahon ever got along very well. They never really had a love for each other, and I don’t know why that is. They were both the same kind of player, they just played on opposite sides of the ball. Dan gave everything he had, every down, every breath. He had knee problems and he was always beaten up, but it never stopped him. That’s why he’s in the Hall of Fame. McMahon, I think what you have to understand about him—whether you love him or hate him—is that he was one of the most competitive people on the planet. He wasn’t acting like somebody he wasn’t. If we were losing, you might have thought he was an egomaniac. But I can honestly say I don’t think Jim McMahon ever cared more about himself than about the team. He did some strange things to draw attention to himself, but it never affected his teammates or his play.

  There we were on our way t
o the Super Bowl, and naturally, stuff was happening everywhere. Again, I wasn’t paying much attention to anything outside of the team and the preparation. McMahon had been on David Letterman, then Bob Hope, Fridge was doing stuff, everybody wanted Payton, there were posters. The damned “Super Bowl Shuffle” never ended. But I was worried a bit about Stanley Morgan, one of the Patriots’ wide receivers. He may have been 30 years old, but he had the highest yards-per-reception average of any active NFL player, almost 21 yards a catch. He didn’t catch a million balls, only 39 during the season, but he was dangerous as hell when he did.

  Then there was their other wideout, a young guy named Irving Fryar. Yeah, the media was watching us, and I suppose we gave them a lot to watch. But Fryar was getting watched, too. He’d missed the AFC Championship Game because he’d badly cut his ring finger and sliced the tendon in the little finger of his right hand. The news stories said he’d been in a fight with his pregnant wife and there was a knife, and, well, something happened. Besides catching passes, he was New England’s leading punt returner. Hell, he was the leading punt returner in the NFL. Their safety Roland James replaced him against the Dolphins and fumbled twice. And a guy named Stephen Starring had replaced Fryar at wideout, and he didn’t have a catch in the game. It mattered a bit to us whether Fryar played or not. Although, with our defense, maybe not that much.

  New England coach Raymond Berry came out with some nice coach-speak. “I’m not sure that Starring isn’t every bit as good as Fryar,” he said.

  Good work, Ray.

  The main thing was, in my mind, Tony Eason was not Dan Marino. Raymond Berry is one of my favorite friends, a guy I respect and love to death. But Don Shula had realized before that 13th game that our offense was what it was, maybe he thought he could stop it. Maybe not. But the Dolphins weren’t terribly worried about our offense, at any rate. It was our defense that terrified them. So Shula went after it. He spent his time trying to beat our defense. Why could he do that? Because he had Dan Marino. Guys like Marino don’t fall out of trees. Dan Marino has a cannon that God hands out to maybe one person a century. And he didn’t give one to Tony Eason.

  I told the players again about Duane Thomas and the Super Bowl. As a player I sat near Duane in the Dallas locker room, and I didn’t know him well—he was real hard to understand and be a tight friend with. He was aloof and silent a lot. But he was a lot smarter than I thought.

  Here’s hoping we could be smart, too.

  GAME 13

  Chicago 24, Miami 38

  One and Only: Season Smudged

  Nobody’s perfect, not even the 1985 Bears. When Miami had polished off the 38–24 victory that turned out to be the only blemish on the Bears’ season, the Dolphins ensured that their 1972 record of 14–0 in the regular season and 17–0 overall would remain unequaled.

  Seven seconds into the second quarter, the Bears trailed 17–7. Scoring on every first-half possession, Miami extended its lead to 31–10 at intermission. Mike Ditka chose to get into a shootout with the great Dan Marino in the first half, and Marino won. He wound up throwing for 270 yards and three touchdowns. Walter Payton, meanwhile, did not carry the ball until the Bears were behind 10–7 and nearly 10 minutes had elapsed.

  One semi-highlight: Payton broke the NFL record with his eighth consecutive 100-yard game, but only because the Bears called timout three times on defense in the final minute after Payton had fumbled the ball away when he was stuck on 98 yards. But the Dolphins failed to run out the clock, and Payton got another chance, finishing with 121 yards.

  “Walter Payton is the greatest football player to ever play the game,” Ditka said. “Other people who call themselves running backs can’t carry his jersey.”

  Steve Fuller is helped from the field after spraining his ankle.

  Jim McMahon had missed the previous three weeks with a tender shoulder, but he looked sharp in warmups. Still, Ditka left him on the bench until Steve Fuller sprained his ankle early in the fourth quarter. McMahon moved the Bears briefly until throwing an interception with 6:12 to go. It was Miami’s third interception against a team that had thrown just nine during its 12–0 start.

  The Miami Dolphins’ Nat Moore (89) catches a Dan Marino pass and runs for a touchdown, December 2, 1985.

  Not all the action was on the field. When the Bears gave up their fourth touchdown in the first half after a blocked punt at their own 6-yard line, Ditka screamed in frustration at Buddy Ryan on the sideline. But Ditka was calm, even cocky, postgame: “Nobody’s perfect, and we proved it. Now it’s what you do with it. Do you bounce back? We’ll be back. [The Dolphins] deserved to win and we didn’t. I hope they go as far as we’re going to go and we play them again.”

  Of course, the Dolphins did not go to the Super Bowl. But the next day several Bears did record “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” Perfect season or not, this team had swagger.

  Chicago 24, Miami 38

  DEC. 2, 1985, AT THE ORANGE BOWL

  BOTTOM LINE

  Dolphins pile it on right from the start

  KEY PLAY

  Maury Buford’s punt being blocked at the Bears’ 6-yard line. Nat Moore’s ensuing touchdown made it 31–10 Miami, still in the first half.

  KEY STAT

  The Dolphins’ 31 first-half points were the most against the Bears since the 1972 season opener.

  Linebacker Mike Singletary and the defense had no answer for Dan Marino and the Dolphins in the Bears’ only defeat.

  Remembering ’85

  OTIS WILSON

  No. 55, linebacker

  “We had the ’80s, and Michael had the ’90s.”

  “When you say ‘showmen,’ we were just a crazy bunch of guys with great personalities, but when it was time to work, we went to work.”

  “With Buddy Ryan doing some of the things he did and Mike being vocal, hey, everybody was crazy.”

  “One thing Buddy said: ‘If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll be standing over here by me.’ I couldn’t stand him at first. No. 1, he wouldn’t call us by our names. And he was on us so hard. But he wanted you to understand what was really going on. By my second year, it clicked in my head. I understood the total picture, and it made me a better player.”

  “‘The Super Bowl Shuffle’ sounded stupid. It sounded cocky. But, hey, we did it. We put ourselves out there in front of the bullet and made it happen. Willie Gault put that together, and Harold Washington was in office. They were trying to come up with an idea to raise money for various charities. That was the whole focus. It wasn’t that we were trying to relate it to football. We were trying to raise money for charity. But it just turned out that way.”

  “[Mike] Singletary, an intense, smart individual. Hard-nosed. Almost like a coach on the field. Dedicated. Watching him study and understand the game helped me as well.”

  “Playing with Wilber [Marshall], I called him ‘Pit Bull,’ because he got on you and don’t let you go.”

  “Dave Duerson and I, when we played, we’d get a little excited, a little carried away sometimes. We were just saying, ‘We’re like a pack of dogs out here. ‘We just started barking, and that’s how it all started, believe it or not. I wish I could’ve put a patent on it. I’d be Bill Gates.”

  “You couldn’t double-team anyone on that line. If you double-team Richard [Dent], [Dan] Hampton and [Steve] McMichael would take your head off.”

  “We saw something in everybody’s eyes. We were coming, and they were like, ‘Oh, Lord, here they come again.’”

  “The fans have always been great here in Chicago. Twenty-five years later, they can still name every player on that team. It’s recognized, it’s appreciated, and their support’s always been great.”

  “It’s a brutal sport. You see this guy going into his fifth year, and this guy coming out of college is 21. I only have to pay him $20,000. I have to pay you a million. Which one do you think they’re going to pay? You’ve got to look at all these things, kid. Don’t go in there stupid.” />
  “Ed McCaskey used to always tell me, ‘Otis, are you saving your money?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m saving my money. I’m saving for a rainy day. I’m investing it wisely.’ Then I’m saying in my mind, ‘Because I’m not getting enough of it.’

  chapter XV

  Stick a Needle in This

  The circus packed its tents, herded the giraffes and tigers onto the flatcars, rousted up the fat man and the bearded ladies and the jugglers and the strongmen, and headed down to New Orleans. There had been other eccentric and entertaining, even evil or nearly sanctified, teams in the 19 previous Super Bowls, but there had never been a carnival like the Chicago Bears. You had dark Raiders and sanctified Cowboys in the past. But here was something for everyone all on the same train.

  From the riveting talent of Walter Payton to the intensity of the defensive line to the pulpit frenzy of Mike Singletary to the splendor of William “The Refrigerator” Perry to the antisocial unpredictability of Jim McMahon, there was everything on the Bears—you could observe it for hours and still have room for popcorn. And in the end it was all because there had never been a head coach like Mike Ditka.

  Ditka’s zeal was renowned, but whoever thought the wild man from western Pennsylvania would lead a band of disparate souls to the pinnacle of team sports? It was fascinating to all to know that Ditka was behind this thing, not as a player but as a coach. See how people could change? Or maybe change wasn’t necessary, only tweaking, only passion. Ditka seemed so unlike Hank Stram or Chuck Noll or Bill Walsh or, of course, Tom Landry, as to be another species. But maybe not.