The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest

by Ditka, Mike

  After the Rams went three-and-out on their first possession, McMahon took the Bears 56 yards in five plays for a 7–0 lead, scoring the touchdown on a 16-yard run. Kevin Butler added a 34-yard field goal before the first quarter ended, and the tone of the day was set.

  McMahon converted Dickerson’s second fumble into a 22-yard TD pass to Willie Gault in the third quarter, waving off the draw play Ditka had sent in from the sidelines.

  The defense got into the offensive act in the fourth quarter, Wilber Marshall returning Brock’s fumble 52 yards for the game’s final score after Brock had been dumped for the third time.

  How one-sided was it? The Rams’ longest drive was 27 yards. They went three-and-out on eight of their 16 possessions and averaged just 2.2 yards per play.

  “I don’t want to sound like I’m not happy about what happened today,” Ditka said. “But we’re on a mission, and it won’t be finished until we’re finished in New Orleans.”

  Chicago 24, LosAngeles 0

  JAN. 12, 1986, AT SOLDIER FIELD

  BOTTOM LINE

  Defense, cold send Bears on way to New Orleans

  KEY PLAY

  Willie Gault’s 22-yard touchdown reception. Jim McMahon waved off Mike Ditka’s call for a draw play and hit Gault, who had faked cornerback LeRoy Irvin inside and then run a corner route.

  KEY STAT

  The Rams’ longest drive covered 27 yards. They averaged 2.2 yards per play.

  Wilber Marshall steams into the end zone in the fourth quarter after scooping up a fumble.

  Remembering ’85

  BUDDY RYAN

  Defensive coordinator

  “In the meeting with defensive players the night before the Super Bowl I told them regardless of what happened, they’d always be my heroes, and walked out. They all were crying and yelling. It was a very emotional thing. I never planned much of anything like that. I found it works better if you have the feeling, you know?”

  “Being carried off the field in the Super Bowl in New Orleans. That’s a great honor that your players carried you off after the game. It’s never been done to an assistant coach before or since.”

  “I don’t have anything to tell you about Mike Ditka. I don’t have feelings either way.”

  “Mr. Halas gave me the job a month before he hired Ditka and told me to hire my coaches.”

  “A dumb player gets you beat, and a guy that’s scared will get you beat. You have to have intelligence and toughness. The players executed, and they just scared people. I think there was actually some fear. People laugh when you say ‘NFL’ and have somebody scared. Well, believe me, we had them scared.”

  “When they started out as rooks, they were numbers. As they got up and played well, I started calling them by name.”

  “If you remember, Mike Singletary and Todd Bell and Al Harris all held out that year. I spent the whole off-season begging them to sign up. Singletary did, but the other two didn’t come into the fold, so they didn’t get a Super Bowl ring.”

  “Moments that year? Oh, they were all great. Dominated in the Super Bowl the way we did.”

  “We’d always score the first 10 points of the game on defense and then give the offense the ball on the plus-40.”

  “Dan Hampton and I own some horses together, and he’s kind of a country guy. Great player.”

  “If something broke down, Gary Fencik would jump the pattern. He’s a super-smart guy. To play our defense, you had to be smart, and you had to be tough. Gary qualified both ways.”

  “They wanted me to play a three-man line, so they went out and got a nose tackle [William Perry], so they thought. But he could only play a couple plays, and then he had to rest.”

  “I used to play the players in racquetball in Chicago all the time. I competed that way. I beat them most of the time. McMahon could beat me. He’s too good for me. But most of them I could beat.”

  “Weeb Ewbank hired me as an assistant coach for the New York Jets, and we only had four coaches back in those days, so you had to do it all—you had to draft, you had to scout, you had to coach. You learned a lot under Weeb.”

  “Joe Namath was a great player. He was a leader. He was the one who made it happen. Wore his white shoes.”

  “I had four brothers and two sisters. We were poor, but we didn’t know it. We had clean clothes to wear and always had food on the table. We had great togetherness, really.”

  “I worked digging ditches and building roads, all kinds of things, anything that paid.”

  “I had a bunch of tough players over the years. Wilber Marshall was a tough guy. Otis Wilson was a tough guy. Gerry Philbin was a tough guy with the Jets. Then I had Alan Page and Carl Eller and Jim Marshall. Jerome Brown was a super-tough guy. I told you before, we looked for brains and toughness. Dumb guys get you beat, and cowards get you beat.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything misunderstood. You pretty well get what you see, don’t you?”

  Super Bowl

  Super Bowl XX

  Chicago 46, New England 10

  Mercy!

  The Bears were far and away the most dominant team in football in 1985, so it was only appropriate that they wrapped up a storybook season with the most dominant performance in Super Bowl history. After taking Bourbon Street by storm during a week of frenzied buildup, they turned their attention to football and pulverized the New England Patriots 46–10 at the New Orleans Superdome. The game was so one-sided it evoked comparisons with an earlier Bears team’s 73–0 destruction of the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL title game, football’s previous standard for utter annihilation.

  “Right now I’m so happy I could jump up to the top of the Superdome,” All-Pro linebacker Mike Singletary said after orchestrating a defensive effort that drove New England quarterback Tony Eason from the game after six feeble possessions. The Patriots actually scored first, converting a fumble into a field goal after Jim McMahon and Walter Payton missed connections on a handoff. The short-lived 3–0 lead deprived the Bears of an opportunity for a third straight postseason shutout. But by the time backup QB Steve Grogan got the Pats on the board again, it was 44–3. Grogan was then sacked for a fourth-quarter safety, making the 46–10 final score especially poignant because it was the “46” defense the Bears used to lay waste to the NFL all season.

  “The game was never in question,” coach Mike Ditka said.

  Ditka, the star tight end on the Bears’ last championship team in 1963, joined the Raiders’ Tom Flores as the only men to play for and coach a Super Bowl champion. Ditka said he’d cherish this ring more, while remaining in debt to franchise founder George S. Halas, the late Papa Bear, who coached the ’63 champions and who gave Ditka the chance to coach the Bears.

  William Perry dives for a one-yard touchdown that added controversy to Super Bowl XX.

  Cornerback Reggie Phillips charges in with a 28-yard interception for a touchdown.

  “What you do in life by yourself doesn’t mean as much as what you accomplish with a group of people,” Ditka said. “It’s because of Mr. Halas that I’m here. I’m just trying to pay some dues.”

  McMahon, whose antics in the week leading up to the game left him a marked man, responded with the sort of insouciant effectiveness that characterized his play all season. He completed 12 of 20 passes for 256 yards, setting up his own two touchdown runs and a third by Matt Suhey. “We could have got to 60 points, but we ran out of time,” McMahon said. “And I would like to have seen a goose egg up there for them.”

  Willie Gault caught four passes for 129 yards, and charismatic 308-pound rookie William Perry bulldozed through the dazed Pats for his fourth touchdown of the season in the third quarter. That score, though, ignited the game’s biggest controversy. Walter Payton, the proud face of the Bears franchise in some of its bleakest years, was denied an opportunity to score a Super Bowl touchdown. Payton led the Bears with 61 yards on 22 carries but failed to score.

  “I wanted to get Walter into the end zon
e,” Ditka insisted. “But our plays are designed to score, and I didn’t know who had the ball.”

  “I feel very sad for No. 34,” McMahon said.

  Hurt feelings aside, it’s a safe bet the Bears could have won without Payton and McMahon, so superior was their defense. They held the AFC champions to 123 total yards and 12 first downs, none in the first 25 minutes.

  The defense also contributed to the point barrage when rookie cornerback Reggie Phillips returned a third-quarter interception 28 yards for a touchdown. Defensive end Richard Dent, leader of the pass rush that sent Eason scurrying for cover, was voted the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player, but the Bears would have been just as happy if the award had gone to Buddy Ryan, architect of their fearsome defense.

  “Buddy is the MVP of our defense,” Singletary said. “He’s a step ahead of everybody else. If it wasn’t for him, what happened today wouldn’t have happened. He’s a real genius.”

  Singletary and his cohorts showed their appreciation at the final gun. As Ditka was being carried off the field, several defensive players hoisted Ryan to their shoulders and accorded him a similar tribute.

  “I can’t tell you how I feel about these guys,” Ryan said. “They started off terrible this year. They gave up 28 points in the first game and were ranked 25th in the league. But they kept working like dogs to get it done. They did everything they could to be No. 1. That’s what makes me so proud of these kids.

  “This is the best defense that I’ve ever been with, and I’ve been with some awful good ones.”

  Chicago 46, New England 10

  JAN. 26, 1986, AT THE SUPERDOME

  BOTTOM LINE

  46 points, ‘46’ defense add up to utter domination

  KEY PLAY

  William Perry’s third-quarter touchdown. Some of the Bears never forgave Mike Ditka for calling the Fridge’s number instead of Walter Payton’s from the 1-yard line.

  KEY STAT

  46–10. Total domination.

  Afterword

  After finishing my last reading of this book, I shut down my laptop, leaned back in my chair, stretched these creaky knees, and reflected on the Super Bowl Bears. Ah, yes, what a time it was. The magic came and left so quickly it seems maybe it never was here. But it was. Wasn’t it?

  Take my own roof. In 1986, six months after Super Bowl XX, workmen were doing some repairs up there—seems somebody was always hammering above—and I had a brainstorm: what if I put a sign there? The roof itself was very steep, too steep to stand on, but a worker had a roof ladder, the kind of ladder that has a piece that hooks over the peak and lays flat against the shingles. Before dusk I got a bucket of white house paint and a brush from the garage, climbed a regular ladder to the roof, clambered onto the roof ladder and sat there, looking out at the deserted Bears practice field and Halas Hall.

  From the players’ vantage point, my black roof would be a billboard staring them in the face, a “SEE ROCK CITY” barn along a Tennessee highway. I carefully pried off the lid of the gallon can and began to paint. I was bubbling with Super Bowl giddiness, like all Bears fans, and this is what I painted: “46–10.”

  I didn’t hear much from folks for a while—you had to be on the field to really notice, but from there it was like a neon sign in your eyeballs—until a year later Ditka saw me at a practice and said, “Could you get that damn score off your roof? We haven’t done crap.”

  He was mad because the Bears had lost the 1986 NFC playoff game to the Washington Redskins, and the Super Bowl score was a sharp stick in his side. It took a while, but I located the roof ladder again, maybe I called the worker who owned it, and I went back up on the roof. I painted a line through the 46–10 and painted, directly above it: “13–27,” the losing score of that Redskins playoff game. Another year went by, and the Bears lost in the playoffs again. To the Redskins.

  “Dammit!” Ditka said this time. “Get those scores off your roof! They’re killing me!”

  But here was the problem. The roof ladder was gone, the workmen were long gone, and I wasn’t interested in climbing onto those black shingles again, by any means. I could see myself tumbling off, being impaled on the fence below, ending a brief career with a bad obituary headline.

  “Coach, I’m sorry, I can’t get up there,” I said. “But you can do whatever you want.”

  Time went by. One day I heard a whirring noise, a bump on the roof. I went onto my deck. The Bears’ cherry-picker, the crane like contraption from which cameraman Mitch Friedman filmed practice, had been driven to the edge of Bears territory, tilted forward, and now somebody was leaning out, painting my roof with a long roller and black paint. The score was gone.

  After a few years the numerals started to creep out. Then, in 1993, Lake Forest was hit by a bad hailstorm, and the insurance company replaced my entire roof. In 1997 the Bears moved to new Halas Hall in another part of town, and that was that.

  What remains are the memories, the former players, and the coach—Ditka. If that 1985 season had all of the elements of the mythological journey—the leader with an outsized goal, the band of characters, the trek, the battles, the temporary failure (Miami), the wise old adviser (Landry), the internal strife (Buddy), the redemption, the goal achieved, the uncertainty after success—Ditka has become the embodiment of the adventure. He could have become a clown, a caricature, even a nobody. But he stayed in the public eye, being wise, being funny, being angry, being absurd, making contradictions, doing such things as saying he’s running for U.S. senator, making a movie, appearing on radio and TV, selling an erectile dysfunction drug, even coaching the woeful New Orleans Saints for a spell. “It’s funny,” he told me of that miscalculation, “but the Bears played our Super Bowl in New Orleans, and because of that I thought somehow I could make it Chicago down there.” Ricky Williams was going to be Ditka’s new Walter Payton. Wrong.

  Now people genuinely like old No. 89. Maybe love isn’t too strong a word. His V-hairdo and mustache are not just trademarks, they’re fun, they’re legend. Folks revere Ditka because he personifies things seemingly lost—guy-dom, the era before political correctness, old-time nasty football. But they also revere him because they can tell somewhere inside that huge, snarling carcass is a soft touch, a great big beating heart. In fact, more and more that kindness is right on the surface.

  “I eat quitters for breakfast and spit out the bones!” Ditka bellows in Kicking and Screaming. But he’s winking the whole time.

  Of course, he twitches with unfulfilled want. It’s as though he’s the biggest toddler in the world. It’s like he was built with attack mode only and a dial that goes to 12. He fidgets, he plays solitaire, he grumbles to himself, he plays golf in the wind, snow, sleet. Sharks rest more than he does, even at age 70. You look at Iron Mike, and you know what he should be doing forever is catching a pass across the short middle, seeking a collision with the tough-guy linebackers and maybe a couple safeties, if they want some.

  It was fitting that we spent so much time in his cigar bar over the years. “If people don’t like smoke, they don’t have to come,” he’d say, firing up a stogie. It’s perfect, because public smoking is now as vanished as the dodo. I never saw a dodo, but I miss those birds.

  I think of Ditka’s comments about Grabowskis and Smiths. Doug Smith, the Los Angeles Rams Pro Bowl center in 1985, told me back then, “My name’s been Smith all along, and I never associated it with white collar or conformity. I mean, they’re the ones making videos. We could make a video and there would be 50 sales—to our families.”

  He was right. The Bears were all kinds of things. Ditka himself was the Grabowski. And part of a Grabowski’s essence is being restless, always slightly teed-off, ever the self-perceived underdog. Ditka can make a comment, then later reverse himself, then crisscross it all like a foaming speedboat. Confront him with the wavy contradictions, and he’ll solve everything by spouting, “Well, you can kiss my ass!”

  Diana Ditka has seen it all. “Mike is just so hon
est,” she says. And honestly, aren’t we all contradictions like Mike? Isn’t that the appeal? No matter how deep-thinking we get, don’t we invariably come back to the caveman principal regarding life’s ambiguities: kick its ass before it kicks yours?

  A while back, my son and two buddies were sitting at our kitchen table, watching an NFL game on TV. I said to them, apropos of nothing, “So the entire continent of Europe takes on 11 mini-Ditkas in a game of football. Who wins?”

  “Easy, Mr. Telander,” said one boy, still polite, even as a teenager. “The mini-Ditkas.”

  “By how much?”

  “Two hundred thirty-seven to nothing.”

  “Correct,” I said.

  I recalled more Saturday Night Live “Super Fan” logic.

  “Ditka and God are sitting at a bar,” I said. “What are they talking about?”

  “Trick question!” the boys shouted in unison.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Ditka is God!”

  Whatever he is, you gotta believe he’s a treasure.

  —Rick Telander, July 2010

  Appendix: 1985 Game Statistics

  GAME 1

  SEPT. 8 at SOLDIER FIELD

  38

  BEARS 28

  BUCCANEERS

  TAMPA BAY 14 14 0 0 28

  BEARS 7 10 14 7 38

  FIRST QUARTER

  BUCS: Magee 1 pass from DeBerg (Igwebuike kick), 7:06.