Rich Cohen - Monsters: the 1985 Chicago Bears and the wild heart of football

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FOR MY OLD MAN,

who never told me what to love but did show me how

And none of the other men

failed to protect him; they all held their shields out in front

and lifted him up and carried him out of the fighting

to the horses waiting for him at the rear of the battle

with their charioteer and handsome, bronze-inlaid car;

and they brought him, groaning with pain, back toward the city.

But when they came to the ford of the swirling Xanthus,

they lifted him out, laid him upon the ground,

splashed water over his face, and he came to

and opened his eyes and got onto his knees

and coughed up dark blood, then sank back to earth, and night

covered his eyes, for the mighty blow still overwhelmed him.

Homer, Iliad (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

but the way I got spun around and nailed in the side by a helmet right where I was vulnerable well, I knew I was in big trouble. I was rasping, croaking when I got back to the huddle. I called an audible designed for Willie Gault, but when I threw the ball, he wasnt there. It got picked off. Willie had a good reason for not being where I thought hed be. I couldnt hear you, Mac, he said. Are you hurting? Was I ever. I told Steve Fuller to be ready. Eventually, I couldnt take it any longer. I went in and tried to urinate. Like grape juice. I was bleeding internally. I jumped right in the shower. I must have stayed there for an hour, because I knew where I was going, I wouldnt shower for a week. I was headed to the hospital for a prolonged visit.

Whats the score? I asked the ambulance driver on the way.

Youre up 176 in the fourth quarter, he said.

Its the one thing that made me feel good.

Jim McMahon, McMahon! The Bare Truth About Chicagos Brashest Bear

CONTENTS

THE SUPER BOWL SHUFFLE

In the winter of 1986, in a manner I wont bother to go into, I came into possession of two tickets to Super Bowl XX. The Chicago Bears, the Monsters of the Midway, would play the New England Patriots in the Superdome in New Orleans. I was a senior in high school and this was my first great Chicago team, the Bears having last won a title in 1963, half a decade before I was born. The Chicago Cubs had last taken the World Series in 1908, when my Grandpa Morris was walking behind a mule in Poland.

Id gotten permission to miss school to attend the game on the ruse that this would in fact be an informational visit to Tulane University with a side tripbecause Ill be there anywayto the Super Bowl. But I found it impossible to secure passage. It seemed as if half the city, experiencing the once-in-a-generation delirium of victory, was heading south. Every seat on every flight was sold, as was every seat on every train. When my parents refused to let me drive, I toyed with the idea of running away, lighting out, thumbing it. At the last moment, salvation came via a woman in my mothers office, who knew some fans who had chartered a planethey called it the Winged Bearfor the trip to New Orleans. There were still a few seats in the main cabin, which is how my friend Matt Lederer and I came to leave for OHare airport in our Jim McMahon jerseys. Im not sure what I expected: a Learjet with a dozen North Side business types, perhaps, or a DC-3 filled with a football-loving Boy Scout troop. We instead found ourselves seated in a tired L-1011, with a Kodiak bear painted on the tail, the rows packed with a few hundred fans of the cartoon variety: huge beer-swilling South Siders with the sort of mustaches that suggest virility. Every one of them wore either a team jersey or the type of Bears sweater-vest favored by Coach Mike Ditka. The seats were as stuffed as the knishes at Mannys deli near Maxwell Street. Beers were distributedMickeys, Budweiser, Schlitzand the nasal voices rang with Were gonna murder em guarantees. It was 4:00 p.m., and some of these men had been drinking for six hours.

The flight attendants, in orange-and-blue aprons, got us seated for takeoff, but the big fat men started unbuckling soon after. They wandered in the aisles, slurring and prophesying. One made his way to the lavatory as the plane was in steep ascent. It was like watching a ball roll up Mount Everest. A stewardess ordered him back to his seat. Lady, he said, Im full of sausage and beer. Its out of the way, or a big mess. Footballs were taken out of bags and spirals went zipping across the cabin. Several people were hit in the head midsentence or midbeer. A punt banged off an emergency-door handle. I envisioned the headline: BEERY BEARS FANS SUCKED TO TRAGIC DOOM .

Free-for-all gave way to pandemonium: three hundred Chicagoans blowing off decades of frustration. It was beautiful and terrifying. The pilot issued a warning. When this was ignored, he came out of his cockpit in the stern way of a parent but was driven back by a shower of empties. The rabble were led by a handful of guys from Bridgeport and Pullman. If you could morph their faces into a single face, it would be big and pink and filled with mischievous joy. They stood through the landing and sang as we touched down. Some fell in the aisles. If this were England, these would have been hooligans, but these were Chicagoans, too good-natured to plunder. As I exited the plane, I was not surprised to see the cops. A flight attendant whispered in the ear of a sergeant, pointing out the instigators, who were taken aside and cuffed.

The last image I had of these men was enormous backs, heaving with exertion, in Ditka and Butkus jerseys as they were led away. It burned into my retinas: to travel all the way to Jerusalem only to be taken into custody on the steps of the Temple. As a result, I approached the game through a veil of tearsthe tears of drunken superfans arrested days before the coin toss. The arrested men never left my thoughts. I admired their commitment. They had come to express the nature of their city but never made it to baggage claim. They spent days in jail, the poor bastards. Who were they? The unknown tailgaters and bratwurst eaters, the mustache combers, the last of the old-timers, the aluminum-siding boys, the bungalow dwellers, the masses from the Back of the Yards, the pub rats and union goons. These were the real fans. Theyd put in the years and suffered the humiliations and packed on the pounds and cursed the fates in a way that I never could, coming from a cozy North Shore suburb on the lakeGlencoe, if youre keeping score at home.

The 85 Bears developed a special bond with all their fans but most powerfully with the sort I had seen taken away. It was not just that they wonthey went 15 and 1 in the regular seasonbut how they did it. With personality, style. This was the team of The Super Bowl Shufflea song released earlier that season by several of the players, it expressed their confidence in ultimate victoryand it was made of characters. Like the Beatles, there was a Bear for every sort of fan: Jim McMahon, the Punky QB, for the cocky daredevils. Walter Payton, Sweetness, the great running back, for the aficionados. William Perry, the Fridge, the gap-toothed 325-pounder, for big tall men. Dan Hampton, Danimal, the ferocious defensive tackle, for band geeks filled with secret violence. Mike Ditka, the coach who actually looked like a bear, for lovers of Patton-like rhetoric and the military boot. The offense was good but the defense was vicious: the famed 46, a concussion machine that swarmed and confused and beat other teams bloody.