The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (2 page)

Sometimes I would stand next to the fence and watch wide receiver Willie Gault sprint effortlessly after seemingly far-overthrown passes from McMahon and gracefully pull them in. Sometimes I’d watch the boring recognition drills conducted for the defensive unit by the taciturn Buddy Ryan. At the end of certain practices the Bears would work on their two-minute drill—a loud, frantic blend of chaos and creativity that often ended with kicker Bob Thomas drilling a hurried field goal that would arch over the antique goalpost, soar above the chicken wire that hung uselessly from rusting poles above the
fence, and bounce off the roof of my house.

Some of those balls the Bears managers were able to find. Some stayed in my yard for, well… let’s just say a few of them still haven’t been returned.

I ran into Ditka a few times, sometimes after practices when I’d simply walk through a hole in the fence and have a chat with a player like Payton or Gary Fencik or, in years to come, new-draftee Jim Harbaugh. Indeed, it was Harbaugh who looked at my house and asked if I’d be willing to sell it. “Man, I could wake up, walk across the field, and be there for the meetings in two minutes,” Harbaugh would say wistfully. I pondered a deal. Maybe I could gouge the first-round pick. But where would we move?

Like most writers, I didn’t get too close to the head coach. Ditka was intimidating. He was in his mid-40s and except for the bad-hip, bad-foot hobble, looked like he could catch and crush the typical journalist with one paw. I have a photo of him holding my third baby, Robin, in his arms in 1988, tickling her under the chin, seated in the empty wooden bleachers next to the field. He was always civil enough, and always ready to sign autograph hounds’ souvenirs, but he was…Ditka.

“We call him ‘Sybil,’” Jim McMahon would write in his biography,
McMahon,
“after the girl in that movie. You know, the one who had all those different personalities? Mike will be calm one minute, then throw a clipboard the next. People don’t understand that, but we do. The players figure he’s just going from one stage to another. He’s merely ‘Sybilizing.’”

One summer a few years later workmen were at our house, adding a new bedroom and putting skylights in the two second-floor bathrooms. One of the carpenters was sitting on the exposed rafters of the open roof, looking down at the field and the practice session below. I knew he was a Bears fan, and I could hear him yell at Ditka—something about how stupid it was to trade away safety Dave Duerson. I heard muffled yelling, and then the carpenter came swinging down fast from his perch, looking terrified. What happened?

“Ditka yelled at me,” he said, pale as drywall.

What did he yell?

“‘Use your hammer, not your mouth, jackass!’” While writing this book I took a break to see
the soccer comedy movie,
Kicking and Screaming,
starring Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall as kiddie coaches and Ditka as—of course—himself. Enlisted by Ferrell as his assistant, the cigar-chomping Ditka screams on the first day to the assembled 10-year-olds: “I’m not just coaching soccer, I’M BUILDING MEN!”

This guy wasn’t like Vince Lombardi or Landry or Chuck Noll or Joe Gibbs. Well, maybe there was a bit of Lombardi fury in him. But Ditka was unique. Unlike many high-profile coaches, he had been a great player. He was high-strung and ornery, unpredictable as a weather vane, and no one had ever considered him a brilliant tactician. But then, his actions were so loud and dramatic nobody much looked at his tactics. He had made so many impetuous mistakes in his life—in judgment, in execution, in choice—that he seemed to be constantly recreating himself out of penance or disgust or boredom into a new, more considerate, more actualized form of human. But through it all he pretty much stayed the same, and he always seemed able to grin at himself.

In his 1992 book,
Monster of the Midway,
Armen Keteyian wrote that Ditka “is some sort of cultural aberration—at once the best and worst his town [Chicago] has produced.” It is true Ditka has always carried the positives and the negatives of intense desire with him like twin briefcases, one in each hand. But if he seemed dangerous and threatening long ago, time has softened those ridges. He now is, without argument, Mr. Bear. He has pointedly stayed in Chicago after his football career. (Unlike, for instance, Butkus.) Please forget that brief nonsense down there as the New Orleans Saints head coach. (Lord, who else but Ditka would pose for a magazine cover as the groom in a wedding photo with Saints bride/tailback Ricky Williams?)

Ditka has a looming presence that shocks people who stumble into his path. No one could possibly mistake him for anyone but who he is. That head, that brow, those eyes, that walk, that mustache.

Twenty-five years have gone by since the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl. In 1984, my first year in the neighborhood, they showed promise. They beat the evil Los Angeles Raiders for one thing, and they finished a surprising 10–6. They even won a playoff game, the first Bears team to do
so in more than two decades.

Then in 1985, not only did they make it to Super Bowl XX, they snatched the champion’s mantle and toyed with it and danced on its fabric like maniacs. It was Ditka’s pinnacle. It was his fulfilled team. At its crescendo, that 1985 squad was, almost without question, the best NFL team ever. And it was the first to have larger-than-life characters sprinkled throughout. Quasi-nutcases, some. Or maybe it was just the first to have the media appreciate those characters, dissect them, revel in them, despise them, adore them—starting with the head coach. It was a sitcom played out for our entertainment.

I was next door during all of it—except when I was on the road observing the team—stunned like everyone else. To sit down two and a half decades later and have the man himself reflect on the journey has been entertaining, to say the least. We did most of the tapings in Ditka’s own restaurant on—where else—Mike Ditka Way, in downtown Chicago. Some we did in the lounge at Bob-o-Link Golf Club in Highland Park, Ditka’s home away from home. The tapes are littered with nightclub noises, plates crashing, vacuum cleaners roaring, toasts being proposed, the voices of autograph hounds, singing by impassioned Sinatra devotee John Vincent, wild laughter, shrieking, horrible jokes, pointless digressions, Ditka occasionally bellowing above the din, “Knock it off!” and they are, as you might guess, remarkable.

I couldn’t bring Da Coach live to everybody’s doorstep. But I captured his thoughts on that classic journey of yore, the one that seems so recent yet recedes daily like a plume of blue cigar smoke over an old oaken bar.

Bon voyage!

—Rick Telander, July 2010

The crowd was huge, half a million strong, and the plumes of condensed breath that came from the multitude of cheering mouths dissipated instantly in the stiff breeze.
It was January 27, 1986, and downtown Chicago was frozen like a block of dry ice. The temperature was 8 degrees, with a windchill of 25 below zero. But the adoring masses were out to greet the returning heroes, direct from New Orleans, weather be damned. People barked like rabid dogs. They pounded their mittened hands in joy.

Less than 24 hours earlier the Bears had destroyed the New England Patriots in the Superdome 46–10, the largest margin of victory in any Super Bowl to that date. It wasn’t a whipping; it was a humiliation. Consider, for instance, that starting Pats quarterback Tony Eason played all the way into the third quarter yet did not complete a pass.

“If I could crawl out of here,” said Patriots linebacker Steve Nelson after the final whistle, “I would.”

And the long-starved city of Chicago loved it. Bully for the bullies! On this manic Monday, Mike Ditka rose up through the sunroof of the limousine carrying him in the now-halted victory parade along LaSalle Street. There were hands to shake, supplicants to bless. His army of pilgrims was there, smiling and begging.

I stood up and, believe me, I wasn’t hanging out there long.
I was in a coat and tie and shades, and it was colder than frozen snot. I’d slept a little the night before, but not a whole lot. There was champagne that had to be drunk, and there was a team party. I did some TV show first thing in New Orleans when I got up—can’t remember,
Good Morning America
or
The Today Show
or something—and then we got on the plane and there we were. All those people, and it was really, really cold. It was impressive. It would have been impressive if it had been 80 degrees out, but 25 below? It showed what our team meant to the city of Chicago. To all the Grabowskis.

“See, Grabowski is the name I came up with for the players on our team, and it fit Chicago.”

—Ditka

See, Grabowski is the name I came up with for the players on our team, and it fit Chicago. I grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a work-ethic community, where guys went to work with their lunch buckets, did their jobs, and came home with empty lunch buckets. So when we got ready for that second playoff game against the Los Angeles Rams, I said, “We’re the Grabowskis, they’re the Smiths.” I didn’t mean anything negative about race or nationality or any of that stuff. It’s that we represented Chicago, a work-ethic place. It’s just a name I pulled up. A Polish name. It could have been Jim Grabowski, it could have been Tom Grabowski. Hell, it could have been Tinker Bell Grabowski. It symbolized that we were the hard-hat guys. The other guys ride in limos. We ride in trucks.

Of course, there I was in a limo. But like I said, I was freezing my butt off, or at least the part of my body sticking out of the roof. We were all supposed to be in limos, 34 of them, but it was so cold that day, even with the sun shining bright, that most of the players were told to stay in the buses. I don’t think they minded.

Some of the guys, like Super Bowl MVP Richard Dent, weren’t with us. They were already flying to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. But I knew what Dent had said the night before: “If we’re not one of the best teams of all time, I’d like to see the others.”

Bears coaches Johnny Roland, Ed Hughes, and Mike Ditka at work during win No. 1 against Tampa Bay.

Yeah, that got right to it. We finished 18–1. Fourteen times we held opponents to 10 points or less. We led the league in takeaways, yards given up, all kinds of stuff. Hell, 24 Bears players scored.

Me, I couldn’t believe where I was. Mr. Halas had given me a chance. I don’t think anybody else would have. There were people right in the Bears organization who didn’t want me there, who thought I was the stupidest hire of all time. But Papa Bear had the say-so—he started the NFL!—and he gave me the job. I desperately wished he hadn’t died two years before, so he could see me, see how I and the team had repaid him for his trust. Because this really was about a team, a group of guys who were kind of misfits who all fit together for that one time.

But, man, the cold! It was crazy.

And there I was, a Grabowski in a limo.