The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (23 page)

The Bears horse-whipped the lowly Atlanta Falcons 36–0 the next week. It was more of the same. More defense. More Payton. More McMahon still out with injuries—mainly that bad shoulder. Indeed, rumors from Halas Hall were that McMahon might be done for the season. The Fridge got himself an airborne one-yard touchdown dive in the blowout, a move he said he copied after further studying Payton’s leaping heroics. According to the
Sun-Times,
Perry’s self-launch to paydirt “alarmed both air traffic controllers and earthquake monitors.”

Ditka was amused and a little awestruck himself by the carnage. “They must have felt like it was Sherman’s army marching through them,” he said of the Atlantans. Even third-string Bears quarterback Mike Tomczak got some quality minutes in the rout.

“I used to play the game, and I remembered what it was like when the Old Man fined me. That really bothered me!”

—Ditka on fining McMahon

The Bears were playing at a level never seen in the NFL. The “46” defense looked like a single wave of attackers storming a straw hut. Mike Singletary was outraged when he learned Atlanta running back Gerald Riggs had gained 100 yards, the first 100-yard game given up by the defense since the opener against Tampa Bay, when James Wilder got 166. “You have to understand Mike,” Ditka said. “And his pride.”

Now the obvious challenge for the Bears was to go without a loss. Standing in the way of the 12–0 team was this week’s opponent, the Miami Dolphins. The game was to be at the Orange Bowl, the Dolphins’ home field, where coach Don Shula and his young genius quarterback Dan Marino ruled. Indeed, the Dolphins had won 17 of their last 18 games in the always-jammed, old-fashioned, humid and palm tree-dotted arena. It was a fitting matchup, because it was Shula’s 1972 Dolphins who were the only team in NFL history to go undefeated, including winning the Super Bowl. That 1972 team had a curious parallel to the Bears’ 1985 team in that in the previous season the Dolphins had marched all of the way to the Super Bowl, only to lose. Those 1971 Dolphins had lost 24–3 to the Dallas Cowboys, who featured a tight end named Mike Ditka.

“We got beat, and we didn’t like it,” then-Miami quarterback Bob Griese said later. “So really our season started with a loss the year before.” Same with the Bears. Their 23–0 spanking in the 1984 NFC Championship Game had festered badly. At the end of the Bears’ 44–0 demolition of the Cowboys two weeks earlier, inflamed and single-minded middle-linebacker/preacher Mike Singletary had turned to the Texas crowd and screamed, “Don’t leave! I want witnesses!”

Going undefeated in the NFL wasn’t just hard. It was a transcendent goal; maybe, with the extended schedule, impossible. The 1972 Dolphins had finished 17–0. Prior to Super Bowl play, NFL teams only played a maximum of 13 games, final game included. Now the Bears would have to go 19–0—16 regular-season wins and three playoff wins—to achieve perfection. That didn’t stop Bears analysts from crowing. A headline above
Sun-Times
football writer Kevin Lamb’s column said, “If Stats Don’t Lie, It’s Bears By 40.”

Stats weren’t going to mean much in this face-off on national TV, again an ABC
Monday Night
spectacular. This would be about intangibles, luck, bounces. The Bears were well on their way to being the first team since those undefeated 1972 Dolphins to lead the NFL in points scored and fewest points allowed. They were ahead of everyone by 40 offensively and 45 defensively. In the last four games they had outscored their opponents 120–13. The average score of their last three games—all quarterbacked by Steve Fuller—was a ridiculous, 35–1. Still…

The contest would be the highest rated for
Monday Night Football,
ever. Even to this day. Everybody tuned in to see the battle, to see these barking dogs, this high-wire act, this invading horde, and the obstacle in front of them.

McMahon is still hurt,
but I’m used to it now. He makes a crack about how he needs to play so he can make some money on his incentives, so he can pay all the fines I’ve laid on him. I don’t know about that. If I fined anybody that year, it was minimal. Really minimal. I had rules, but they weren’t much. I probably had a double standard for some guys. But I don’t remember fining many guys that year. I hated to take their money. I used to play the game, and I remembered what it was like when the Old Man fined me. That really bothered me! In retrospect, yeah, I deserved it. But it pissed me off.

In a sense, there’s no question I was too compassionate toward the players. Not the coaches, maybe…but the players. I know later on I kept guys too long, after they were done. But I couldn’t help it. I always remembered being a player, how your life was in the hands of the coach.

We’re traveling to Miami and not much of this is on my mind, because all I’m thinking of is what a great coach Don Shula is and what a great passer Marino is. Still, I knew we had a team that was incredible.

We get to the Orange Bowl, and the crowd is at a fever pitch. That’s fine. Cops have German Shepherds on leashes. We’re used to noise and craziness by now. It was humid but not hot, because this is already the beginning of December. Somebody has told me we’ve lost our last eight
Monday Night
games when we’re on the road. Yeah? Screw ’em. Screw those statistics, all of it. This isn’t a pinball game. This is football.

But something is wrong with this night. The Dolphins are having Marino roll away from Dent, which is smart, but we can’t get to him with the other guys. They’re using little wide receiver Nat Moore like a tight end, putting him in the slot and putting him in motion. We’ve seen three-receiver sets, but this has three wideouts and no true tight
end. So we have to cover Moore with a linebacker like Wilbur Marshall or, after a while, we moved Fencik up in man-to-man, but he’s more of a deep safety, and that’s not a good matchup, either.

Now, Dent is an impact player. He should be in the Hall of Fame, no question about it. He was the 203rd player taken in the 1983 draft out of dinky Tennessee State, and he was skinny and raw and hadn’t played against anybody. But he worked his ass off, bulked up, used his athleticism. I kidded him, calling him Robert, but that was just because he wanted more money, more publicity, and I was messing with him. But he was the real deal, a great pass-rushing defensive end.

Thing was, in this game Marino stayed away from him. Marino did his half-rollouts to stay away, and he had that quick release. A quick-draw gunslinger’s gun. The problem is, Dent can’t do anything, because he’s got to go 15 yards or more to get to Marino, and we’re asking our linebackers, guys who are used to going straight ahead, to drop back in coverage. We should have gone to a nickel. Five defensive backs. They’re running what is essentially a third-down-and-long formation a whole lot of the time. They hadn’t shown that before. Not throughout an entire game. And we didn’t adjust. Sure, it was more complicated than that, but that was at the root of it.

Steve Fuller was doing what he could on offense. He never worried about his limitations, he never worried about being a star, about notoriety, none of it. He was a true team player, and he had confidence, because he’d had early success with the Kansas City Chiefs. He planned and prepared like nobody else. He was very smart—he was a Rhodes Scholar candidate at Clemson—and he’s made a great success in real estate down in South Carolina since his football career ended. I never looked at him as just a backup, but, still, it was McMahon, the rebel grenade, who could do the genius things. And he was on the bench.

Miami got lucky, too. They blocked a punt by Maury Buford and recovered it at our 6. They even had a horseshit pass that Hampton deflected, and it should have been intercepted, but it went way up in the air, and damned if their toothpick wideout Mark Clayton didn’t catch it for a long score. But that wasn’t what pissed me off.

No, I was mad at Buddy. Look, what we’re doing on defense isn’t working. So let’s adapt! Wilbur Marshall is one of the best athletes I’ve seen, but don’t ask him to cover wide receivers 30 yards downfield. We should have gone to a straight nickel. Rush four linemen, use two linebackers, and have the five DBs cover. Maybe the problem was who do you take out? It might have
hurt somebody’s ego. Maybe Buddy’s. Otis Wilson is a good linebacker, but why didn’t we put Reggie Phillips in there in the nickel? If you’re not flexible to make adjustments, to change what’s not working, you’ll never win. The “46” had been ungodly up until this game. But we needed to fine-tune it. Right now! You have to give your players the best chance to win. You can’t handicap them. If the tanks are getting blown up, come in with the Air Force. That’s all I was saying.

So we come in at halftime, down 31–10. We’ve given up more points in two quarters than we had in the last six entire games! Goddamn, I was furious. Later, people would say I was doing too much off-field stuff, commercials and TV shows and what have you, that I wasn’t paying attention to the store. That was bull. My mind was always on the goal.

I go up to Buddy and I start screaming at him. “What are you doing out there? We have to run the nickel! Let’s blitz the shit out of them!” He yells back at me, and now we’ve got a pissing match. We’re pushing and yelling, and the players are there, and it’s not a good thing. It’s pretty ugly. Players separate us, and we move apart. I try to calm down. Football is a tense game. I’ve seen two assistants go at it. But not a head coach and a coordinator. All I’m trying to get across is that you don’t let your men get beat just because you won’t combat what the other side is doing. I’ll go to my grave believing that.

I think Buddy and I resolved the conflict before the half ended. And I think I apologized to him after the game. At any rate, Fuller got hurt in the fourth quarter, so I put McMahon in the game, hoping that maybe he could do stuff just like in that first Minnesota game. But it wasn’t there. He had no magic under his hat. He got sacked a couple times and threw an interception. We lost 38–24, and it stunk.

The only good thing that happened was I kept Walter in at the end, handing him the ball so he could get 100 yards. He got 121, his eighth straight 100-yard game, an NFL record. I wanted him to beat that
Monday Night
TV guy, O.J. Simpson, who had been tied with him at seven. Simpson was always second-guessing us. So now he could second-guess Payton’s record.

They told me Fridge’s new McDonald’s ad had debuted at halftime of the
Monday Night
game. Swell.

Nobody is invincible. And nobody that season was undefeated. Not even us, the mighty Bears.

We had to regroup.