The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (25 page)

The Indianapolis Colts didn’t stand a chance. They were the Bears’ next opponent, at Soldier Field, and they weren’t a very good team. And the Bears were seething. The final score was 17–10 Bears, but it wasn’t that close. Chicago had been leading 17–3, until the Colts scored on a 61-yard pass late in the fourth quarter. Other than that play, the Colts gained only 24 yards and made one first down in the second half. Walter Payton rushed for his ninth straight 100-yard game, extending his NFL record. And praise be! Jim McMahon played the entire game.

Next up were the New York Jets, a 10–4 team that featured long-haired and flaky defensive end Mark Gastineau, known for sacking quarterbacks and doing a spastic celebratory dance afterward. Ditka had called the Indianapolis win “ugly,” and the game against the Jets was no beauty, either. It was close until Kevin Butler made his third and fourth field goals of the game in the last four minutes. The Bears won 19–6. Everything seemed tainted since the Miami loss, but still, the fact was there: the Bears were a 14–1 team.

“By the end of the season if you said ‘Refrigerator,’ people didn’t think of a place to put food. They thought of a huge guy who ate food. That’s how famous he was.”

—Ditka on William Perry

There were so many great players
on that 1985 team, and I sometimes wish I could just tell the world how much they meant to me. Take Butthead. Kevin Butler was like one of the guys. You may say, so what? But kickers are often very unusual people. They’re guys who are hard to have conversations with. If you’re not careful, they’ll start crying or calling for their mother. That’s if you can even understand what in the hell they’re saying, because they’re usually from Austria or somewhere. But Butler was born in Savannah, Georgia, and he went out with the guys and par-tied and was a football player, the real deal. I liked him. Of course, maybe I wouldn’t have liked him so much if he couldn’t kick straight. But in that Jets game alone he had four field goals. Not real long ones, but needed ones. And he was automatic. Twelve points. Not bad.

William Perry was settling in, doing whatever we asked of him. People might have thought I was all over the map, using this kid like I was. But in the Jets game he picked up a fumble and ran with it seven yards. He may have looked like a barrel rolling across the floor, but he was moving pretty good, in my opinion. I’d already talked to the press about wanting him to run for a touchdown, catch a touchdown pass, and—here was the big one-throw a TD pass. It was fun, but here are two things. One, by doing that it made the other team have to prepare for him and maybe forget about what was really important. And two, I could have done the same thing with 10 other guys, but it wouldn’t have worked. It worked with William because he was a good enough athlete and a good enough person to handle it. By the end of the season if you said “Refrigerator,” people didn’t think of a place to put food. They thought of a huge guy who ate food. That’s how famous he was.

You think I was eccentric? You think I was intense? Hell, I remember coming back from a loss up in Minnesota when I was a rookie. Coach Halas got on the intercom at the front of the airplane and said, “You’re nothing but a bunch of c---s!” I think Michael McCaskey, his own grandson and president
of the team, once said I was a lot calmer than Halas.

I suppose I was a product of where I grew up and how I grew up. My dad was old school, absolutely. He was a former Marine. He never went to battle, but he was a Marine. He worked on a railroad that serviced J & L Steel in Aliquippa, which is one of the mill towns up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. My dad was a car repair man, a welder. A burner is what we called them. His dad was a burner, too, did the same thing.

Dad would come home, and his clothes always had holes in them from the sparks. He had burn marks on his hands and arms, but that’s what he did. He was self-taught. I think he went to the seventh grade, at most. But he could do any crossword puzzle I’ve ever seen. He had a great vocabulary, and with that limited education he became president of his union. Although he defended the workers, he wouldn’t defend somebody who wouldn’t work. You slept on the job? I got news for you. Pop Ditka was on your ass.

We are Ukranian. My father was born here, but his parents came over from the old country. People called us Polacks, mostly, or Hunkies. I don’t know why they couldn’t come up with Ukies. We weren’t a close family, and it was because my dad was tough. He was tough with my mom. And he was tough with me. He got on me hard, but he didn’t go after the other kids. I was the oldest, and I had two brothers and a sister. I was talking to my sister the other day, and I said, “Dad never touched you, did he?”

And she said, “One time when I was a sophomore or junior in high school I said something to him, and he slapped me.”

I said, “I never thought he slapped anyone but me.”

I know he never touched the other two boys. But he was rough with me and my mom. When you see that as a kid, it bothers you. But then in retrospect you understand that he was raised like that, and that’s what he knew. I blamed him for a lot. I didn’t like him, basically, until I went off to college and lived away from home. All of my buddies got to do stuff, but I could never be out past nine o’clock until high school. There was a reason why he did it, but I didn’t understand his motives until the end: he didn’t want me working in the mill. He wanted me to get an education. We kids were going to have a better life than he did.

It took a long time for that to sink in, to explain things to myself, but the more I understood, the better it got. At the end we used to talk a lot, and we had a great relationship even though it was from a distance. It’s like that song, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” by Harry Chapin. When I had time for him, he had no
time for me. When he had time for me, I had no time for him. That’s the sadness of getting old with your kids. You can’t go back and undo things. But, really, we went from being strangers to being friends by the end.

He died 11 years ago, at 80, while I was coaching in New Orleans. He had hardening of the arteries, and he was a four-packs-of-Lucky-Strikes-a-day guy from the time he was 12 until he quit cold turkey at age 59. Twenty-one years without a smoke, which was pretty good. And he used to go crazy when Diana would light up a cigarette in front of him. He’d shake his head and say, “I’d give anything to have one of those!”

“When I went nuts on teammates or players, it was only because winning was so important to me.”

—Ditka

I was the firstborn, and probably he was hardest on me for two reasons: because I was the oldest and because I deserved it more than the other ones. I had a knack for getting into stupid trouble. Nothing malicious. But if there was something stupid to do, I’d be one of the guys doing it, and I’d always end up getting blamed. I’ll give you an example.

One time me and my buddies went to the library during the holidays just to mess around. They had a Christmas tree up, and we stole a couple of ornaments. Why, I don’t know. We were dumb-ass kids. So we have these little glass ornaments, those colored balls, and we’re running down the street playing catch with them, throwing them back and forth. You know how light they are, and the wind is blowing. So I throw one, and the wind catches it, and it hits a kid right above his eye. I hit him pretty good. The glass shatters, and he’s cut, and there’s blood pouring down his face, and he freaks out. He has to get about six stitches.

Me, I have to go to school and tell the nun what happened, and she beats the crap out of me with a ruler. Then I have to go home and tell Dad, and he beats the crap out of me. That’s the way it was. I got my butt beat a lot. Now the nuns, maybe they were mean. But I think it was their job to teach you discipline and order, and they didn’t allow any messing around. The ones I had, anyway.

Did beating me make me change as a person? No. But it taught me to fear doing something wrong. If you’re afraid to do something wrong, you’ll avoid it because you don’t want your ass whupped. Funny thing is, as a coach I don’t believe in it. I know the nuns did, and my dad did, but I don’t. I believe that if you’re fair with people, you’re up front with them, you talk to them, it’s better than force. Still, the only way they deterred me from doing even stupider things as a kid was by punishment.

When I went nuts on teammates or players, it was only because winning was so important to me. I got on some guys pretty bad at Pitt, for instance, and I’m not proud of that. But I really couldn’t think of another way. I couldn’t do it Landry’s way. Of course, I didn’t know Landry back then. Even Lombardi couldn’t have been like Landry. Lombardi was Lombardi. I was myself.