The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (34 page)

The thing is our defense hadn’t been scored on in the playoffs, and to say we were confident was an understatement. Still, you don’t know. You don’t know. You just don’t know. The clock would not move.

After what seemed like years, the game finally started. Actually, it almost began, and then it was delayed a little bit because of too much smoke from the fireworks inside the Superdome or something. Noise, screaming, cameras everywhere. Everybody was uptight. Even McMahon. We got the ball, and on the second play Jim called the wrong formation on a weak-side slant, and Walter got hit just when he was getting the ball and fumbled. The Patriots recovered at our 19-yard line. Oh, this is a great way to start. This is perfect.

McMahon had had his butt shot up by team doctor Clarence Fossier, probably with novocaine and a little cortisone in there. He also was wearing gloves. Indoors. Help me. He told me he was going to do that. He’d worn them in the last two games, which were cold as can be, but here it’s 72 degrees, maybe hotter. I said, “Is that the right thing to do?”

“I get a better grip on the ball,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Do whatever you want.”

But when he came to the sideline now, I said, “What are you doing?”

“I messed up,” he said. “I called the wrong formation.”

When he called a Slant 24, it should have gone left to the weak side, instead of to the right. Maybe he got confused for an instant by the numbers, because, see, I numbered even to the left and odd to the right, which nobody else does. That was from Coach Landry….

But this is the thing—our defense didn’t let New England move forward an inch after the turnover, not a single inch, and they had to settle for a field goal from the same spot. Talk about character. We had become a whole.

And the rout was on.

We scored the next 44 points. It was an ass-whipping. Plain and simple. Everything we knew we could do, we did. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of a game plan in my life. They keyed on Walter like we thought they would, and so we used him in motion or flanked him or used him as a decoy and let Suhey carry the ball. We hit them with so many missiles it was unreal. The first time we got the ball back, we hit them with a 43-yard pass to Gault. I wasn’t going to play it tight. I knew going in this was balls to the wall.

Butler had two field goals early, then Suhey scored on an 11-yard run. It was only 23–3 at the half, but we were killing them. They had minus-14 yards of total offense for the half. We were making them go backward.

In the third quarter we scored two touchdowns to make it 37–3. Then we had the ball at their 1, and I sent in Fridge. He plowed it over to make the score 44–3. I’d already put him in to block once and also to pass. That didn’t work, and he got tackled while still looking to throw. He is probably the heaviest man ever to be sacked.

Tony Eason, I’m not blaming him, but I think our defense was so relentless that he got shell-shocked. I think he started looking for the rush, for who was going to earhole him or hit his back or his knees or slam him, and he couldn’t concentrate on routes or receivers. I mean, wow, he did not complete a single pass in the game. He was zero-for-eight, oh for the Super Bowl. Steve Grogan came in later, but it was history. We annihilated the Patriots 46–10. Richard Dent was the MVP, and that was a great choice. He represented that incredible defense.

McMahon played well after that first series, with two touchdown runs and 256 yards passing. He wore all of these headbands, too, looked like a street sign, but he was very clever about it. One said “Plato” or “Pluto” or something like that, for a friend of his, one was for juvenile diabetes, and one said “POW-MIA” for the war veterans. Not that I was watching his forehead. But this, I found out later, was famous stuff. This was what got the media excited.

When it was over, when the final second ran off, I felt this incredible sense of relief. The hype and the buildup had been so huge that I just felt totally drained. I didn’t even notice the guys coming to pick me up. Some players grabbed Buddy and hoisted him up, and two guys got me. Looking at photos now, I see it was McMichael with my right leg and Fridge with my left. It scared me a bit, to tell you the truth. I’d never been lifted like that before. My hips and legs aren’t in mint condition, you know. But it was a great feeling, too. Two defensive players were picking me up, although Fridge was part of the offense, too, of course. As I recall, they were very gentle.

“Life is fragile. You never know. My buddy and teammate Joe Marconi died young. You wonder why some go and some stay.”

—Ditka

I was glad I got to have some fun with William Perry. I did the stuff with him, because he was a good player and I liked him. I was going to have him run for a touchdown, catch one, and throw one. It almost worked. I probably would have let him kick a field goal, too. Nah, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have let Walter kick one. There were limits. People said I told William, “I made you a hero,” but I never said that. We just had a good time, that’s all.

But what I realized after the game, after we were champions, 18–1, and bigshots of the day, was that Walter Payton didn’t score in the game. And that bothered him. And because it bothered him, it bothered me. McMahon had two short TD runs. Perry had one. Suhey had one. Walter had none. I didn’t plan that. That put a damper on things later. I asked Walter, and he said it didn’t bother him, but it did. I regret not giving him that honor. But we had a game plan, and he was the whole reason it worked, because wherever he went, the Patriots defense went. Later I explained this to him. I don’t think he ever accepted it totally.

The other thing I regret is Les Frazier blowing out his knee on a reverse on a punt return. He was a defensive back and used to running backward. Now he’s carrying the ball, going forward? I love Steve Kazor, our special teams coach, but I don’t know if that all was necessary. It was a freak thing, but Les was never really the same afterward.

I mean, think about it. A bench kid named Keith Ortego—a guy wearing my No. 89, by the way—signals a fair catch and then grabs the ball and runs and hands off to Les. There’s a penalty flag, and the play doesn’t even count. Frazier was one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL, and he’ll never get credit for it, because he didn’t have a long career, and he wasn’t a showboat like Deion Sanders. And at his highest peak, at our moment of glory, he goes down like that. I guess that’s football.

Life is fragile. You never know. My buddy and teammate Joe Marconi died young. You wonder why some go and some stay. Why do things happen? It was so good for Marconi, then boom—dead at 54. Everybody knows about the tragedy of Brian Piccolo. And I am always haunted by Farrington
and Galimore in that crash.

You have to appreciate things at the moment and never stop trying to achieve what you want. A while back I read that a guy I played against, Jim Otto, had his leg amputated. He never missed a game in 15 years, but he’s had over 50 major surgeries because of his injuries, and he has so many artificial joints that his body’s immunity to infection is about gone. It’s a tragedy. It’s like old George Connor of the Bears who went through stuff like that.

Jim Otto was a warrior. Back then we played hurt. Sports medicine sure wasn’t what it is now. And you didn’t want to have your job taken from you, the way Wally Pipp got his taken by Lou Gehrig. See, you get in the starting blocks and you run the race. That’s what you do. That’s what George Connor did. That’s life. You can’t rewrite things as you go along. You have to go straight ahead on the path you’ve chosen, with all your might. Who is Jim Otto? All those things. That’s who he is.

And yet I’m working on getting a better shake from the NFL for the retired veterans. A lot of them, more each day, are in bad shape. The dementia from brain trauma is without a doubt the worst problem. And the guys without money suffer the most.

Me, I wouldn’t change anything. I had that groin problem, and they shot me up all the time with cortisone back in the day, so deep it went to my hip socket, and I think that’s why my hip wore out. They say you should get cortisone a couple times a year, tops, and I was getting two or three shots a week. And the dislocated foot I got when a guy fell on it back in the early 1960s, that caused a lot of other things to go. I remember Dr. Fox, the old Bears doctor, put it in a cast in training camp. But I’m “Iron Mike,” so I’m out dancing every night. He takes the cast off after a month and he says, “That doesn’t look very good.” I take a step and fall down.

I don’t think he did anything. I don’t think he did anything but put a cast on it. Later a doctor said he could fix my foot, but he’d have to break about eight bones to do it. And I played the whole season on it. Never got it fixed. Fox is the guy who messed up Dick Butkus’s leg, too. But I loved the guy. What the hell, I don’t know. You didn’t sue medical people back then. I sure wasn’t going to. You’re the player. He’s the doctor. Play ball.

I was sorry about Todd Bell and Al Harris not being part of that Super Bowl season. But they got bad advice. In life, that happens. And it was true that Richard Dent was underpaid at $90,000. And he should be in the Hall of Fame, and I think he will be. But where else was he going to make that kind of money? And whether I’m right or wrong, this is about team. And we were a team. Who knows what would have happened if you go back and change a thing here or a thing there? Maybe if
Todd and Al had been on the team we wouldn’t have won. That’s why you do what you feel you have to do, with what you’ve got.

It’s cold and it’s cruel, this life. But it’s great, too. It’s all there together.

Take that movie I was in. There I am playing myself, smoking a cigar, and who’s next to me? Why, it’s Will Ferrell, one of the funniest guys in the world. He came to my bar one night and he did the greatest Harry Caray you’ve ever heard. Diana and I were dying. And who’s on the other side? Why, it’s Robert Duvall, who may be a better actor even than Robert DeNiro. Why me with these guys? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

• • • • •

So there we were, champions of the world. Maybe I thought about luck a little when I popped my head up through the sunroof of that limo, there in downtown Chicago. How lucky I’ve been. But damn, it was cold. Beautiful, in a frozen way. What a place for a parade, especially one that wasn’t moving.

I hadn’t slept much, but that wind was a nice slap to the face. All those thousands and thousands of people cheering. It was wonderful. And yet, on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after we won, the space shuttle blew up. That put things in perspective. We didn’t visit the White House like we were supposed to because of that. We were about the only winning Super Bowl team that never got to do that.

But for one moment in time, one fleeting second, we were the best in the world. In that moment we were the best of all, because we had beaten down our opponents, fair and square. And if you don’t play to beat the best, to beat them all, why play?

I can say I came full circle. I feel like I started in Chicago with the Bears and George Halas, and I came back and did what I wanted to and lived up to his legacy. I’m not sure the Old Man could appreciate the significance of what him trusting me meant to me. Maybe he saw that I was a lot like him. That sounds funny even saying it. He was probably more serious than I was. I messed around a little, you know.

But that Super Bowl XX win stands alone in Chicago history. An ass-whupping. Pure and simple. It’s like what columnist Bob Verdi wrote: “The New England Patriots were lucky to escape with their Boston accents intact.”

Me, I thought somebody just invented this giant merry-go-round, and we were getting on, and we were going to ride forever. And it would be fun.

Then it all sort of ended. We continued for a while, but Buddy left to coach Philadelphia and jealousies came into play, and Wilbur Marshall went to Washington, and McMahon got hurt, and people said I did too many commercials and on and on. I’ve heard it all.

But I didn’t change as a coach. I couldn’t. It’s my essence. The people who say outside stuff interfered with my drive are full of crap. I’m an emotional person. I get wrapped up in things. And I wanted this to go on and on. But it didn’t, and no Bears team has won the Super Bowl since. The Patriots, whom we hammered that day, have won three Super Bowls in the last 10 years. I didn’t think the Bears would go a quarter-century without repeating, I really didn’t. I guess we were kind of living a fairy tale back in the day.