The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (4 page)

Mike Singletary stood in back of the team bench at Candlestick Park, facing not the debacle being completed on the field behind him, but the jeering, sneering San Francisco fans.

“Nice game!” hostile voices screamed. A lot of them sounded very drunk. “The Bears suck!”

Singletary’s nostrils were flared, and his glinting samurai eyes were wide and focused. He was breathing hard. The clock was running out on this NFC championship game between the Bears and the 49ers, and the Bears were being dissected 23–0. It was January 5, 1985, and Chicago’s high hopes for its 1984 team were being crushed. No Super Bowl here. Maybe none ever.

“We’ll be back!” Singletary, the Bears’ Pro Bowl middle linebacker, yelled in a fevered Southern minister’s voice, facing the enemy. “We’ll be back! I guarantee you. We WILL be back!”

“He was our quarterback, our first-round pick in 1982, my first year. He was smaller than most quarterbacks, and he wasn’t in great shape and he was feisty. And he was different.”

—Ditka on Jim McMahon

The crowd hooted and pelted Singletary with more verbal abuse. On the bench Walter Payton had sunken so low into himself it appeared he was shrinking. He may have been crying. He had carried the ball 22 times for 92 yards, and they were hard yards. On one barely successful fourth-and-one run he had to break three tackles—in his own backfield.

The Bears’ offense was impotent. It had totaled but 186 net yards to the 49ers’ 387. And of course, it couldn’t score. The loss was complete, overwhelming, destructive. And humiliating. San Francisco coach Bill Walsh had briefly used a 280-pound guard, Guy McIntyre, in his backfield as a flattener. It wasn’t illegal. In fact, it was semibrilliant. But it hurt.

The Bears thought they had a stellar defense, based on the hyper-aggressive “46” scheme. But 49ers quarterback Joe Montana had whipped it by taking three-step drops and throwing in less than two seconds. San

Francisco receivers Freddie Solomon and Dwight Clark had 11 catches for 156 yards between them. Bears fill-in quarterback Steve Fuller passed for just 87 yards and was sacked an astounding nine times by a San Francisco defense that was more Bearish than the Bears.

Fans began pouring out of the stands before the clock had expired. It was going to get ugly. For the Bears. The refs called the game with two seconds remaining.

Even Singletary, eyes set in fury, ran for the exit.

My God, did we hurt.
I don’t think anybody can realize how much we hurt after that game. I take the blame for a lot of it, because I thought with our defense, all we’d have to do was stay close, run the ball, and our defense would give us a chance to win. That was wrong. I was wrong. We had to score points, be more aggressive.

I said at the time that we got a lot of lessons out there. In life, you either teach or you learn. Professor or student. I hoped we learned. I was outsmarted by Bill Walsh, their great coach. And I was embarrassed. But we had a couple things going against us, too. Things that had nothing to do with the 49ers.

Our safety Todd Bell had played a great game against the Washington Redskins the week before in our first round, which helped get us into this game—and this NFC title game was as deep into the playoffs as any Bears team had been since the Super Bowl started. But against San Francisco, Bell had to replace our injured right cornerback Les Frazier, and second-year sub Dave Duerson replaced Bell. Later, Bell and Duerson switched positions. Our other safety, Gary Fencik, had a good game with two interceptions. But we were unsettled back there. Neither Todd nor Dave was a cornerback.

Also, we were without Jim McMahon. He was our quarterback, our first-round pick in 1982, my first year. He was smaller than most quarterbacks, and he wasn’t in great shape and he was feisty. And he was different. What I was already finding out was that he was going to be injured a lot, because of the way he played. He played balls out, all the time. He had already suffered a lacerated kidney, which in a way was just par for the course. We’d had four quarterback changes in just that 1984
season because of Jim, but I didn’t blame him.

I mean, there was no question that he shortened his career because of the way he played. He butted heads with linemen, he ran, he dove, he hung on to the ball too long. He played the way a linebacker plays the game. He had no regard for his body. But I couldn’t change him. It would have ruined him. His persona was to put the pedal to the metal, and I kind of liked that. But, man, the problems.

“I look at Finks, and he looks at me. Oh, brother. But it was okay—I played the game, and I did my share of messing around, and it wasn’t going to kill him.”

—Ditka on Jim McMahon

Fuller couldn’t do anything in that NFC game, because we were playing catch-up most of the time, and they were laying for him. Steve was a great addition to our team, and tough as nails himself, but he wasn’t McMahon.

Who was? I remember when McMahon first came to Chicago. We had just drafted him, and I was in the office with Jim Finks, the general manager at the time. McMahon walks into Halas Hall, and he’s got a beer in his hand and a six-pack under his arm. I think it was Miller, but it might have been something else. He has a wad of tobacco under his lip, too. First thing he says is, “I was getting dry on the way in.”

I look at Finks, and he looks at me. Oh, brother. But it was okay—I played the game, and I did my share of messing around, and it wasn’t going to kill him. He had on a sport coat and slacks and sunglasses, of course. He had an eye that was damaged from when he was a kid—he accidentally stuck a fork in it or something—and he said he needed the shades for the pupil. Needed shades all the time. Fine.

After a while it was time for McMahon to talk to Halas. The Old Man was brutal. He’d only been with the team for 62 years. When I played, Halas did all the negotiations, all the contracts, everything. He
was tougher than iron. He was mostly retired now, but he meets McMahon, and he looks at him and says, “You’re not very big, you don’t look very strong, your knees are lousy, you got a bad eye. I’m not going to pay you very much money.”

McMahon looks at him, kind of curious. Maybe he yawned. He says, “I thought you drafted me.”

Jim was something. Anyway, I knew we weren’t bad enough to get shut out, 23-zip by the freaking 49ers. The guys knew it, too. In the locker room afterward I told them I’d take the blame for the mess. I thought we could shove the run at them. I thought we could bully them. I thought we were much more physical than they were. But I realized we would have to be creative and aggressive on offense next time, and we would have to score points.

Were we fighters or not?

And I couldn’t forget how Walsh had this formation, and I looked in the backfield, and I’ll be damned, there’s a guard back there. That big old McIntyre. I said, “Okay. Good. Uh-huh.” That stuck in my mind.

I’m talking to the team, and I tell them we will be back and we will play these guys again. I hadn’t read it yet, but I know Walsh had a quote in the next day’s paper where he said, “They have a great team. When they get their offense squared away with McMahon and get more experience with Fuller and the defensive backfield, I think next year they will be the team to beat.”

That’s fine. But I was mad as a sledgehammer. I had great respect for Bill. To a point.

I told the team, “We will beat these guys. You take care of the players next time, and I’ll take care of the coach.”

We had time to think about it. And fume.

I
t would be a preview of Super Bowl XX. The Bears’ defense utterly dominated the Patriots’ offense, holding New England to 27 rushing yards. The Patriots keyed to stop Walter Payton and eventually sent him out of the game with bruised ribs, but myriad other Bears did sufficient damage.

The Bears sacked Tony Eason six times—they would sack Eason and Steve Grogan seven times in the Super Bowl—and held the New England offense to 206 yards, 90 coming on a late touchdown pass from Eason to Craig James. They forced the Patriots to punt 11 times, the same number of rushes New England would try in the Super Bowl.

The Bears opened the game with a decisive 69-yard drive that needed only four plays before Jim McMahon hit Dennis McKinnon with a 32-yard touchdown pass. Kevin Butler made the halftime lead 10–0 with a 21-yard field goal on a day when the offense hammered the Patriots with 44 runs to only 23 passes after a 34–34 run/pass balance the week before. The defense was swarming, with Mike Singletary blitzing and picking up three sacks to go with an interception.

Matt Suhey scored on a 1-yard dive in the third quarter, followed by a Butler field goal from 28 yards. The shutout was lost on the Eason-to-James touchdown, but the Bears otherwise completely outplayed their guests.