The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (41 page)

“This is the best defense that I’ve ever been with, and I’ve been with some awful good ones.”

Chicago 46, New England 10
JAN. 26, 1986, AT THE SUPERDOME

46 points, ‘46’ defense add up to utter domination

William Perry’s third-quarter touchdown. Some of the Bears never forgave Mike Ditka for calling the Fridge’s number instead of Walter Payton’s from the 1-yard line.

46–10. Total domination.

A
fter finishing my last reading of this book, I shut down my laptop, leaned back in my chair, stretched these creaky knees, and reflected on the Super Bowl Bears. Ah, yes, what a time it was. The magic came and left so quickly it seems maybe it never was here. But it was. Wasn’t it?

Take my own roof. In 1986, six months after Super Bowl XX, workmen were doing some repairs up there—seems somebody was always hammering above—and I had a brainstorm: what if I put a sign there? The roof itself was very steep, too steep to stand on, but a worker had a roof ladder, the kind of ladder that has a piece that hooks over the peak and lays flat against the shingles. Before dusk I got a bucket of white house paint and a brush from the garage, climbed a regular ladder to the roof, clambered onto the roof ladder and sat there, looking out at the deserted Bears practice field and Halas Hall.

From the players’ vantage point, my black roof would be a billboard staring them in the face, a “SEE ROCK CITY” barn along a Tennessee highway. I carefully pried off the lid of the gallon can and began to paint. I was bubbling with Super Bowl giddiness, like all Bears fans, and this is what I painted: “46–10.”

I didn’t hear much from folks for a while—you had to be on the field to really notice, but from there it was like a neon sign in your eyeballs—until a year later Ditka saw me at a practice and said, “Could you get that damn score off your roof? We haven’t done crap.”

He was mad because the Bears had lost the 1986 NFC playoff game to the Washington Redskins, and the Super Bowl score was a sharp stick in his side. It took a while, but I located the roof ladder again, maybe I called the worker who owned it, and I went back up on the roof. I painted a line through the 46–10 and painted, directly above it: “13–27,” the losing score of that Redskins playoff game. Another year went by, and the Bears lost in the playoffs again. To the Redskins.

“Dammit!” Ditka said this time. “Get those scores off your roof! They’re killing me!”

But here was the problem. The roof ladder was gone, the workmen were long gone, and I wasn’t interested in climbing onto those black shingles
again, by any means. I could see myself tumbling off, being impaled on the fence below, ending a brief career with a bad obituary headline.

“Coach, I’m sorry, I can’t get up there,” I said. “But you can do whatever you want.”

Time went by. One day I heard a whirring noise, a bump on the roof. I went onto my deck. The Bears’ cherry-picker, the crane like contraption from which cameraman Mitch Friedman filmed practice, had been driven to the edge of Bears territory, tilted forward, and now somebody was leaning out, painting my roof with a long roller and black paint. The score was gone.

After a few years the numerals started to creep out. Then, in 1993, Lake Forest was hit by a bad hailstorm, and the insurance company replaced my entire roof. In 1997 the Bears moved to new Halas Hall in another part of town, and that was that.

What remains are the memories, the former players, and the coach—Ditka. If that 1985 season had all of the elements of the mythological journey—the leader with an outsized goal, the band of characters, the trek, the battles, the temporary failure (Miami), the wise old adviser (Landry), the internal strife (Buddy), the redemption, the goal achieved, the uncertainty after success—Ditka has become the embodiment of the adventure. He could have become a clown, a caricature, even a nobody. But he stayed in the public eye, being wise, being funny, being angry, being absurd, making contradictions, doing such things as saying he’s running for U.S. senator, making a movie, appearing on radio and TV, selling an erectile dysfunction drug, even coaching the woeful New Orleans Saints for a spell. “It’s funny,” he told me of that miscalculation, “but the Bears played our Super Bowl in New Orleans, and because of that I thought somehow I could make it Chicago down there.” Ricky Williams was going to be Ditka’s new Walter Payton. Wrong.

Now people genuinely like old No. 89. Maybe love isn’t too strong a word. His V-hairdo and mustache are not just trademarks, they’re fun, they’re legend. Folks revere Ditka because he personifies things seemingly lost—guy-dom, the era before political correctness, old-time nasty football. But they also revere him because they can tell somewhere inside that huge, snarling carcass is a soft touch, a great big beating heart. In fact, more and more that kindness is right on the surface.

“I eat quitters for breakfast and spit out the bones!” Ditka bellows in Kicking and Screaming. But he’s winking the whole time.

Of course, he twitches with unfulfilled want. It’s as though he’s the biggest toddler in the world. It’s like he was built with attack mode only and a
dial that goes to 12. He fidgets, he plays solitaire, he grumbles to himself, he plays golf in the wind, snow, sleet. Sharks rest more than he does, even at age 70. You look at Iron Mike, and you know what he should be doing forever is catching a pass across the short middle, seeking a collision with the tough-guy linebackers and maybe a couple safeties, if they want some.

It was fitting that we spent so much time in his cigar bar over the years. “If people don’t like smoke, they don’t have to come,” he’d say, firing up a stogie. It’s perfect, because public smoking is now as vanished as the dodo. I never saw a dodo, but I miss those birds.

I think of Ditka’s comments about Grabowskis and Smiths. Doug Smith, the Los Angeles Rams Pro Bowl center in 1985, told me back then, “My name’s been Smith all along, and I never associated it with white collar or conformity. I mean, they’re the ones making videos. We could make a video and there would be 50 sales—to our families.”

He was right. The Bears were all kinds of things. Ditka himself was the Grabowski. And part of a Grabowski’s essence is being restless, always slightly teed-off, ever the self-perceived underdog. Ditka can make a comment, then later reverse himself, then crisscross it all like a foaming speedboat. Confront him with the wavy contradictions, and he’ll solve everything by spouting, “Well, you can kiss my ass!”

Diana Ditka has seen it all. “Mike is just so honest,” she says. And honestly, aren’t we all contradictions like Mike? Isn’t that the appeal? No matter how deep-thinking we get, don’t we invariably come back to the caveman principal regarding life’s ambiguities: kick its ass before it kicks yours?

A while back, my son and two buddies were sitting at our kitchen table, watching an NFL game on TV. I said to them, apropos of nothing, “So the entire continent of Europe takes on 11 mini-Ditkas in a game of football. Who wins?”

“Easy, Mr. Telander,” said one boy, still polite, even as a teenager. “The mini-Ditkas.”

“By how much?”

“Two hundred thirty-seven to nothing.”

“Correct,” I said.

I recalled more Saturday Night Live “Super Fan” logic.

“Ditka and God are sitting at a bar,” I said. “What are they talking about?”

“Trick question!” the boys shouted in unison.

“Why?” I asked.

“Ditka is God!”

Whatever he is, you gotta believe he’s a treasure.

—Rick Telander, July 2010

GAME 1

SEPT. 8 at SOLDIER FIELD

FIRST QUARTER

BUCS:
Magee 1 pass from DeBerg (Igwebuike kick), 7:06.

BEARS:
McKinnon 21 pass from McMahon (Butler kick), 12:11.

BUCS:
House 44 pass from DeBerg (Igwebuike kick), 12:33.

SECOND QUARTER

BUCS:
Bell 11 pass from DeBerg (Igwebuike kick), 3:29.

BEARS:
McMahon 1 run (Butler kick), 6:51.

BEARS:
Butler 38 FG, 12:25.

BUCS:
Wilder 3 run (Igwebuike kick), 13:51.

THIRD QUARTER

BEARS:
Frazier 29 interception return (Butler kick), :22.

BEARS:
Suhey 9 pass from McMahon (Butler kick), 14:33.

FOURTH QUARTER

BEARS:
McMahon 1 run (Butler kick), 2:28.

GAME 2

SEPT. 15 at SOLDIER FIELD

FIRST QUARTER

BEARS:
McKinnon 32 pass from McMahon (Butler kick), 3:03.

SECOND QUARTER

BEARS:
Butler 21 FG, 14:23.

THIRD QUARTER

BEARS:
Suhey 1 run (Butler kick), 10:44.

BEARS:
Butler 28 FG, 13:38.

FOURTH QUARTER

PATRIOTS:
James 90 pass from Eason (Franklin kick), 5:57.

GAME 3

SEPT. 19 at THE METRODOME