Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (11 page)

The team got better and better. At times, they seemed unstoppable. The other boys loved Sid now, this kid racking up unheard-of numbers. Three hundred yards in the air. Four touchdown passes, five, six. The 1940 roster boasted several stars: George Wilson, George McAfee, Bill Osmanksi. It’s considered one of the best clubs in history, the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees or the 1976–77 Montreal Canadiens. There’ve been only a few teams worth remembering by fans in other cities. This is when the Bears became known as the Monsters of the Midway, a nickname lifted from the University of Chicago Maroons, who played on what had been the Midway of the 1893 World’s Fair and excelled in the Big Ten till the university president ended the football program. Halas took the name, as he took everything else he thought would help his team.

After finishing 8 and 3, the Bears faced the Washington Redskins in the NFL Championship. The Skins were favored by 10. Whereas Chicago was led by an untested Ivy Leaguer, the Redskins had Slinging Sammy Baugh, a lanky Texan once considered the best quarterback ever. If a writer wanted to praise Luckman, he’d call him “Halas’s answer to Sammy Baugh.”

George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Redskins, needled Halas all that week. At issue was a game the teams had played earlier in the season. The Bears were down 17–14 with less than a minute. They had the ball near the Redskins’ goal but no time-outs. Halas told George McAfee to fake an injury to stop the clock. The refs saw through the ruse and penalized Chicago, assuring a Redskins victory. Halas, who insisted the injury had been real, bitched about it to anyone who would listen. “I probably used all the words I had used on the Chicago streets and in ballparks and training camps and maybe even made up a few new ones,” he said. Marshall called Halas and his team “a bunch of crybabies.” He sent Halas a telegram when the Bears clinched their spot in the championship: “Congratulations. I hope I have the pleasure of beating your ears off next Sunday and every year to come. Justice is triumphant.”

In the locker room, Halas gave a speech organized around the hideousness of being called a crybaby:
Are we just gonna take it? Are we gonna let that cocksucker get away with that bullshit? Or are we gonna go out and show that pop-off artist who the real crybabies are?

As the team ran onto the field, Halas held Luckman back, put his arm around him. He told Sid the first three plays to call: How they react, that’s going to show us everything we need to know. He squeezed Sid’s shoulder, said he was proud of him, and wished him luck. The relationship between these two men was the coach/player relationship in platonic form. Years later, shortly before he died, Halas wrote Luckman a letter. They were both old men, with their glory days a million years behind; the letter ended, “My devoted friend, you have a spot in my heart that NO ONE else can claim. I love you with all my heart.”

Sammy Baugh marched his team downfield on the first drive. There was something romantic about him … the slow walk, the laconic way. He never got flustered. He was relaxed when he threw. Whereas Luckman released from his shoulder, Baugh extended his arm to its apex, releasing at twelve o’clock, a premonition of the over-the-top style of the moderns. He got his team into Bears territory. On one play, he eluded the rush and found a receiver in the end zone. He hit him in the chest, a beautiful West Texas spiral, but the receiver dropped it. A groan went up from the stands. It would be Washington’s best chance of the day.

Two plays later, the Bears had taken over and Luckman was thinking through Halas’s plays as he walked to the line. For a quarterback, a lot of any game is played in his head, a stream of consciousness: first I do this, which will make him do that, but if he does that, I’ll go here, which will make him go there and do that, in which case I will do this, unless, of course, they do that, in which case I’ll come back with this, then look for McAfee, and if he’s covered …

The early break came on the ground. One of the innovations of the modern T was trickery, fakes and feints that disguised the most basic play; half the time, the defense didn’t know who had the ball. Sid called it in the huddle: “Spread left-0-scissors 46.” He hiked, faked right, then tossed to Osmanski, who got tangled up in the line, broke free, then made it to the outside, where a hole opened. He went the length of the field, a perfect run, but it’s the block that opened the hole that people remembered. For years, it was the most famous block in NFL history. It was made by George Wilson, who, according to Luckman, “coming from his right end position, dashed at an angle toward [Osmanski’s] line of flight. Around mid-field … he hurled his body, at full speed, into Malone of Washington, who bounced back into his partner, Justice, and the two of them somersaulted helplessly over the sideline.” In other words, one guard took out two tacklers—in bowling, they call this picking up the 7–10 split. “Watching it,” Luckman wrote, “I assured myself that I’d seen the most wicked block perpetuated by man or beast. When Osmanski returned from his sixty-eight-yard touchdown gallop, he found us slapping Wilson on the back and frolicking around. He couldn’t understand it, of course, because he was the only man on the field who missed the spectacle.”

Football is Nietzschean. It’s a question of finding a play or a sequence of plays that breaks the enemy. In the 1940 Championship, it happened during that run by Osmanski. “Washington’s hopes began to dampen,” wrote Luckman. “The whole business had happened in 58 seconds.”

Luckman passed for more than three hundred yards, completing touchdown after touchdown. Fans, who’d come to see a battle, found themselves at a clinic instead, a public demonstration of the modern T-formation. “Everything seemed to click. Even a boner was good for ten yards,” Luckman wrote. Coming back to the bench, the quarterback “found Halas delirious with joy … After we’d rung up our fiftieth point or so, he began to murmur: ‘Wonder what Mr. George Preston Marshall is doin’ at this stage?’”

“With Luckman calling the plays with the genius of a clairvoyant, the Bears were a perfect football machine,”
Time
reported. “By the end of the third quarter, the game had become an undignified rout.”

In the fourth, Halas told his kick holder to kill the play instead of going for the extra point. Nine footballs had already been booted into the stands and he didn’t want to lose any more:
Who do you think pays for those balls, smartass?

Seventy-three to zero—it remains the most lopsided championship game in NFL history. The next morning,
New York Times
sportswriter Arthur Daley began his column, “The weather was perfect. So were the Bears.”

In the locker room, a reporter asked Sammy Baugh what might have happened if his receiver had made that catch on the first drive. A shift in momentum can mean everything. “We would’ve lost 73 to 7,” said Baugh.

In the following seasons, most teams in the league adopted some version of the modern T-formation. Halas taught it to anyone who was interested; this might seem like giving away company secrets, but he was generous with ideas. He believed the Bears had come up with a better kind of football that would benefit the league. He wanted to win, but he also wanted to produce a superior product. In the off-season, he wrote a book with Clark Shaughnessy and Ralph Jones,
The Modern “T” Formation with Man-in-Motion.
He sent Luckman to Columbia and Notre Dame to teach the offense to college quarterbacks. It was complicated, with a steep learning curve. If Halas could get colleges to run it, he would secure a supply of game-ready athletes.

Within a few years, the only team running the old offense was the Steelers, and they stunk. The single wing had gone the way of the Spanish caravel. In this way, Halas remade not just the Bears but also the game, joining the ranks of Knute Rockne, Alonzo Stagg, and Walter Camp, innovators whose inventions now seem inevitable. In 1941, Halas hired a writer to pen a new fight song, tasking him to take special notice of the team’s recent accomplishments.

Bear down, Chicago Bears, make every play clear the way to victory.

Bear down, Chicago Bears, put up a fight with a might so fearlessly.

We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation, with your T-formation!

Thus began the great dynastic run of the Bears. For Chicagoans, it would never be as good again. A modern fan, especially if born after 1950, is akin to a modern Roman: deep down we know, no matter how we prosper, that our achievements will always pale in comparison to those of antiquity. Early in the 1940s, the Bears played twenty-four games without a loss. They won their second championship in 1941 and did not lose again until December 1942, when the Redskins got revenge in the championship. Luckman had his best game in 1942 in the Polo Grounds in New York. It was Sid Luckman Day. He threw for close to five hundred yards and completed seven touchdown passes, which remains a record. The Bears got even with the Skins in the 1943 Championship, but it was a different world by then. America had entered World War II. As the nation’s young men went overseas—Luckman joined the merchant marine; Halas spent three years in the navy—NFL rosters were increasingly filled by old-timers, has-beens, never-coulds. Bronko Nagurski rejoined the Bears. He was in his mid-thirties, a kind of Methuselah. He had not played in five years. He had been working as a professional wrestler, a circus performer, a gas station owner, and a tiller of the land. When handed the ball, he’d head upfield, yelling, “Let the farmer through.”

The Monsters reassembled for one more championship run in 1946, older, slower, thicker, but determined to execute once more. Luckman was like old Picasso, subsisting on savvy. He threw seventeen touchdown passes, which led the NFL. The Bears finished 8–2–1, then played the Giants in the title game. Chicago clinched it in an unlikely way: Sid, kneeling in the huddle, covered in grime, called his own number:
Trust me, I see something
. He had to repeat himself before the boys agreed: “Bingo, keep it.” He went to the line, looked here, looked there, took the snap, faked a handoff, a beautiful fake, jogged toward the sideline as if to say, The old man needs a rest, then took off, the ball hidden beneath his arm. It was a long moment before the Giants realized what was happening, that it was Luckman, the ancient, who had the dingus. He ran nineteen yards for a touchdown, his feet getting heavier with each step. The Bears won 24–14. If the war had not intervened, that team might have won seven titles. As it is, they won four and must be considered among the best in history.

Luckman returned for 1947, but he was a beat too slow, a season past prime. I once met a pro baseball player who, pontificating on the fate that awaits every athlete, said, “Some guys go on and on, but others just fall off the table.” Sid Luckman was a fall-off-the-table type. He was a leading quarterback right up to the moment he could no longer convert a single play. During one of his last days on the field, he took a whack to the head that knocked him insensible. That was December 14, 1947, the worst game of his career. The magic was gone. He took himself out with twelve minutes left. After that, he was old and done, just as confused as he’d been at the beginning. “It’s strange how many top-flight stars lose their championship urge almost overnight,” he wrote. “One season you’ll find them hustling like young colts, and the next they’ll appear listless and off the pace.”

He stuck around a few more years, the coach’s confidant, a monarch emeritus. When a hero gets old, he takes your youth with him. Luckman retired in 1950 but remained a figure in Chicago for decades. He was the best that had ever been, Sid the Great, who still holds just about every important team passing record. If you follow the Bears, you’re familiar with the phrases “not since Luckman,” “maybe the next Luckman.” He was part of Halas’s crew, one of the knock-around guys—Kup, Brickhouse, Sid—sitting at a round table at the Palmer House. He had all kinds of jobs in the years that followed, but the remainder of his life was mostly spent being Sid Luckman. That’s why it’s so hard for a star athlete to move on. No one wants you to, nor will they let you; they need you to be what you were when you were the polestar, on one knee, calling your own number: “Bingo, keep it.” Sid Luckman played football a million years ago but died in 1998, which seems like yesterday. His ghost went out in Aventura, Florida, where the pinochle is high-stakes and the pools reek of country club chlorine.

6

THE QUARTERBACK

Joe Namath preparing for Super Bowl III. Florida, 1967

Gary Fencik heard this story from Virginia Halas McCaskey, who, as of this writing, is in her nineties and controls the Bears. She began attending games in the 1930s when she was eight or nine, watching from the wooden seats at Wrigley. Her favorite player was a receiver from Vanderbilt named Dick Plasman. He had huge hands. You see it in team photos in which he extends his fingers in the way of a magician about to demonstrate an illusion. If you were a kid, he would be your favorite, too. He was the last professional to play without a helmet. For several years, he was the only bare-headed nut out there, dodging defensive backs, his curly blond hair waving. In a game where everyone else was clothed in leather, he was like a man among machines. The action shots are especially jarring: all those helmeted figures moving in the muck, this lone bare-head among them like the fool without a coat on the coldest day of the year.