Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (38 page)

“The morning that I walked out with my bag with all my belongings, I ran into [teammate] Jeff Fisher,” said Plank. “I told him I’d been released. There’s this line: you’re part of the team or not, and I could see him reassessing me. We had a past but there would be no future. We shook hands, but it was empty. I was suddenly aware of all the players who’d gone through it before me. It’s the end of a life.”

For Dan Hampton, the end came when he realized he was being beaten by players he would once have dominated. “You know that song? ‘The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be’?” he told a reporter. “Well, at some point I realized I was that old gray mare.” Near the end of his last game, the Giants had the ball on Chicago’s goal line. In the huddle, Hampton implored his teammates: “Guys, don’t let them score on the last play of my career.” They did, and the Bears lost 31–3.

Steve McMichael was last on the field in 1994. “I was still being hardheaded, thinking I could still play, until Barry Sanders went the distance on me in Detroit,” he wrote. “[Barry] cut inside, then went into the gap where the defensive end should’ve been, but wasn’t. The play I’d always made, to come back out and make the tackle, the knee wasn’t there, it gave. He was gone. That’s when I knew it was over.”

“You know what I miss?” McMichael told Mark Bazer. “I miss walking out of that tunnel to the roar of the crowd. Here’s some poetry: ‘It didn’t matter anymore, life and death the same. Only that the crowd would be there to greet him with howls of lust and fury. He started to understand his sense of worth. He mattered.’ That was from
Conan the Barbarian
, ’cause I fucking plagiarize.”

“I miss being twenty-five years old and playing with my friends,” said Plank. “Now we’re scattered across the country and it’s all in the past. If you’re lucky enough to experience something that intense when you’re young, you pay for it the rest of your life.”

*   *   *

I came to realize that the various fates of these men, taken together, formed a picture of a generation: among them, they’ve experienced the best and the worst of America. After he retired, Emery Moorehead got a job in the Northbrook office of Koenig & Strey, a real estate firm. He showed houses on the North Shore, a touch of the Super Bowl, a glint of ring to close the deal. He began his new life before his career was over, experiencing what the rocket boys call a hard reentry. “One of my buddies from the team, Reggie Phillips, gave me my first listing up in Mundelein,” Moorehead told me. “The season had ended and I’d been out with a friend and our wives. The phone was ringing when I got home. It was 9:30. January or February. Bitter cold. It was another agent from Koenig & Strey. She lived across the street from the Mundelein house and said, ‘I see the sign with your name on it and just want to tell you there’s a stream of water running out of the garage and turning to ice outside.’ A pipe had burst and there was two or three inches of water in the first floor. I had to run out, and now it felt like the middle of the night, and rent a shop vac at a grocery store—it was the only place open. I was on my hands and knees till three or four in the morning. When the football season ended, Reggie had turned off the heat and just left. He was from Texas. He didn’t know. All the pipes had burst. When I called him, I was like, ‘Dude!’”

When I met Emery, he was in the same office in Northbrook where he answers the phone, “This is Emery.” We sat in the conference room and talked about marriage, divorce, family, Ditka, Super Bowl, and high school. The son of a garbage collector, Emery has sent two kids to college and lives a quiet life on the North Shore. It’s a long way from third and two with a season on the line, but it’s the American dream.

Standing up and jingling his keys, he said, “Let’s go.”

I’d asked him to show me houses. Partly because I had seen Emery block and catch and now wanted to see him sell, partly because, now and then, something in me says, “It’s time to go home.” We looked in Evanston and Wilmette, talking football as we drove. When we arrived at a house, he’d shut off his car, say, “Here it is,” then lead me up the cobblestone as the robins sang. Little of the athlete remains in Emery. He was shaped like a lifeguard, but the lines have blurred. If he walks into the next world like this, they’ll never recognize him.

*   *   *

Doug Plank played his last game for the Bears in 1982: missed tackle, head-to-head, lightning flash. He played part of another season in the USFL but the old zipperoo was gone. When he should’ve been accelerating, he was bracing for impact. A body wants to learn from its disasters. He’d been working all along, taking whatever jobs he could find in the off-season. “I sold Culligan water softeners,” he told me. “I rehabilitated houses. I was a realtor. That was life as a professional athlete. My salary my first year was $18,000.”

He went back to Columbus, Ohio, after he retired and bought into a Burger King. He was not a celebrity owner, standing out front meeting and greeting—he worked in back, standing over the grill. In 1985, when the Bears made their run, he was too busy to feel like he’d missed out. “Here’s what I recommend for former athletes,” he told me. “If you want to get past it and stop feeling bad, run a restaurant. We opened at six a.m. and closed at two a.m. Bury yourself in work. You’ll never have time to feel sorry for yourself.”

“What’s the hardest part of making that transition?” I asked.

“What transition?”

“From Soldier Field to Burger King?”

He laughed, then said, “Well, when I made a great Whopper, nobody was clapping as I wrapped it up and put it down the chute. And you know, you really do miss getting that adoration on a consistent basis. We’re driven toward it. As kids, we all want to get a pat on the back. That’s what you miss: the adult version of a pat on the back. We just don’t get it. That’s why I’m cheesy. I make a big deal of little things. Doing things the right way, giving guys accolades for that. It’s important. In Burger King we used to call it taking a walk. Taking a walk means you get out of your office and walk around the restaurant. You walk outside and look for trash. Is the dining room clean? Are your employees dressed properly? Are they smiling? Are the lights on? We all need to take a walk more often. Just look around and say, ‘Is everything right? Is everything the way it should be? Are we giving ourselves the best chance to have success?’ And if we are, then what’s wrong with going up to that person that has that area cleaned up, and is focused, with a smile on their face, and saying, ‘Hey, I want you to know I appreciate it.’ If there’s one thing I learned as an owner, it’s that the players, people that work for you, they’re the ones that are going to make you successful.”

Plank bought another Burger King, then another. By 1992, he owned several franchises. The national corporation asked him to take over its operations in the Southwest, which meant a move to Arizona. He later sold his restaurants back to the corporation but stayed in Scottsdale, where the climate is kinder to men with titanium shoulders.

Plank’s life changed again about twenty years ago. “I’m driving to a Burger King I own down in Tempe and on the radio I hear that Buddy Ryan has just been announced as the general manager and head coach of the [Arizona] Cardinals,” Plank told me. “And I’m thinking, gosh, they need me for lunch if they’re making combo meals. But Buddy was the guy that named the defense after me. I figured I owed him a visit. So I went down and congratulated him. Then we’re talking. And you can imagine all the media types. It was after a press conference. And someone says, ‘Who’s this guy, Buddy?’ And Buddy goes, ‘This is Doug Plank, number 46. The 46 defense.’ Within five minutes somebody from the Cardinals walked up and said, ‘Hey Doug, would you like to do our pre- and postgame radio show?’”

Plank works as a broadcaster and is now head coach of the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League. He’s coached at Ohio State and for the New York Jets, where he worked for Buddy’s son, Rex. “Looking back, I’d much rather have a defense named after me than have gone to the Super Bowl,” he said. “I say that with all honesty. Two years ago, while I was working with the Jets in the weight room, the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, walked through, introducing himself to players and coaches. He comes over to me and I put down the dumbbells and say, ‘It’s a pleasure meeting you, Commissioner. I’m Doug Plank.’ And once again, it’s one of those Joe Paterno moments: he’s just looking at me, shaking my hand, remembering. Doug Plank. The 46 defense. And he says, ‘You were a great player.’ What’s that worth? Wouldn’t somebody pay a lot of money to have the NFL commissioner say that?”

*   *   *

Willie Gault played through 1993, finishing with the Raiders, then dedicated himself to his real dream: Hollywood. If you want to reach Willie, it’s via his agent. If you want to see Willie, it’s via his head shot. He looks like a romantic in his publicity photos, suave with an open shirt and a white-toothed smile, his chest accented by a necklace of coral shells. His television and film credits, scattered across the twenty years, include
Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper
(Clifford),
Baywatch
(Willa’s dad),
Night Vision
(FBI Agent Coleman),
Holy Man
(NordicTrack Guy),
Millennium Man
(Lieutenant Dunn),
The Pretender
(Willie the Sweeper, nineteen episodes),
Grounded for Life
(Hugh),
The West Wing
(Agent, four episodes),
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
(Black Man in Airport). Of all the Bears at the White House, only Gault looked like he could still get up and down the field. When Willie was a Bear, Ditka designed a play to take advantage of his speed. It was called Big Ben. Willie took off. Mac waited three beats, then threw the football as far as he possibly could.

*   *   *

Mike Richardson was known as L.A. As fans, we assumed it stood for Los Angeles, as Richardson grew up in Compton, but it actually stood for Lazy Ass. Almost everything he did well came naturally. He was fast, hard-hitting, and had great hands—but if he had to work for it, it wasn’t going to happen. Richardson spent seven years in the NFL, finishing in San Francisco in 1989. At twenty-eight, he was done with everything that came easy. He moved back to L.A., where he bounced from job to job, losing touch with teammates along the way. He was the blip that suddenly vanishes from the radar screen. His drug habit began to swallow his life, and he aged quickly. He got in trouble with the police. He was arrested. In the course of sixteen years, he was convicted twenty-one times. Five of the convictions were for felonies.

Following a routine traffic stop in 2006, the police found twenty-eight grams of rock cocaine and ten grams of amphetamine in his car. He was sentenced to one year in prison. Did that, got out, violated his parole and was sent back for thirteen more years. He was given a second shot at parole after just three. Ditka and Dent sent letters to the judge, begging for leniency. “I will help in any way necessary to try and find a way to help him through this tough time,” Ditka wrote. “I believe his life is worth trying to save.” “I know that Mike is troubled, but is a good man to his soul,” wrote Dent. “I would deeply beg the court to give Mike one last chance.”

“You reached heights in your career, in your life,” Judge Kelly told Richardson before he was released. “You attained goals that few people in the world can ever attain. You were a Super Bowl champion. You tasted greatness. You have it inside of you … But the drugs are going to crush it all. And it has already crushed a substantial portion of your life.”

*   *   *

Steve McMichael, the defensive tackle known variously as Ming the Merciless and Mongo, never stopped being Steve McMichael. Soon after his last football game, he was on the road with the World Wrestling Federation. He took part in WrestleMania, fought Bam Bam Bigelow and Kama Mustafa, aka Papa Shango, aka the Godfather. Later, when McMichael moved to World Championship Wrestling, he worked as hero and heel, commentator, instigator, dispute settler, tag teamer, big talker, clown killer. He fought Ric Flair and Bill Goldberg and was involved in every plot and subplot of that impossible-to-follow netherworld. “It was fun for a couple of years,” he said. “But the road … I’d be home two days out of the month just to get clean clothes. You start to smell like a carny in the midway.” The hardest thing, he said, was “learning how to whip my own ass.”

McMichael has remained a fixture on the Chicago sports scene, an aging giant with a bowl haircut, singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field. He coaches the Chicago Slaughter of the indoor football league. He recently ran for mayor of Romeoville, a southwest suburb of Chicago. And lost. He was married, then divorced, then married again. His second wife is named Misty. He has a child. “I’ll be sixty-five when she’s fifteen,” he said. “That’s when I’m going to start letting her date. You know what I’m going to tell the little boys? I’m going to tell them, ‘I’m so old now I ain’t got no problem going to jail. Killing your little ass just helps support my free jailhouse nursing care. That way, I’m not a burden on my family.’”

*   *   *

Shaun Gayle was a special teams standout and a second-string defensive back on the ’85 Bears. He recovered the ball Giants punter Sean Landeta whiffed on in the playoffs and ran it for a touchdown. He later replaced Fencik at safety. He spent a dozen years in the league and made the Pro Bowl in 1991. He was handsome—too handsome. A little is helpful; very presents problems. He became a television broadcaster and worked as a commentator on Sky Sports in the United Kingdom. You’d be flipping through the channels on a trip to London and there was Shaun Gayle explaining some intricacy of American football.

He lived in Deerfield, in one of those big houses on one of those flat streets that just go round and round. On October 4, 2007, an intruder broke into his house and shot and killed his girlfriend, Rhoni Reuter—she was seven months pregnant. In March 2009, the police arrested Marni Yang, described as Gayle’s business associate. When the case went to trial in 2011, Gayle admitted he’d slept with Yang the night before the murder. Asked how often they had sex, Gayle said, “It was, on average, roughly two to three times in the course of a year.” Yang was sentenced to life in prison.