This guy I used to work with was from Cleveland. Not just regular from Cleveland, either, but so from Cleveland that even while living in Chicago he still had season tickets to the Browns. He'd head home eight Fridays a year so full of hope. He usually returned the following Monday in defeated silence, his Browns having lost by some ridiculous amount to... whoever.
I envied him for that. For that kind of devotion and dedication. For the way the NFL schedule would roll out each spring and he would tell me, under no uncertain circumstances, how the Browns were going 13-3 this year, maybe 14-2. "We can take Pittsburgh at home this year," he told me once. "Big time." The Browns lost that game, 41 to nothing, en route to winning six games and losing ten. But you know what? There he was again the following March, mapping out the upcoming season in immaculate, victorious detail. "Reilly, we got a strong draft coming up," he said. "I like us at 12-4, but 13-3 isn't out of the question." The Browns won four games that year.
Obviously, it wasn't the losing that looked so cool, but that he had reason to look up in the first place; not because the Browns were ever any good (they weren't) but because they might be this year, and maybe even good enough to finally win a Super Bowl, and that would be a new and ultimate triumph, a taste of an exotic new victory, his favorite team conquering strange new lands.
I, on the other hand, had the complete opposite relationship with football, and at this point should make a confession which will probably earn me a multi-year, if not lifetime shunning from my neighbors, friends, co-workers, and relatives across Cook and the five collar counties:
I hate the Chicago Bears.
Now, let it be known I have no fondness for those cheese-wearing degenerates from up north. Nor have I latched onto some totally illogical team out of spite or irony, the way so many people show up to the sports bar every Sunday in those heinous orange and white retro Tampa Bay Buccaneers jerseys despite never having been to Florida, let alone knowing an actual Floridian. I cheer for the Bears. I want them to win. I take tremendous joy in their good fortune.
But make no mistake, I hate them. And it all stems from one game. You may already know exactly to which game I will point. If you're from Chicago, or have ever talked sports with someone who is, you at least know of it. The one where the Fridge and the Punky QB followed the wisdom of a certain coach who took a certain team from a certain city by a certain lake to a certain Dome and ran roughshod over the opposition to the tune of a 46 to 10 trouncing before hoisting a certain trophy over their collective head for all the world to bow before as they stood as the rightful victors of Super Bowl XX.
I was six years old that season. I'd like to say I have some sweet, vivid memories of watching every Sunday with my family, little Andrew donning his adorably oversized Walter Payton jersey and saying cutesy things like "Sweetness is the beeeest!" and "Yay touchdown!"
But no, that was not meant to be. Instead, the only two games of any memorable significance that year went as follows:
1. December 2, 1985. The Bears suffer their only loss of the season to the Dolphins, every relative, friend, neighbor, teacher, classmate and bus driver of mine absolutely devastated that the Bears would not go down as the indisputably mightiest killing machine in the history of the National Football League, their inevitable legacy of greatness now subject to debate. Proving stuff through logic and facts, I learned then, at age six, was something Chicagoans weren't especially keen to do. A 16-0 season would have been irrefutable, concrete proof of Ditka's otherworldly genius. 15-1 requires explanation, especially when that lone loss came at the hands of a a glamour team with a pretty boy quarterback and a glitzy offensive attack rather than a meaner, bare-knuckled, more worthy adversary, one the Bears might've still crawled away from in bloodied defeat but also left crippled in the process. Dropping a game in snow and ice by a hard-fought score of 9-7 would have been mostly honorable; losing a 38-24 shootout in sunny Miami was entirely unforgivable.
2. January 26, 1986. The Bears destroy any and all standing in their way, so contemptuous of the opposition they sent a 385-pound man to drive a three-foot nail into the New England Patriots' coffin, emerging through a hail of postgame confetti, as folks in these parts will tell you, as the greatest of all time.
This was the first I'd ever seen of football and, for all intents and purposes, would be the last. The Bears went 14-2 the next year. Best record in the league but still a worse showing than 15-1, their failure of a regular season almost as bad as their inability to even make it back to the Super Bowl. By 1988, the Bears had captured their fifth straight division title but not another championship. Losers.
You get the idea. Six years old and the bar had already been set too high.
The team began its true descent towards rock bottom after 1993, when supposed football genius Dave Wannstedt led them through six mostly awful seasons, each defined by an inability to score, an inability to prevent the other team from scoring or, in those two magical years where they won a combined eight games, both. The team fell about as far as a team could but the local sports scribes and Midway faithful alike insisted time and again that Chicago Bears football stood at the beginning of a new righteous chapter in its glorious history. Remember those "Bill Swerski's Super Fans" bits from Saturday Night Live? To most Americans, those guys were funny. To most people in Chicago, those guys sounded just like your uncle.
Raymont Harris, all team-leading 748 rushing yards of him, would be the spiritual successor to Gale Sayers. Field goals, we guessed, were every great team's offensive weapon of choice, so it was a good thing Butthead outscored everyone else to ever don the orange and blue. A third-ranked defense would somehow balance out a 24th-ranked offense. And the quarterbacks! Oh sweet mother of God, the quarterbacks.
Mike Tomczak. P.T. Willis. Jim Miller. You have probably never heard of any of these men. Rightfully so. But throughout Chicagoland their names will echo on forever, all of them reminders of the years the Bears spent with no one at the wheel. Watch a Chicagoan reflexively wince in pain whenever the sports press uses the phrase "quarterback controversy." A reporter could be talking about any team, anywhere, but the Chicagoan will have nightmare flashbacks to Cade McNown and Shane Matthews duking it out for the right to notch 1,500 passing yards that winter after the team had spent all summer trying to talk up their good fortune of being able to choose between pure garbage and total crap.
It's not that 2001's 13 victories and playoff berth were without celebration, either, even if both only came about by barely edging out the likes of the fourth-place Vikings and fifth-place Lions. Overdue karmic rewards for the Wannstedt years, we figured. Nor was anyone complaining in 2006 when the Bears somehow got away with fielding perhaps the worst team to make a Super Bowl since that Patriots team the Bears themselves destroyed in a certain game in a certain year so long ago. But the question kept reasserting itself: how can anyone still have faith in them?
Where was this tradition everyone kept talking about? Where was the offense made of rolling tanks and the defense of solid marble? Where were the good people of NFL Films to immortalize the ghost of Dave Krieg’s only-somewhat-ruinous 1996 campaign?
When was Papa Bear's family going to show some mercy and have his "GSH" memorial removed from the jerseys?
How terrible must the league have been if the Bears - the Bears! - somehow notched eight NFL Championships before the dawn of the Super Bowl era? As far as we knew, Ditka was just the angry guy we'd run out of town and Butkus was just the guy who always got in trouble for swearing on-air after Jim Harbaugh would throw yet another interception in the face of triple coverage.
To an entire generation, there was no answer, no hope, no rhyme or reason. We had simply been born into the death rattle of the Chicago Bears, our beloved team the football equivalent of the Pittsburgh Pirates or Toronto Maple Leafs. History told us the team was once a juggernaut. We vaguely remembered catching a glimpse of that in action, but by now we'd been reduced to idly waiting for forces beyond our control to bend to our insignificant will.
Fast-forward to a Sunday afternoon a couple years ago. I was sitting in some bar because, well, just because people in Chicago will go out drinking for just about any reason they can, even if only to watch the Bears lose another one to the goddamned Packers. My friend's Browns had lost that morning, as they would quite a few times that season, but he remained curiously optimistic about the season.
"Nine and seven is not impossible," he explained. "They can't all go 15-1."
They can't all go 15-1. They can't all end in parades. They can't all revolutionize defensive strategy while trotting out an unstoppable offense at the same time. They can't win by historic margins every time out. And for fans of 31 teams, this was true.
But those 1985 Bears - and only those 1985 Bears - had done all of that. And if the Bears could, then anyone could - even the Bears! The simultaneous brilliance and circularity of the logic was too perfect. Only the Bears could be as great as the Bears were, because only the Bears had ever been as good as the Bears! It didn't make any sense, but so what? Neither did a 385-pound man rushing for a touchdown in a Super Bowl, and that seemed to have worked out just fine for all involved.
The flood of names and bad memories raced before my eyes. Tomczak. Wannstedt. McNown. These weren't agents of the cosmos sent to ruin an entire city, just men with bad timing. My introduction to the team having coincided with its high point, I knew now there was no turning back, but also no going back. Having already reached the pinnacle, everything that followed would inevitably be a letdown (as they had proven time and again) and I understood then that refusing to cheer for the Bears meant admitting there was nothing left to cheer for. And all of this because the Browns couldn't hold a lead over... whoever. It's funny how things work out like that.
So here we sit now at the dawn of another autumn, another hard-earned soft schedule ahead and all signs pointing to another big name kick-starting the next great era in Chicago football. Thirteen and three? Playoffs? Sure. Whatever. Why not?
Fucking Bears.
[Andrew Reilly lives in Chicago. To read more by Andrew, check out his profile.]
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