The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (22 page)

I know people said we were about as different as two people could be, him so stoic and calm and me all keyed-up. But I looked up to him. And I think he saw something in me he respected and appreciated, and maybe he even was a little like me. He knew, no matter what, how much I cared about the game and doing things well. I’d been his player and then his assistant, and now that I was an NFL head coach, we still talked all the time. I needed his advice on so many things. I could call, and he would always be there for me. He was my biggest booster.

So now we have to play his team, the Cowboys, “America’s Team,” down in Dallas. And they’re pretty good, as they always were under Tom. They’re 7–3 and in first place in the NFC East. This was another big test for us. We got past the Redskins and the 49ers and the Packers, twice. And we had the undefeated streak. But Dallas is Dallas. They beat us last year, the only time we’d played them since I started coaching the Bears. We were only favored by a point.

McMahon was definitely out; his shoulder tendinitis wasn’t improving, so Fuller was my guy again. Good old Steve. I loved him to death. But was he up to this? And I didn’t know how I felt for sure about this contest. I was the pupil going
against the teacher. I had a lot of emotions going around. Believe me, I was pretty chewed up inside.

And then we played. And we annihilated Dallas. Buddy’s philosophy was simple: “Take the sum-bitch away from them in a hurry.” Meaning the ball. Our defense mutilated the Cowboys. It became like a snowball going downhill. Those poor Dallas quarterbacks didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I can still see their backup quarterback Gary Hogeboom, when he was already on his way to the turf, and Singletary hit him so hard before he could reach the ground that I thought Mike had killed him.

The offense was solid. We gained almost 400 yards, and Payton had another 100-yard day. But the defense shut everything down. Richard Dent caught a pass tipped by Hampton at the goal line and ran it in for a touchdown. Cornerback Mike Richardson ran an interception back for a score. Les Frazier had a long interception return. Otis Wilson knocked their starting quarterback, Danny White, out of the game. Twice. Jeez, I started to feel sorry for White, down on the turf, his helmet off, half-conscious. Our defense was crazy, like attack dogs, and they started barking. “Woof! Woof!”

Somewhere in the third quarter I said to Buddy, “Can you slow these guys down?”

And he said, “Mike, I can’t.”

Our defense was gone. On another planet.

We won 44–0 with a backup quarterback. It was the worst loss for Dallas, ever. By the end Texas Stadium was silent, except for all of the Bears fans, who were barking and singing.

I felt good, but I also felt bad. Here we were, doing what we could only dream about doing. And yet it was the worst thing, too. We had our picture taken before the game, Coach Landry and me, our arms around each other. This was the guy I’d learned everything from. He was a good racquet-ball player, and when I was coaching under him, he and I and Dan Reeves and Ernie Stautner and a bunch of guys would play after practice. We had fun, and then he’d say, “Go home. Be with your families. If we can’t get our work done during the day, something’s wrong.” He never asked the assistants to stay real late. He taught me that sometimes you overthink things, you try to change game plans so much that you’re just messing with something that isn’t broken. There was probably nothing he was prouder of than when Dan Reeves and I both became head coaches after studying under him.

But 44–0?

In life there are conflicts like that. It hurt. But I remember just a week before I’d been watching
Monday Night Football,
and Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann got hit by Lawrence Taylor, and his leg broke in half. Compound fracture. They caught it on tape. And it made me sick. Theismann never played another down of football.

But that was life. Life went on.

And now I wanted to go without a loss, ever.

S
ix personal fouls in the first half and a horde of cheap shots might have made it a pro wrestling match. William Perry’s first touchdown catch might have made it a circus. Instead, Walter Payton turned the Bears’ ninth straight victory into a personal tour de force. He matched the third-best performance of his career by rushing for 192 yards and sealed the Bears’ closest victory of the season with a 27-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter.

Payton’s winning score came on an audible. Coach Mike Ditka had called for a pass to Payton to the left side, but when Jim McMahon saw the defense stacked, he changed the play to a run behind tackle Keith Van Horne on the right. Payton cut through the line, broke a tackle at the 20-yard line and outran the Green Bay secondary to the end zone. It was his 13
^th
100-yard performance in 20 games against the Packers, the 68
^th
100-yard game of his career, and his fourth in a row.

Payton’s heroics were preceded by Perry’s debut as a receiver. Trailing 3–0 early in the second quarter, the Bears sent Perry into the back-field. Payton had to tell him where to line up before the Refrigerator put his 308 pounds into slow motion toward the flat. Two weeks earlier, Perry had blasted Green Bay linebacker George Cumby into the end zone. This time Cumby was the victim again.

“They saw him coming and got out of the way,” Ditka said.

William Perry grabs a four-yard touchdown pass during the Bears’ victory at Lambeau Field.

Steve McMichael gets his arms around the legs of Green Bay quarterback Jim Zorn.

Having been humiliated two weeks earlier in a Monday night loss featuring Perry’s first TD run, the Packers decided to get down and, especially, dirty. Tempers flared repeatedly. Green Bay cornerback Mark Lee was ejected after he ran Payton out of bounds and completely over the bench. After another play had wound down, Packers safety Ken Stills leveled McMahon. Even so, Bears safety Dave Duerson acknowledged, “Let’s face it. It wasn’t clean on either side.”

When the Bears arrived at their Lambeau Field locker room before the game, they found a bag of fertilizer from a Wisconsin radio station with the note: “Here’s what you guys are full of.” Payton aside, that might have been an appropriate odor for this game.

Chicago 16, Green Bay 10
NOV. 3, 1985, AT LAMBEAU FIELD

Packers bamboozled in contentious game

Walter Payton’s 27-yard touchdown run. It clinched the victory and kept the Bears undefeated.

Payton ran for 192 yards on 28 carries.

Walter Payton ends up in a bear hug from tackle Jim Covert after scoring on a 27-yard run