The '85 Bears: We Were the Greatest (6 page)

Platteville, Wisconsin, is not near anything. Unless you consider Tennyson or Belmont or Arthur or Cuba City to be more than dots on a grand agricultural map. But that was the point. The dormant-in-the-summer University of Wisconsin-Platteville made the perfect spot for the Bears’ training camp. Away from Chicago—five hours by car, unless you traveled at Payton speed and risked the almost-guaranteed speeding ticket—Platteville offered little but an insulated environment with lots of good flat football fields and meeting rooms and dorms far from prying eyes. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Members of the Chicago sports media would reluctantly make the trip—griping the whole way—and fans from southern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois and eastern Iowa would pile into the family cars to make the hot summer trips to watch the Bears go through preseason camp.

But Platteville was a place for the Bears to come together and focus on the season ahead with relatively few distractions. In July 1985, that focus was keen and narrow. The coach was fired up. So were the veterans. Still, it wasn’t as pleasant and unified an atmosphere as it could have been.

“Al was in between a linebacker and a defensive end; he was a slipper and a slider. You could put him up or you could put him down. Maybe he wasn’t the fastest guy, but he was agile enough and he had a great wingspan.”

—Ditka on Al Harris

Two key defensive members of the Bears’ 1984 team were holding out, looking for better contracts. Safety Todd Bell and linebacker/ defensive end Al Harris did not report to Platteville with their mates. Singletary had been disgruntled over his salary, too, and was, at least in theory, a brief holdout. But the Bears restructured his contract, and he showed up on time. Harris and Bell, however, would not show up all year. It became one of the sad parts of the 1985 Bears’ journey, a journey with so many epic overtones that would lead others to unique places—that two respected members of the stepping-stone unit would not be along for the ride.

And yet the band traveled onward, without the pair. Both Bell and Harris suffered from their exclusion, from the knowledge that business matters sometimes can’t trump personal loss. Of the two, Bell took it the hardest.

There was tragic irony when, in mid-March 2005, Bell suffered a heart attack while driving his car in suburban Columbus, Ohio, crashing into a house. His death came the day after the Bears’ Super Bowl players and coaches publicly agreed to work together with Bears management, often their enemy, on celebrating and capitalizing on the impending 20th-year anniversary of Super Bowl XX. The agreement was festively promoted in the Chicago media, with the
Sun-Times
even running a color photo of alumni Otis Wilson, Dennis McKinnon, Steve McMichael, Dent, and Fencik grinning wide in front of a Super Bowl XX logo, festooned with the group’s website:
www.85worldchamps.com
. Once again Bell had been reminded of what he had lost. Fellow holdout Harris told the
Chicago Tribune,
“Todd never let 1985 go. He felt betrayed. I had that feeling, too, but after a while, that’s life.”

Todd Bell was 47.

I liked Todd a lot.
But I never understood his holdout. Al’s either. Todd had Howard Slusher as his agent, and that was Slusher’s technique—sit out until you get what you want. Or don’t play. I know players don’t have much clout, but that was the biggest mistake of their careers.

Todd wanted something like $1.5 million for three years, and Jerry Vainisi, our GM, was offering a million. Al wanted, I don’t know, maybe a hundred grand more a year than was offered. Todd was a hitter. He was a banger. In the Washington playoff game the season before he changed the tempo of the game. We only won 23–19, and he put a lick on their running back, Joe Washington, that was unbelievable.

Al was in between a linebacker and a defensive end; he was a slipper and a slider. You could put him up or you could put him down. Maybe he wasn’t the fastest guy, but he was agile enough and he had a great wingspan. He used his weight well. And he was one of the nicest guys I’d ever been around, which just made it all so hard. But we had Duerson to replace Bell, and Wilbur Marshall had just finished his rookie year, and I knew he was going to be a star and could play where Harris was. If we moved Dan Hampton to defensive end from tackle and moved this huge new kid, William Perry, in next to Steve McMichael and did some other things, we would be set to go.

Actually, when you got down to it, Todd was limited. He was a blitzer, a guy who could tackle really hard, but he had no coverage ability. He was almost like a linebacker. That was part of the deal with the “46” defense—it was named after old safety Doug Plank, No. 46, and Plank was just a big hitter, like Todd. I went in before camp to talk to Jerry Vainisi, and he said, “Mike, we’re not gonna get these deals done with these two guys.”

That was hard to take, but I thought about it, and I said, “We’ll play without them.” That might sound cocky on my part, but I thought we could replace them. And I wanted to reward the guys who were in camp and had been busting their asses. They’d done everything we asked, and I wasn’t going to spit on them. You’re with us or you’re not.

I knew how the Bears were with money, how they’d always been. I came in as a rookie first-round pick in 1961 and got $12,000 and a $6,000 bonus. Then I went on to catch 56 passes for over 1,000 yards and 12 touchdowns and was named Rookie of the Year and made the Pro Bowl. The next year Halas tried to pay me less. You had to talk to the Old Man himself, face to face, in those deals. It was like looking at Mt. Rushmore. I finally got him all the way back up to $18,000, what I’d made the year before. But playing the game was the main thing; it always was.

“We had been building this team, and a lot of pieces were there before I came. The Bears were long known as a defensive team. But you had to have a quarterback, a good one. Otherwise we were never going to win.”

—Ditka

Buddy Ryan was our defensive coordinator, and when I told him he wouldn’t have Bell and Harris, he almost went nuts. Buddy was a holdover from when Neill Armstrong was head coach, as were most of the assistants. I know he thought Halas should have named him the next head coach, but there was nothing I could do about that. That didn’t help the tension between us.

At any rate, I talked to Todd and Al through the years, and it was always a little sad. They both came back the next year, but it wasn’t the same. They weren’t starters, and they weren’t going to be. That summer at the start of camp, though, I told our guys I believed in loyalty and I’d reward it. We were going to the Super Bowl because we had the players we needed.

Otis Wilson was there when I arrived in 1982, and so were Fencik and Walter and a lot of guys. We drafted Mike Richardson and Marshall and Reggie Phillips and Jim Covert, whom I thought was the best pick I ever made, at left tackle. We had Keith Van Horne and Jay Hilgenberg and Mark Bortz and Tom Thayer on the O-line and McKinnon and Gault at receivers and Tim Wright-man and Emery Moorehead, who gave me so much, at tight end, and we had Maury Buford as our new punter and Kevin Butler as the kicker.

We had Mike Singletary in the middle on defense, a guy they’d tell you now was too small to play or some damn thing. Right. Because they don’t measure your fricking heart! And, of course, we had Walter Payton in the middle on offense. He is to this day the greatest football player I’ve ever seen. Not the biggest. Not the fastest. Not the anything. Just the best player who ever played.

We had all kinds of people on that club, but they were focused like I was. Covert, I mean, on the first day he came to the Bears in 1983 I just said, “There’s left tackle, That’s yours.” And he never let me down. He had a short career because he hurt his back, but what a warrior he was.

He was a military guy, remember. He never berated you, but he knew how to get you to do what was needed. It was plain old leadership, but deep inside it was cockiness-he knew that he could lead.

—Ditka on Roger Staubach

We had been building this team, and a lot of pieces were there before I came. The Bears were long known as a defensive team. But you had to have a quarterback, a good one. Otherwise we were never going to win. I remember all of the conversations Coach Halas and Jim Finks had about Vince Evans, who came in 1977, about what a great, great athlete he was. Yeah, he was a great athlete, but he wasn’t a winner. Good or bad, that’s just the way it was.

See, I played with a winner in Dallas, a guy named Staubach. I knew what it took to play the position and be great—hell, Roger Staubach’s in the Hall of Fame. Maybe it took a cocky guy. Maybe not. You could have a calm guy like Roger, a guy who led by example, a guy who was smart, who you’d want in the foxhole with you. He was a military guy, remember. He never berated you, but he knew how to get you to do what was needed. It was plain old leadership, but deep inside it was cockiness—he knew that he could lead.

Now, we took McMahon with the first pick when I had just gotten to the Bears, and he had a different kind of brashness. The one problem he had was with authority. He had a problem with his father, he had a problem with his Brigham Young coach, and he had a problem with me. Authority figures. He was defiant just because he didn’t want to be known as a conformist or a guy who would listen. He sure as hell didn’t care about being an All-American boy.

But his teammates, especially the offense, believed in him. I guess I had a problem a little like his. In 1982 Ed McCaskey, the chairman of the board, who was married to Virginia Halas, the Old Man’s daughter, called me in. Ed and Virginia had a lot of kids, and their oldest son, Michael, was soon going to be president and CEO of the Bears. But Ed and Jim Finks wanted to talk to me about
something or other I’d said in the paper. I came in and they both went at me, telling me I couldn’t say whatever it was that I said. I honestly don’t remember. And they’re both dead.

But I do remember I told them, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave here and go to my office and call Mr. Halas, and I’m going to ask who’s running this football team.” So I got him on the line and I said, “Mr. Halas, I have to know—who do I answer to, you or them?”

He said, “Kid, you only answer to me.”

Maybe that wasn’t an authority problem I had, but it was a control issue. And the thing is, Halas had been tough with me and he gave me crap after my very first game as head coach. It was at Detroit, and we lost 17–10. We had two different chances to score from the 1-yard line, and we didn’t make it. The next morning I came into my office and there is the playbook opened to the page that says, “Quarterback Sneak.” Man, was he ticked off!

Anyway, here we are in camp and we have to rally together, all of us. The ones who are here. The ones ready for this goal. McMahon may have been a jerk—I remember his first year he ran the mile and a half in almost 13 minutes, walking the last part, looking like he was going to puke and die, behind everybody but our very heavy offensive lineman Noah Jackson—but he was on board. I read that in 1984, even with his lacerated kidney, he’d gone out for Halloween with his teammates, dressed as a priest, drunk. He had a Bible with him, and I guess when you opened it, there were photos of naked women inside. Well, this was football, not religion.