Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football Read online

  I met Kurt Becker at Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse & Bar in Lombard, a suburb twenty miles west of the city. Though Becker is huge, six six with dark shaggy hair, he’s half the size he was when he played. Asked about this, he laughed and said, “The small guys got big, and the big guys got small.” Becker grew up in Aurora, Illinois, and speaks in the nasal twang of a local. He roomed with McMahon in ’85, which had a downside. When McMahon got out of control, Ditka would fine him, and, when that had no effect, he’d fine Becker. “Not fair,” said Becker. “Not fair.” He’s not a fan of the modern game: as a lineman, he’s attracted to the most brutish aspects of the sport. To him, football is two big men seeing just who can push whom up against the wall. “I don’t like the ball being thrown all over the place,” he told me. “I like struggle, the drama of ball control. I want our offense to stay on the field. I like scoring slowly. I like eating up time on a long drive. To me, that’s football: you’re tired, you grind ’em, you recover, you prevail.”

  I met Emery Moorehead, who played tight end on the Super Bowl Bears. He grew up in Evanston. His mother worked in the post office, his father was a garbage collector. He was a high school star, then went to the University of Colorado. He played for the Giants and the Broncos before returning to Chicago. You always noticed him: square shouldered, head down, busting through the line just as he did when Evanston played New Trier. I met him in his office on the North Shore. He’s a real estate broker. He’s a bit of a ruin, too, a fallen-down house of a man, with all the material present but no longer distributed in the same way. I asked what it’s like to play in a big game: Are you scared in the locker room before? “You’re never fearful, and never ever think about what might happen,” he told me. “But the year I retired, I started watching the games on TV differently. I was seeing guys get flipped upside down, landing on the back of their necks, getting up and running back to the huddle, and I suddenly found myself thinking, Dude, that’s crazy! You could get killed!”

  I met Gary Fencik, the team’s All-Pro safety, at the Salt & Pepper Diner in Lincoln Park. He looks like he did when he played: a little guy who stayed little. He was dressed like a bond trader on his day off: faded jeans, loafers, flannel shirt. He has dark hair, a crooked smile, and a handsome face just banged up enough to be interesting. As I said, the ’85 Bears had a player for every kind of fan. If you were a small white guy in Chicagoland, it was Fencik, the Yale-educated defensive back from Barrington. He was the version of us that did not peak in the tenth grade but kept getting better, until he was bathed in champagne and raising the Super Bowl trophy over his head. He still holds the team record for the most interceptions. He was an extraordinarily hard hitter. He often timed it so he reached the receiver at the same moment as the ball. To fans, he’ll always be “the hit man.”

  As we talked, he kept an eye on the TVs showing football games. We watched as a quarterback, crushed from the blind side, was helped off the field. A few minutes later, he was back. I wondered why, knowing what we now know about the long-term effects of head injuries, a player would return after such a hit. “You will unless someone stops you,” Fencik explained. “The first thing you do when the cobwebs clear is run right on the field. It’s instinct. You’re in the game, you get dinged, you come to on the sideline and realize your team is out there. You don’t think about what it will mean when you’re forty. You just think, Whoa, I’m missing it! It’s panic. It’s like that bad dream you have when you’re a kid. It’s the day of the big test and you’re late for school.”

  After breakfast, I rode with Fencik downtown. He was looking for a place to park. When I noticed a spot, he pointed to a No Parking sign. I said I found it hard to believe that anyone in Chicago would give Gary Fencik a ticket. He said, “Yeah, well, they do,” thought a moment, then added, “but not speeding tickets.” He’d recently been pulled over on the highway. The cop, a young woman, took his license to the patrol car but returned in a few minutes, handed it back, and said, “My father and brothers are big Bears fans. If I give you a ticket, they’ll kick my ass.”

  * * *

  I’d long considered pro football players to be among the dumbest American celebrities. I’d interviewed more than a few over the years and always found their answers vague, bland, and thoughtless. They talked and talked but said nothing. Of course, the players had been trained to talk this way—something I understood later. A person is a person, after all, and will reflect on every situation, especially one as violently dramatic as life in the NFL, but athletes who want to stay in the league learn to answer questions without making news. The colorful players are pushed out or characterized as flakes. But talking to the ’85 Bears long after retirement, I found them to be some of the smartest, most reflective people I’d ever interviewed. Something big happened to them long ago—so big it cleaved their lives into sections: during and after. And many of them have spent their middle years thinking about it: What happened? What did it mean? I found I could ask them the questions I’d always wanted answered: What’s it like in the locker room before a game? What does a man think as he lies broken on the field? Were you ever scared? What did you really think of the fans? When does the fake TV hate turn into the real thing? How do you go on living after the life you’ve always wanted is over? My notebooks were filling with more than anecdotes and stories, but with a picture of an era. This might be true if you studied any group of people carefully, but the ’85 Bears offered an especially vivid sample, a collection of men who spent the peak years of their lives together before time carried them away. In the seasons that followed the Super Bowl, each went on to finish his career and live his life. Some succeeded, some failed, some died. Taken together, they experienced everything.

  Safety Doug Plank, the namesake of the 46 defense, as he was in his prime

  * * *

  Of all the Bears I spent time with, my favorite was Doug Plank. He was off the roster by ’85 yet remained the spirit of the team, the personification of the vicious, hard-hitting 46, the defensive scheme that defined the Bears in the 1980s. We met in Scottsdale, where Plank has lived for the last several years. In his playing days, he was a shade under six feet, a biscuit under two hundred, a quick, mean safety who roamed all over the field. His hair was surfer blond, his eyes a glazed happy blue. Every player has a Doug Plank story. He was a maniac. From first play to last, his career was defined by big hits. “I remember his final game,” said Steve McMichael, a slightly crazed defensive end. “A big old behemoth pulling guard … came around. Here goes Doug, forcing the play. He came up, the guy didn’t try to cut him, so Doug took him on high. Doug took his ass out—boom, hit him as hard as he could. It laid out the guard, but it pinched both nerves on both sides of [Doug’s] neck so badly that all he could do was stand there.”

  “Nah, that’s not what happened,” Plank told me. “It was a short pass, a curl. I was coming from my safety position ’cause the pass was only ten yards. I was breaking on the ball and didn’t realize that another one of our players was coming just as hard from the other side. Otis Wilson. As I was getting ready to put my helmet into the receiver, he fell down. At the last second—I don’t even know if I really remember this—I saw a flash of Otis coming full speed. We went head-first. Next thing I know, I was on all fours with something dripping from my face. My helmet had come down and opened my nose. It was busted, blood pouring out. And next to me is Otis on his back, eyes wide open, staring into oblivion, out cold.”

  “It was in Detroit,” Wilson said. “I had the receiver, and Doug—he don’t see the ball. He just see the man, torpedoes himself right into people. And he got me. I’m coming this way and he’s coming that way. I’m 245, he’s 196—so he ain’t gonna win. I was pissed off at that son of a bitch. Open your eyes! He was a great guy but he’d knock the shit out of you.”

  “It was a spinal concussion,” Plank told me. “About the only thing I can compare it to is sticking your finger in a socket. I stuck my finger in plenty of sockets when
I was a kid so I know what I’m talking about. That was happening in the lower half of my body. Numb. Pins and needles. That feeling in my left leg, it never went away.”

  It was Plank who gave the defense its name: the 46. Many fans assume it came from the on-field alignment of players, as with the 3–4 defense and the Cover 2. In fact, 46 means nothing more than we’re coming hard, in the way of the man who wears that number, Doug Plank.

  The defense was a puzzle, a blizzard of reads and options, but, when I spoke to Plank, he summed it up like this: “We’re going to get to know your backup quarterback today.”

  Plank has slimmed down since his playing days but is still blond, tough, handsome, and cool. He’s the sort of older kid you meet at camp and follow around all summer. He’s not gotten away as clean as Baschnagel—he’s had a knee replaced and has titanium shoulders. The aftereffects of life as a missile. When I asked what caused the damage, he said, “Every body has a certain amount of hits in it. Mine had 237. Unfortunately, I took 352.”

  Even when the Bears were bad, there was Payton on offense and Plank on defense. A late hitter? A dirty player? “Well, yeah, you’d look at it and say, ‘Gosh, Plank came late and took that guy’s head off.’ But all I was doing was flying over the pile; what looked like a big collision was just me sailing by. One time, I remember going back and saying to the ref, ‘But I didn’t even hit the guy.’ And he said, ‘Maybe not, but you had bad intentions.’ And you know what? He was right. I had bad intentions from the moment I walked on a football field.”

  Plank was one of the only players to ever knock the great power running back Earl Campbell out of a game. “We watched film of the Broncos’ safety Steve Foley trying to tackle Earl,” Plank told me. “Generally, with film, you see everyone on the line, then the action, then it cuts to the next play. In this case, we saw Earl break through the line and Foley come to make the tackle. He put his helmet into one of Earl’s thighs. But his thigh pads were thirty-four inches. Mammoth. Think about it. I had a twenty-nine-inch waist. Foley got knocked back, then knocked out. Instead of cutting to the next play, the film stayed on the scene as the medics carried Foley away. Buddy [Ryan] turned off the camera and said, ‘If any of you guys don’t want to play this weekend, let me know.’ So I sat there, thinking: You know what? I’m not going to hit Earl Campbell in the legs. He wore metal thigh pads, not the foam rubber type like in Pop Warner. When Earl hit you, it sounded like an aluminum baseball bat: doinggg, doinggg. So I thought, Where is Earl Campbell vulnerable? Yes, yes, between the legs. So that whole game, I was waiting for the moment I could drive my helmet into the vulnerable area. When I finally got the chance, I put him down.”

  Plank numbers his own concussions, from dings to who-am-I-and-why-am-I-here blasts, in double digits. He carried smelling salts in his waistband to bring himself around. After an especially big hit, he would shake his head, then look at his uniform. “If it was the dark one, I’d tell myself, ‘Go stand with the guys in the dark jerseys.’” He knew the protocol, how to keep himself in a game. “You’d run to the sideline and the doctor would hold up his fingers, how many, how many? It was always two.”

  Judged by today’s standards, Plank told me his entire career would be considered a penalty, an endless whistle blowing in the canyons of hell. “What’s football?” he asked. “It’s chess. Tackle chess. And what’s the quarterback? He’s the king. Take him out, you win the game. So that was our philosophy. We’re going to hit that quarterback ten times. We do that, he’s gone. I hit him late? Fine. Penalize me. But it’s like in those courtroom movies, when the lawyer says the wrong thing and the judge tells the jury to disregard it, but you can’t unhear and the quarterback can’t be unhit.”

  Plank wishes every fan could cover an opening kickoff in the NFL, just for the excitement, the rush of running downfield with the noise and the color and the scoreboard and the big hit waiting as a beer waits at the end of a long day. Doug Plank represented the regular man, which is why he was so beloved by fans. He was a good high school player, but neither big nor fast enough to attract Division I scouts. So he scouted himself, writing up his games at his desk in Pennsylvania, sending these reports to Joe Paterno, the coach of Penn State, where Plank had always dreamed of playing.

  The day after his last high school game, Doug was shooting baskets in the gym when Paterno walked in: glasses, blue windbreaker. He called Doug over, then turned to the gym teacher and said, “Coach, okay if we use your office?” Paterno sat Doug down, then broke his heart, returning the letters, complimenting his spirit but telling him he was too small to play big-time college football. He offered to write letters of introduction to Division III schools.

  A few weeks later, Doug was called to the principal’s office, where Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, was waiting. He said, “Doug, how’d you like a full scholarship to play football for me?”

  “It’s what I’ve dreamed of all my life,” Plank told him.

  Sophomore year, an assistant coach asked Plank, who rarely started at Ohio State, if he ever wondered why he’d gotten that scholarship.

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “’Cause Woody heard Paterno had been to see you and wanted to screw him up.” After Plank’s rookie NFL season, in which he led the Bears in tackles, Paterno began invoking the story as a cautionary tale. “Keep an open mind,” he’d tell his scouts. “One of the little guys might be another Doug Plank.”

  It was a fluke that brought Plank to the Bears, who took him, for sentimental reasons, in the twelfth round, which is like not being drafted. “That’s why I played the way I did,” he told me. “The good players, the guys with talent, they have an A game, a B game, a C game. They don’t feel perfect, it’s practice, okay, go with the B game. I didn’t have that option. There was only the A game for me—as hard as I could every time or I would not be on the field; that’s what gave me such intensity.”

  “He used to take guys out in practice like you do in games,” McMichael wrote. “I guess that’s why our offense stunk back then, nobody was going to catch a pass over the middle. [Doug] used to hit guys so hard he’d knock himself out.”

  “He coldcocked me in practice,” said Baschnagel. “We were just in helmets, no pads. Inside. On a gym floor. I went across the middle, and he nailed me. As he helped me up, he said, ‘Oh, Brian, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was you.’ Then, ten minutes later, he does the same thing. This time, as he helps me up, he says, ‘That time I did know it was you, Brian.’”

  When I asked Plank what makes someone a hitter, he thought a moment, then said, “Try running into a wall. A normal person will slow down at the last moment—a hitter will accelerate. When people say I was great in my day, I say, No, I was just able to control my mind for those few seconds before impact. I never slowed down. I sped up. That’s what makes a hitter. Not size, not speed. It’s the ability to suppress your survival instincts. We’ve all known big physical players that just don’t want to hit. We’ve seen people that you look at and go, no way, but they put a uniform on and become a terror. If you can convince yourself that what you’re doing on that field is not going to hurt you, you’ll be capable of anything. It takes practice. You have to develop the mental capacity to keep moving those legs even when you know pain is coming.

  “When I played, I played angry,” he added. “It sounds childish, but I would trick my mind into believing that the person on the other side had done something to me or my family and now it was time to deliver justice. It sounds shallow, but you have to work yourself up into a fury. I never went to the Super Bowl. I never played in a Pro Bowl. But here’s one thing I did do: hit as hard as I possibly could every time I possibly could.”

  To me, Doug Plank was a revelation. Not only because he was smart and funny but also because he has considered and reconsidered every moment of his career. He’s thoughtful. What’s more, he typifies the Bears mentality. “You get to Chicago and you look around and see all the incredible history,” he told me. �
��Halas, Butkus, the defenses, the Hall of Famers, and you feel like you have an obligation. When I first got there, people told me, ‘Doug, win or lose, you’d better be tough and physical, you better play like a Bear.’ I remember my mind-set going out onto the fields in those first years: If we were not going to beat the other team, we were at least going to beat them up.” He was a throwback, a perfect example of an old-time player; in him, you recognized the energy and gleeful anger that made football the national game. What is baseball when you can watch Doug Plank seek frontier justice on a Sunday afternoon? He could have played with Jim Thorpe, or Red Grange, or Bronko Nagurski—he could still be playing today. He’s the foot soldier, the cannon fodder, the grunt, the sort of player who has lit the boards from the beginning. It was hard hitters from the grim coal towns that made the game worth watching. In Doug Plank, you see the spirit and history of the Chicago Bears, and of the game itself.

  3

  THE OLD ZIPPEROO

  The Chicago Bears played their first season as the Staleys, the pride of A. E. Staley, a starch manufacturer in Decatur, Illinois, one of many industrial teams that characterized early pro football.