Forty years ago today, I watched the Bears win the Super Bowl with my best friend, which is the kind of thing that sounds ordinary until you realize how few people are still around that you can say that about.
We were Bears fans exiled in Indianapolis together, which in those days felt like being stranded in the wrong religion. So, we stuck together the way young men do when they are far from home and not yet aware how easily life separates people who swear it never will.
We watched Twenty together...
...Walter Payton, the 46 defense, the whole thing. A game so lopsided it felt less like a contest and more like a settling of old scores, 46–10, no mercy required because none was needed.
At the time, the 22 years between championships, from 1963 to that 1985 season felt endless. Like a personal injustice handed down to two kids who weren’t even alive the last time the Bears had mattered, and who had already grown tired of explaining loyalty for a team that rarely returned the favor.
Life, as it turns out, doesn’t care much about loyalty either.
The years pulled us apart quietly; jobs, families, geography, long stretches of silence. The kind of separation that doesn’t involve slammed doors or dramatic endings, just fewer calls until one day you realize you no longer know the details of another man’s life.
Someday one of us will go first, and the other will be left carrying the memory whether he wants it or not. Which in my case will always be that Sunday afternoon in 1986, two exiles in a borrowed city watching the Bears finally be great and washing away, if only for a few hours, the mediocrity we had grown up with.
Most seasons since have slipped by without much worth remembering, and we are no longer close. Barely in touch at all, but anytime the 46 defense or Walter Payton comes up, I don’t think about schemes or statistics. I think about my old friend, that day, and how quickly forty years can disappear.
Bear Down Bobby G...
