I was six
years old when I first saw Dick Butkus play football.
It was 1972, and I was
sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room watching the Chicago Bears on
television. I didn't understand defenses or formations. I didn't know what a
middle linebacker was supposed to do, but I understood Dick Butkus.
He looked like a warrior.
I remember telling my dad
that I wanted to be Dick Butkus when I grew up. The Oldman looked down at me
and gave me one of those answers fathers give their sons, an answer that
doesn't mean much when you are six but somehow makes more sense fifty-four
years later.
“You'll never be Dick Butkus. Just
work hard at being you.”
That afternoon, without
knowing it, I became a Chicago Bears fan, and the Bears have been there ever
since.
Three years later came Walter Payton.
In 1975, Sweetness arrived in
Chicago, and the deal was sealed. Then came 1977. Walter ran for more than
1,800 yards, Bob Avellini was behind center, and the Bears went 9–5 and reached
the playoffs. It was the first Bears playoff team of my lifetime.
People can give me McMahon, Cutler, this
new kid out of USC, whoever they want, but Bob Avellini will always be
my favorite Bears quarterback.
Because sometimes your
favorite player isn't the greatest player. He is the one who was there when you
first believed.
Then came 1985.
Chicago didn't merely have a
football team that year. We had a civic religion. The Super Bowl Shuffle, McMahon,
Sweetness, Singletary, Hampton, Mongo, Otis Wilson, Wilber Marshall, Fencik,
Richard Dent, The Fridge, and Mike Ditka.
I go against the grain on this one, but I
have always believed the coach who really won that Super Bowl was not Ditka. It
was Buddy Ryan and that defense.
The Bears went
15–1, then 3–0 in the playoffs, including consecutive shutouts, before
destroying New England 46–10 in Super Bowl XX.
For a Bears kid who had
started with Butkus, we had finally reached the mountaintop, but football isn't
really about mountaintops.
Not when you follow a team for fifty-four
years. It is about all the ordinary Sundays in between.
It is walking into the backdoor at 220 South
Lombard wearing a $124 Chicago Bears
Starter jacket and having the Oldman look at me like I had just
invested my life savings in magic beans.
“Why did you waste your money
on that?”
Then he told me something
else. Someday, the Bears wouldn't be as important to me as they were then. Damn
him, he was right again.
Because life happened, but through the
ups and downs. The good days and the bad. The Chicago Bears were always there.
I remember my wife bringing a
breast pump to a Bears game,
disappearing at halftime to pump and dump so we could stay for the second half.
Try explaining that to Dick Butkus.
I have sat inside the old
Soldier Field on a November Sunday when the wind came howling off Lake Michigan
and cold worked its way through your boots, your gloves and eventually your
bones.
I have also sat in a
neighborhood tavern staring at a Bears game on an old Zenith television with an
Old Style in front of me.
Both somehow
felt like church.
Then came Super Bowl XLI. The
Bears lost to the Baltimore Colts,
29–17, in the rain in Miami. I don't remember that night primarily for Rex
Grossman's interceptions or Peyton Manning holding the Lombardi Trophy. I
remember my six-month-old son George lying on my belly while we watched the
game.
The Bears lost, but I had my boy and somehow,
that made everything all right.
That
is what fifty-four years does to a football fan.
The six-year-old who once
watched grown men as mythological warriors is now a sixty-year-old man watching
players young enough to be his sons.
Some of my warriors are
gone. Walter Payton, Dave Duerson, Dick Butkus, Doug Buffone, Steve McMichael and
now Matt Suhey, Walter's great friend, and lead blocker, gone at only sixty-eight.
He sure seemed older when he was 28.
One by one, the names that once seemed
permanent remind us that nothing really is.
Not football players.
Not fathers.
Not marriages.
Not childhood.
Not us.
Maybe that is why sports
begin to mean something different as we get older. Terence Mann talks in Field of Dreams about baseball marking time
and remaining a constant as America changes around it.
I have come to understand exactly what
he meant.
Because since that afternoon
in 1972, when a little boy sat on the floor of his parents' living room and
announced that he wanted to grow up to be Dick Butkus, I have watched the
Chicago Bears go 410–438–1.
Four hundred and ten
victories. Four hundred and thirty-eight losses and one tie.
Miraculous victories that sent me screaming
around the room. Heartbreaking losses that ruined perfectly good Sundays.
Great teams, terrible teams. Quarterbacks
who were going to save us and quarterbacks we couldn't wait to get rid of.
Coaches arriving as geniuses and departing
with moving boxes.
Soldier Field changed, Chicago
changed, the NFL changed, my family changed and I have changed.
I
finally understand what my Oldman was trying to tell that six-year-old boy. Do
not spend your life trying to become somebody else's hero, work hard at
being you, and maybe he was right about that ridiculous Starter
jacket, too.
The
Bears aren't as important to me today as they were when I was twenty. Something
better happened, they became part of the scenery of my life.
Every September, the leaves begin turning.
The air off Lake Michigan gets colder. Somewhere, somebody pulls an old Bears
sweatshirt from the closet.
Soldier Field fills again, and another
generation of Chicago kids discovers its own Butkus, Payton or McMichael.
And I take my place again.
I am not six anymore, but sixty.
Older, hopefully wiser, and certainly more
aware that our seasons together are numbered.
But still watching, still remembering,
and still believing that maybe this Sunday will be one of the good ones.
The one constant through all the years,
Jumbo, has been the Chicago Bears. On the shores of Lake Michigan, autumn has returned. The Monsters of
the Midway are playing football, and somewhere inside this sixty-year-old man,
that six-year-old boy is still sitting on the living-room floor.
Bear Down.
