Last week, for the first time in years, I dusted off the Super Bowl XX video and put it in the VCR. Nostalgia had little to do with it. Like a coach, I wanted to study the things that had made the Bears successful; like any fan, I wanted a glimpse of the glory days to get me through the present darkness; and, like a cheap detective, I wanted to study a picture of the troubled family in better times, thinking that it would provide clues to the current problems. Because right now the Bears are a team–as Mike Ditka himself admits–in disarray. As one member of the Bears put it recently, where other teams used to come into Soldier Field fearing for their lives, they now come in nursing an armload of past offenses, thinking it’s pay-back time. It’s a story as old as the decline of Rome; the barbarians are at the door, chaos lurks on the other side of every game. Last Monday’s fiasco at Cleveland, played before a national TV audience, confirmed the worst.
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The fans have changed their attitude toward the Bears, and the old “everybody knows you when you’re up, nobody knows you when you’re down” line doesn’t fully explain the change. Clearly, the team doesn’t excite as it did four, three, or two years ago, or even as it did last season. The departure of Jim McMahon is not the sole aggravating change here, but it is the most noticeable and the most telling. For many fans–myself included–it was the last straw, coming as it did on the heels of the Bears’ shabby treatment of Willie Gault, Wilbur Marshall, Otis Wilson, Al Harris, and Todd Bell (the last two doubly done over by the Bears). When McMahon left, he said a number of things about the Bears and Ditka, with varying degrees of fairness, but his harshest, most direct, and most pointed attack was on Ditka’s belief that it’s good coaching, and not good football players, that wins games. McMahon said it would be a relief to be away from that sort of crap. The fans believe that version of events, and for good reasons. Look at the 1989 Bears compared to the 1985 championship team, and in every position where a starter has been replaced, the new man has a diminished personality, less character, and usually less ability. Mike Tomczak for McMahon, Neal Anderson for Walter Payton, Brad Muster for Matt Suhey, Ron Morris for Gault, Ron Rivera and Jim Morrissey (the latter now injured) for Marshall and Wilson. James Thornton for Emery Moorehead at tight end is the only position where the Bears have improved themselves in four seasons, and even that can be debated. Is it the Bears’ persistently poor drafting position–dictated by their success–that is responsible, or is Mike Ditka cleaning house?
That’s Mike Ditka’s fault, I believe, because the other thing Super Bowl XX shows is that the Bears had a potent offense. Their offensive line was at the peak of its ability, Payton was still a force, and Gault was amazing and–it should now be pointed out–essential. Wendell Davis and Ron Morris may have terrific hands, and they may know how to run a pattern, and they will probably put up better stats for most of their careers than Gault amassed that championship year: Gault caught only 33 passes, for only one touchdown (!) during the regular season. Yet he does so many things that Davis and Morris will never do; he changes the other team’s defense with his mere presence on the field. McMahon, meanwhile, was a marvel, and he knew how to use all the weapons in his arsenal. Overruling the plays of the cautious Ditka, he drove the Bears to lay it on thick, understanding that in football, momentum and initiative are precious and must never be relinquished. When the Bears lost McMahon–whether or not it’s true that he could no longer do what he had done on the football field–they lost the last great individual they had who could counterbalance Ditka.
