Now is perhaps the best time to celebrate the 1985 Chicago Bears, champions of Super Bowl XX. Because if there was ever any doubt that that was a great team–a great team not only in what it accomplished but in its comprising a unique and enduring group of characters–the season just completed last Sunday proved the point once and for all. The core of that team remained intact through this season, and–in all likelihood–it will remain on into next season. Dan Hampton is the only player who has announced he will not return. Yet 1991 does not bode as well for the Bears as 1990 did, and when we look back at what poor prospects 1990 held for the Bears a year ago–well, that’s putting a dim cast indeed on the future.
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We have to remember how dire things looked for the Bears a year ago in order to appreciate their season, and we have to remember what pleasure these players have offered during the course of their careers–most of them getting on toward ten years or more–in order to bring the entire picture into focus. The 1985 Bears were a great team, a gathering of characters that comes along once a generation, like the 1969 Cubs. What’s clear now is that, beneath the flash of “Super Bowl Shuffle” stars Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, Willie Gault, and William “Refrigerator” Perry (all but Perry now departed, and he, even, possessed of a very different character now), there lurked a core of great players who possessed no less character than those stars and who were, in the end, more important to the continuing success of the team (if not to the team’s Super Bowl chances from year to year). Hampton, Steve McMichael, Jay Hilgenberg, Jimbo Covert, Mark Bortz–along with lesser lights of the “Shuffle,” Mike Singletary and Richard Dent–what characters they were and are, how clearly they demonstrated that character in almost every instant they appeared on the field, and, in the end, what great football they played. That they rallied their forces, one last time, to make the playoffs after everyone else–fans, writers, and this column included–had written them off, was perhaps the most amazing feat of their careers. Because make no mistake: they will never again reach the playoffs as an identifiable group of 1985 holdovers.
If that sounds slightly patronizing, we should perhaps point out that their season, if not an active deception of the fans, was at least something of a mirage. They couldn’t beat a decent team, and that included their opening-round playoff victory against the New Orleans Saints. We withdrew our prediction the Bears would lose to the Saints immediately after seeing New Orleans’s last game the Monday before the playoffs began. The Bears are a team of aged, great players who aroused themselves for one last season; the Saints are not only incapable of arousing themselves half the time, they have few good players, let alone great ones. The Bears beat the Saints and went on, last Sunday, to lose miserably to the New York Giants. It was no decent way to go out, but “in life,” as coach Mike Ditka says, there are few good exits.
The Bears’ loss was a beginning to lose its bite by the time the lockerroom interviews began. By the time we went to the Stadium last Monday night to watch the Bulls defend first place against the Milwaukee Bucks, the Bears were all but forgotten. Odd, isn’t it, that it’s the Bears, now, who fill the tune between the baseball and basketball seasons, that they’re no longer an obsession but simply a way to while away the time? And what they fill that time with, for the most part these days, is not fine, exciting football but memories of what once was. We’ll settle for that.
