Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (5 page)

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.

When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, George Halas was a kind of god. His face seemed to hover over the city. The lantern jaw and steely skull, eyes blazing. Fury burned like a fire in the old man, flames seen through the window of a dilapidated mansion. Halas was an Old Testament god. In his years as coach of the Bears, he would race up and down the sidelines, screaming at referees and opposing players. The air around him turned blue. A lot’s in dispute about his legacy, but one thing seems settled: his favorite word was “cocksucker.” After a loss in Minnesota, he got on the plane’s PA system and said, “You’re all a bunch of fucking cunts.” End of speech. On one occasion, when a ref threw a flag, Halas shouted, “You stink, you lousy cocksucker!” The ref threw another flag, marked off fifteen more penalty yards, then said, “How do I smell from here, Halas?” He said that he retired from coaching only because his bad hip didn’t let him make it up and down the sidelines fast enough to keep up with the referees. He was known for being stingy, angry, and mean. Years before, when he docked Ditka’s salary, the young tight end said, “The old man is so cheap, he throws around nickels like they’re manhole covers.” It was a nasty thing to say, and it stuck. By the 1980s, it was the main impression fans had of Halas. Of course, like almost everything else said about old people, it was half considered, unfair, shallow, and wrong.

The bones sat close to the surface of Halas’s face. He looked like sculpture. Even when he was alive, he resembled a bust in the Hall of Fame. The high cheekbones, sharp nose, and exaggerated jaw that gave him a wicked underbite—it made the old man look like he was forever grinding his teeth or girding for a blow. His chin was dimpled in the axe-wound way of Kirk Douglas, a recognizable feature from his first schoolboy photo to the last shots snapped by local paparazzi. It was an iconic Chicago face, a West Side face, the face of a boss or alderman, as familiar as the silhouette of the Sears Tower.

Halas was born in 1895 and grew up in that part of the city once known as Pilsen, many of its early inhabitants having emigrated from the area around Pilsen, Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. Back then, Chicago was a quilt of immigrant neighborhoods, communities of outcasts, each more despised than the next. You lived with everyone from everywhere. Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Greeks. It gave Halas a broad-mindedness that distinguished him from other players in the early years of the NFL. Halas could get along with anyone as long as he could play.

Coach Halas working the sideline. When he disputed a referee’s call, the air around him turned blue. October 25, 1959

Pilsen was one of those redbrick neighborhoods you see from the window of the elevated train, broad streets rushing toward the vanishing point, narrow houses, shades drawn in the upper stories, neon in the saloon windows, church spires, hardware stores, stoops, iron, ruin, and rain. The fire escapes were complicated weaves of rotting wood. Halas’s father was a brewer, a barkeep, and a tailor. He owned a grocery on 18th Place and Wood Street, three miles west of the Loop. George and his siblings lived in rooms above the store. In the summer, George shoveled coal for 50 cents a week, money he saved for college. Later reminiscences of his youthful striving had the comical ring of the miser telling you how he walked three miles to school, uphill both ways: “It was sometimes said of me that I threw dollars as though they were manhole covers,” he wrote in
Halas by Halas
. “That is correct. It is precisely what I did do. By being careful with money, I have been able to accomplish things I consider important.”

Halas was a Cubs fan, a member of the last generation of Chicagoans who did not have their hearts broken by the team, then a dominant franchise. The Cubs played in West Side Park, a jewel box with curtained opera seats, brownstones looming. The stadium was demolished in 1920, lost in the way of Atlantis, sunk to the subconscious of the city. Baseball was the only pro team sport, and Halas watched with the fascination of the fan who recognizes a possibility: maybe, if I keep getting better. Though scrawny, he was a natural athlete, a master of every variety of stoop- and stickball game, the flea you make the mistake of underestimating. To get to West Side Park, he had to cross 14th Street, which meant fording the territory of the 14th Street Boys, a gang of jacket-wearing, punch-throwing gutter rats. “I would take a sock at the nearest punk and run,” Halas wrote later. “I believe that’s how I developed the speed that later was to be helpful in all sports.”

Running from thugs was football in its primal state, with the object not scoring but surviving. In the early years of the pro game, scouts looked for players with the toughest childhoods: those who had to fight would have the instincts. The street games that preceded high school, games we all played, were football stripped to its essence—a run from the 14th Street Boys confined to a playground. Mob ball, gang ball. Anything can be done to you as long as you hold the rock. Those who give it up too soon will be considered cowards; those who hang on as the blows rain down will be esteemed. Halas came to favor a half dozen phrases, but the highest was reserved for players who kept the ball a moment longer than seemed reasonable. Such men had “the old zipperoo.”

Halas excelled in every sport, but football was his favorite. The game itself was still relatively new; it had appeared in New England only after the Civil War. Here and there, it was banned as too violent. In Boston, where it was played at the beginning of the week, it was called Bloody Monday. It eventually was picked up by students. The first official college game was played between Rutgers and Princeton in November 1869. There really was no professional football, though there were a few independent teams, perhaps, fielded by factory owners who, caught in a rivalry, might pay ringers. For its first forty years, football meant college, where it became a sensation. By the time Halas was old enough to read the sports summaries in the
Chicago Tribune
, sixty thousand fans were filling the stadium in Champaign-Urbana to watch the University of Illinois play Michigan or Wisconsin or Northwestern, or any of the other Big Ten teams.