1985 Bears Postseason Flashback: "Men Against Boys"

In the two weeks between the Bears’ dismantling of the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game and their date with destiny in Super Bowl XX, Chicagoans were guardedly optimistic. Their teams had a history of near misses and other failures that made it impossible for many fans to fully savor the ride on which the Bears were taking them.

The Bears themselves were confident that they could not lose. Oddsmakers made them double-digit favorites, and the Bears swaggered into New Orleans as conquering heroes. Certainly no team ever entered the Super Bowl with a more colorful cast of characters. Their propensity for unpredictable quotes made the Bears an ongoing media event. One New Orleans sportscaster—not content with the actual outrageous statements of the Bears—falsely reported that quarterback Jim McMahon had called the local women “a bunch of sluts.” This was a rare instance in which the controversial McMahon was blameless. However, he did moon photographers at a workout to show them, he said, the part of his anatomy that was being treated with acupuncture.

The AFC champion New England Patriots were almost forgotten in the general hubbub surrounding the Bears. It wasn’t that the Patriots weren’t deserving (they had won 12 of their last 14 games); it was just that they weren’t the Miami Dolphins—with whom the Bears wished to settle accounts. But the Dolphins hadn’t made it to New Orleans, and the Patriots would have to do.

In a meeting of the Bears’ defensive coaches and players the night before the Super Bowl, Buddy Ryan all but confirmed the rumors that he was leaving to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. “Whatever happens tomorrow,” he told the players, “I want you to know that you’re my heroes.” He then left the room, overcome with emotion. 

The group began watching some film of the Patriots. After just a few minutes, Dan Hampton concluded that the session had gone on long enough. He kicked the projector off its stand. Steve McMichael then hurled a chair through the chalkboard on which some plays had been diagrammed. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” said Hampton. Without anyone saying another word, the players all got up and walked out of the room. The meeting was over, and the Bears were ready.

  

“I’LL MEET YOU GUYS AT THE QUARTERBACK.”

Once the game started, New England had a brief glimmer of hope. On the second play of the game, Walter Payton fumbled at the Bears’ 19-yard line and the Patriots recovered. “Here we go again,” thought all the Chicagoans who’d learned from bitter experience not to trust their teams too much. But New England quarterback Tony Eason misfired on three pass attempts, and the Patriots settled for a field goal.

Although they were behind 3-0 with the game barely a minute old, it was already perfectly plain by now that the Bears would win. The Patriots had no more idea how to move the ball against them than they’d had four months earlier, when they rushed for only 27 yards in a 20-7 loss at Soldier Field. 

Convinced by the September 15 game that his team couldn’t run on the Bears, New England coach Raymond Berry felt he had no choice but to come out throwing. Therefore, Eason felt the full force of the Bears’ merciless pass rush on almost every play. In the Bears’ defensive huddle, Hampton said, “I’ll meet you guys at the quarterback.”

“We knew that if we got them into a passing situation,” Mike Singletary said, “we’d have things wrapped up.” 

The Bears’ next two possessions resulted in field goals by Kevin Butler. Then Richard Dent stripped the ball from Patriots running back Craig James, and Singletary pounced on it at the New England 13. Two plays later, Matt Suhey carried 11 yards for a touchdown.

At the end of the first quarter, the Bears led 13-3. New England had run ten plays for minus-19 yards. “It was like trying to beat back the tide with a broom,” said Patriots guard Ron Wooten. The second quarter saw more of the same. “I tried to scramble,” Eason said, “but there was no place to go.” The Patriots simply could not block the Bear defenders. Eason was 0-for-6 passing and had been sacked three times when he was removed from the game, for his own good, five minutes before halftime.

It was 23-3 at the intermission. By now even the most pessimistic Chicagoan must have known that nothing could stop the Bears. “It’s the men against the boys out there,” said NBC analyst Pete Axthelm.

Veteran Steve Grogan replaced the shell-shocked Eason and fared somewhat better, but the Bears continued to pour it on. McMahon hit Willie Gault for 60 yards on their first play of the second half; he concluded the 96-yard drive eight plays later with a quarterback sneak from one yard out. A 28-yard interception return by Reggie Phillips and a one-yard plunge by William Perry gave the Bears their last two touchdowns.

The score was 44-3 when head coach Mike Ditka called off the dogs and replaced his starters early in the fourth quarter. New England finally scored a touchdown on an eight-yard pass from Grogan to Irving Fryar after a 12-play drive against the Bears’ second-team defense. Later, an obscure defensive end named Henry Waechter ended the day’s scoring when he sacked Grogan in the end zone for a safety.

Ditka took a lot of flak for not trying harder to get Payton a touchdown at some point—especially since Perry, the coach’s favorite novelty act, got the chance to score from the one-yard line in the third quarter. Ditka admitted that he should have realized before it was too late that Payton hadn’t scored in the game. But it was difficult to see how a token touchdown in a blowout game, even if it was the Super Bowl, would have added much luster to Payton’s incomparable career. What really mattered was that he and his teammates were world champions.

 

RYAN AND DITKA ARE CARRIED OFF THE FIELD.

When it was over, both Ditka and Ryan were carried off the field in triumph. The Bears had been splendid on both sides of the ball, and the final score of 46-10 made it the most lopsided Super Bowl up to that time. Practically any one of a dozen Bears could have taken MVP honors, which ended up going to Dent. McMahon, for example, passed to six different receivers for 256 yards and ran for two touchdowns, while Gault caught four balls for 129 yards. Ryan’s defenders disrupted everything that New England tried to do, limiting the Patriots to a mere 123 yards on offense—seven on the ground.

“It will be many years,” Paul Zimmerman wrote in Sports Illustrated, “before we see anything approaching the vision of hell that Chicago inflicted on the poor New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. It was near perfect, an exquisite mesh of talent and system, defensive football carried to its highest degree. It was a great roaring wave that swept through the playoffs, gathering force and momentum until it finally crashed home in New Orleans’ Superdome in pro football’s showcase game.”

After exceeding even the wildest dreams of their fans all season, the Bears outdid themselves when it mattered most. In three postseason games, they scored 91 points and yielded only 10. Their opponents averaged fewer than 145 yards per game and converted three third downs out of 36.

The 1985 Bears showed football fans a level of excellence that had seldom been attained. They talked big, played bigger, and shuffled into a place in history. 

  

 

Check out our book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports on Amazon.

The Fog Bowl

When Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan resigned after the 1986 Super Bowl to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, the uneasy truce that he and Mike Ditka had observed for four years was fractured. Since they no longer had to work together, each man was now free to say just what he thought of the other. Both men made full use of the privilege in a series of recriminations back and forth through the media.
     The feud was good theater, and it sparked interest in the Eagles-Bears playoff game at Soldier Field on the last day of 1988. Unfortunately, the crowd of 65,534 and the national television audience saw only the first half. The second half was rendered all but invisible by fog.
    Neal Anderson’s four-yard touchdown blast put the Bears ahead 14-6 with 6:21 remaining in the second quarter. This took place under sunny skies. But when Kevin Butler added a field goal some four minutes later, the fog was rolling in from Lake Michigan and creeping over the stands. Within minutes, the whole field had been obscured.
    

KEVIN BUTLER KICKS A FIELD GOAL.

For the rest of the game, the spectators could not see a thing. Nor could the TV cameras capture the action going on behind the thick curtain of fog. “I felt like I was on another planet,” a CBS producer remarked. For the players and officials on the field, visibility was better—but still less than 20 yards. “Have I ever played in anything like that before?” said Butler. “I haven’t even driven in anything like that before.”
     Philadelphia’s Luis Zendejas kicked two field goals (his third and fourth of the game) through the mist in the second half, and Butler booted another to make the final score Bears 20, Eagles 12. The game was quite unremarkable but for the fog. Quarterbacks Mike Tomczak of the Bears and Randall Cunningham of the Eagles tossed three interceptions apiece. The Eagles outplayed the Bears in most aspects, but they frittered away one opportunity after another—particularly in the first half, when Cunningham had two touchdown passes called back for penalties and another would-be touchdown strike dropped in the end zone.
     Despite 430 total yards and 22 first downs, the Eagles never breached the Bears’ goal line. “Credit the Bear defense,” Ryan said. “Every time we got down there, we didn’t make anything happen. We stopped ourselves. The effort was there, the heart was there, but it just didn’t happen.”
     The Bears were delighted to have gotten away with the victory that few people saw. “One good thing will come out of this,” said center Jay Hilgenberg. “We’ll have a short film session tomorrow. I mean, what are the coaches gonna show us?”
     Bob Verdi of the Tribune had the last word on the game that was known forever after as the Fog Bowl. “Somewhere over there on the lakefront,” he wrote, “there’s a guy who left his seat late in the first half to find a restroom and he’s still out there, trying to find his wife.”

 

 

Check out our book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports on Amazon.

Dave Duerson, 1950 - 2011

    

DAVE DUERSON

     When rookie safety Dave Duerson, a third-round draft pick out of Notre Dame, was informed that he had made the Bears' roster at the close of training camp in 1983, he did not receive the good news from defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan in quite the way that he'd imagined. He wasn't told, "Welcome aboard; we're glad to have you!" Instead, the crusty Ryan told him, "You better be good. I had to cut my best friend to make room for you." Ryan was referring to Doug Plank, the human missile whose uniform number had given the famed "46" defense its name.
     Duerson, who passed away last week at the age of 50, turned out to be pretty good. He played seven years for the Bears, the last five as a starter. He made the Pro Bowl in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. In 1986, he set a record for defensive backs by recording seven sacks. In 1987, he received the NFL's Man of the Year award, which goes to the player who best combines excellence on the field with a commitment to community service (the award was renamed for Walter Payton after his passing in 1999).
     Duerson "stepped in and did a great job for us," said Bears head coach Mike Ditka. It was no fault of Duerson's that he was not as famous in Chicago as most four-time Pro Bowlers would have been, because the Bears of those days were well stocked with larger-than-life characters (starting with Ditka himself) who, intentionally or not, tended to attract the spotlight.
     After leaving the Bears, Duerson served as a backup with the New York Giants and the Phoenix Cardinals, wrapping up his 11-year career in 1993. He was one of only three 1985 Bears to earn two Super Bowl rings. It is well known and still lamented that the Super Bowl XX champions never returned to the pinnacle--but Duerson picked up a second ring with the 1990 Giants, as did Richard Dent with the 1994 49ers and Jim McMahon with the 1996 Packers.
     The intelligent, ambitious Duerson became a successful entrepreneur after his playing days, and for some time he was viewed as a role model for retired athletes wishing to make a smooth transition to other careers. Duerson later suffered reversals that included financial difficulties and a domestic-battery complaint in 2005, but former teammates who saw him at the 1985 Bears' reunion last November said he looked fit and seemed to be in good spirits. They were stunned to learn that his death has been ruled a suicide. "I knew he had some problems," Ditka said, "I knew he lost his business. I knew all that. [But] it's just a tragedy."
     "For someone to leave us at age 50, very young, active, and in great shape, that's tragic," said former linebacker Jim Morrissey. "It's way too early for someone to pass. We were just hoping he would have said something, that we could have helped."
     Although Duerson did not reach out for help himself, it's possible that his untimely passing will eventually help others. He donated his brain to further research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative neurological disease that has afflicted many former NFL players.

Colonel Now Ranks as a Hall of Famer

Richard Dent

     Col. Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame used to say, "We do chicken right." His point was that the company did not allow itself to be distracted by offering hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, or other fast-food staples. KFC focused on one thing and did it very well.
     Early in his career with the Bears, Richard Dent picked up the nickname "Colonel" because it was said that he, like Sanders, focused on one thing (in his case, rushing the opposing quarterback) and did it very well.
     Dent's ability to rush the passer made him the most proficient sacker of quarterbacks in Bears history and the sixth most proficient in NFL history. It earned him four trips to the Pro Bowl, a first-team All-Pro nod in 1985, and the Most Valuable Player award for Super Bowl XX. This past Saturday, it also earned him election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
     Extraordinarily lithe and agile for his size (six-foot-five and 265 pounds), Dent relied more on quickness than brute strength to go around blockers. "He could play at a level that I don't care who you were," former NFL coach and broadcaster John Madden said, "you couldn't block Richard Dent."
     Perhaps the man who came closest was Dent's teammate, Jimbo Covert. After he was informed of his election to the Hall of Fame, Dent gave a shout-out to the former All-Pro offensive tackle who might have ended up in Canton himself but for the injuries that shortened his career. "Practicing against him every day," Dent said of Covert, "made the games seem easy."
     When he is inducted into the Hall this summer, Dent will become the third member of the 1985 Bears' defense to be enshrined, having been preceded by Mike Singletary and Dan Hampton.
     Buddy Ryan, the coordinator of that incomparable defensive unit, has argued that Dent's moniker is misleading, for "the Colonel" didn't simply take off after the quarterback on every play. Ryan often assigned Dent to run away from the quarterback to cover potential receivers. "I used him in coverage a lot, and most defensive ends just rush the passer," Ryan said. "But he paid the price so we could run the defense we wanted to run. He could have had a lot more sacks if I hadn't used him in coverage."
     Even when Dent was otherwise occupied, opposing quarterbacks were far from safe. Hampton, Steve McMichael, Mike Hartenstine, Wilber Marshall, Otis Wilson, and Singletary would be swarming from all directions. "It was," New England guard Ron Wooten said, "like trying to beat the tide back with a broom."

1985 Bears Flashback: Men Against Boys

     Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, on January 26, 1986, the Bears won Super Bowl XX in a most convincing fashion, ending the story of their sensational 1985 season with an exclamation point.

BEARS OVER EASON:
WILBER MARSHALL, DAN HAMPTON, AND OTHERS ABUSING THE PATRIOTS QB

    
     In the days leading up to Super Bowl XX, the AFC champion New England Patriots were almost forgotten in the general hubbub surrounding the Bears. It wasn’t that the Patriots weren’t deserving (they had won 12 of their last 14 games); it was just that they weren’t the Miami Dolphins—with whom the Bears wished to settle accounts for handing them their only defeat of the season. But the Dolphins hadn’t made it to New Orleans, and the Patriots would have to do.
     In a meeting of the Bears’ defensive coaches and players the night before the Super Bowl, defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan all but confirmed the rumors that he was leaving to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles after the game. “Whatever happens tomorrow,” he told the players, “I want you to know that you’re my heroes.” He then left the room, overcome with emotion. The group began watching some film of the Patriots. After just a few minutes, Dan Hampton concluded that the session had gone on long enough; he kicked the projector off its stand. Steve McMichael then hurled a chair through the chalkboard on which some plays had been diagrammed. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” said Hampton. Without anyone saying another word, the players all got up and walked out of the room. The meeting was over, and the Bears were ready.
    
     Once the game started, New England had a brief glimmer of hope. On the second play of the game, Walter Payton fumbled at his own 19-yard line and the Patriots recovered. “Here we go again,” thought all the Chicagoans who’d learned from bitter experience not to trust their teams too much. But New England quarterback Tony Eason misfired on three pass attempts, and the Patriots settled for a field goal.
     Although they were behind 3-0 with the game barely a minute old, it was already perfectly plain by now that the Bears would win. The Patriots had no more idea how to move the ball against them than they’d had four months earlier. Convinced by the September 15 game that his team couldn’t run on the Bears, New England coach Raymond Berry felt he had no choice but to come out throwing. Thus Eason felt the full force of the Bears’ merciless pass rush on almost every play. “We knew that if we got them into a passing situation,” Mike Singletary said, “we’d have things wrapped up.”
     The Bears’ next two possessions resulted in field goals by Kevin Butler. Then Richard Dent stripped the ball from Patriot running back Craig James, and Singletary pounced on it at the New England 13. Two plays later, fullback Matt Suhey carried 11 yards for a touchdown.
     At the end of the first quarter, the Bears led 13-3. New England had run 10 plays for minus 19 yards. “It was like trying to beat back the tide with a broom,” said Patriot guard Ron Wooten. The second quarter saw more of the same. “I tried to scramble,” Eason said, “but there was no place to go.” The Patriots simply could not block the Bear defenders. Eason was 0-for-6 passing and had been sacked three times when he was removed from the game, for his own good, five minutes before halftime.
     It was 23-3 at the intermission. By now even the most pessimistic Chicagoan must have known that nothing could stop the Bears. “It’s the men against the boys out there,” said NBC analyst Pete Axthelm.
     Veteran Steve Grogan replaced the shell-shocked Eason and fared somewhat better, but the Bears continued to pour it on. Bears quarterback Jim McMahon hit Willie Gault for 60 yards on their first play of the second half; he concluded the 96-yard drive eight plays later with a quarterback sneak from one yard out. A 28-yard interception return by Reggie Phillips and a one-yard plunge by William “Refrigerator” Perry gave the Bears their last two touchdowns.
     The score was 44-3 when Ditka called off the dogs and replaced his starters early in the fourth quarter. New England finally scored a touchdown on an eight-yard pass from Grogan to Irving Fryar after a 12-play drive against the Bears’ second-team defense. Later, an obscure defensive end named Henry Waechter ended the day’s scoring when he sacked Grogan in the end zone for a safety.
     Bears head coach Mike Ditka was roundly chastised for not trying harder to get the immortal Payton a touchdown at some point, particularly in light of the fact that Perry, the coach’s favorite novelty act, got the chance to score from the one-yard line in the third quarter. Ditka admitted that he should have realized before it was too late that Payton hadn’t scored in the game. But it was difficult to see how a token touchdown in a blowout game, even if it was the Super Bowl, would have added much luster to Payton’s nonpareil career. What really mattered was that he and his teammates were world champions. No one had ever been more deserving of that honor.

     When the game was over, both Ditka and Ryan were carried off the field in triumph. The Bears had been splendid on both sides of the ball, and the final score of 46-10 made it the most lopsided Super Bowl up to that time. Practically any one of a dozen Bears could have taken MVP honors, which ended up going to Richard Dent. McMahon, for example, passed to six different receivers for 256 yards and ran for two touchdowns, while Gault caught four balls for 129 yards. Ryan’s defenders disrupted everything that New England tried to do, limiting the Patriots to a mere 123 yards on offense—seven on the ground.
     “It will be many years,” Paul Zimmerman wrote in Sports Illustrated, “before we see anything approaching the vision of hell that Chicago inflicted on the poor New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. It was near perfect, an exquisite mesh of talent and system, defensive football carried to its highest degree. It was a great roaring wave that swept through the playoffs, gathering force and momentum until it finally crashed home in New Orleans’s Superdome in pro football’s showcase game.”
     After exceeding even the wildest dreams of their fans all season, the Bears outdid themselves when it mattered most. In three postseason games, they scored 91 points and yielded only 10. Their opponents averaged fewer than 145 yards per game and converted three third downs out of 36.
     The 1985 Bears showed football fans a level of excellence that had seldom been attained. They talked big, played bigger, and shuffled into a place in history.

Reprinted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c) by Christopher Tabbert

1985 Bears Flashback: "It Didn't Matter What We Scored"

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, the 1985 Bears punched their ticket to Super Bowl XX in New Orleans with a resounding 24-0 victory in the NFC championship game. That game is described below in an excerpt from the recent book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports.



WILBER MARSHALL (58) AND OTIS WILSON ROMP TO THE RAMS END ZONE.

     
     The Bears hosted the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game on January 12, 1986. It was a suitably cold and windy day in Chicago, and the Rams looked as if they longed for the temperate climes of southern California. Bears defensive end Dan Hampton said he could see defeat in their eyes even at the opening coin toss. When the Rams won the flip and elected to receive, the crowd of 63,522 cheered, figuring the Bear defenders would push them backward.
     From the start, Los Angeles quarterback Dieter Brock (10-for-31 passing) and running back Eric Dickerson (17 carries for 46 yards) were wholly ineffective. Dickerson, supposed to be the man who would eventually break Walter Payton’s lifetime rushing mark, had gained a playoff-record 234 yards against Dallas the week before. The Bears held him to less than three yards per attempt and forced him to fumble twice. “If they would have run him more,” said defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, who had predicted three fumbles by Dickerson, “he would have had three.”
     In the third quarter, Dickerson and Bears middle linebacker Mike Singletary—Southwest Conference rivals at S.M.U. and Baylor, respectively—renewed their acquaintance in the Rams’ backfield. Dickerson had just taken a handoff when he blasted into Singletary filling the gap and stopped dead in his tracks; he moved not one inch forward after meeting up with the Bears’ middle linebacker. “I like this kind of party!” Singletary shouted to the Rams. “I’m gonna be here all day!”
     Bears quarterback Jim McMahon, meanwhile, was brilliant. Despite the weather, he hit on 16 of 25 passes for 164 yards. On the Bears’ first series, he ran 16 yards for a touchdown on a play that was called as a pass. Later he passed for a touchdown on a play called as a run. “The coach sent in a play I didn’t agree with,” McMahon said, “so I called my own.” His 22-yard strike to Willie Gault put the Bears ahead 17-0, and the outcome was decided. The Bears would be NFC champions.
     The fans began to chant: “Super Bowl, Super Bowl.” Late in the fourth quarter, the hapless Brock dropped back to pass and was flung to the turf by Richard Dent. The ball popped loose. Linebacker Wilber Marshall picked it up at midfield and headed into Rams territory with Otis Wilson escorting him. Just then, it started to snow.
     Marshall and Wilson romped 52 yards to the Los Angeles end zone all alone, while the crowd cheered both them and the snow. As the final minutes ticked away, the Bears briefly abandoned the business-as-usual demeanor that had characterized them all year. The embraced one another on the sideline, and head coach Mike Ditka congratulated each man individually. Safety Dave Duerson asserted that Ditka even became choked up. The final score was 24-0.

“The way we were playing defense,” said Ditka, “it didn’t matter what we scored.”

The Bears became the first team ever to post back-to-back playoff shutouts.
     The Bears were headed to New Orleans for the first Super Bowl in franchise history and their first championship game since 1963. They would make the trip worthwhile.

1985 Bears Flashback: Grabowskis

Twenty-five years ago today, the Bears began the postseason run that would culminate with them hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy as Super Bowl champions. In the first playoff game, the Bears hosted the New York Giants at Soldier Field. That game is described below in an excerpt from the recent book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports.

RICHARD DENT

     Bears head coack Mike Ditka always emphasized the contrast between his team and the defending world-champion San Francisco 49ers. He described the 49ers as a “finesse” team, which was not intended as a compliment. He was equally eager to distinguish his own style from that of San Francisco’s “cerebral” coach Bill Walsh. “There are teams that are fair-haired and there are teams that aren’t,” Ditka said. “There are teams named Smith and teams named Grabowski. We’re Grabowskis.”
     By going 15-1 in the 1985 regular season, the Bears equaled the 49ers’ feat of the year before and ensured that if there were an NFC championship rematch between the two clubs, it would be at Soldier Field. They also earned a week off while other playoff qualifiers fought it out in wild-card games.
     While the Bears were home relaxing, the New York Giants whipped San Francisco—so the Niners wouldn’t be coming to Chicago after all. The Giants appeared at Soldier Field on January 5, 1986.
     On this clear, cold, and blustery day, the wind off Lake Michigan became a 12th player for the Bears when New York’s Sean Landeta went back to punt from his own goal line in the first quarter. A gust blew the ball away from Landeta at the instant his foot was coming through. The ball glanced off the side of his foot and wobbled to the five-yard line, where safety Shaun Gayle scooped it up and sauntered into the end zone. Landeta was credited with a punt of minus seven yards, and Gayle’s touchdown made him the 22nd different Bear to score for the year (the ninth on defense).
     The Giants were not in the game after Landeta’s miscue. They went three-and-out on nine of their first 11 possessions. Pro Bowl running back Joe Morris rushed for 14 yards on his first carry but managed only 18 yards on 11 attempts thereafter. Quarterback Phil Simms was sacked six times. Bears defensive end Richard Dent was all over the field, recording three and a half sacks and corralling Morris from behind several times. “The Giants came into the game with the No. 2 defense in the NFL,” Don Pierson wrote in the Tribune, “and left knowing that Avis is a lot closer to Hertz than the Giants are to the Bears.”
     Quarterback Jim McMahon connected with Dennis McKinnon on two touchdown strikes in the third quarter to put the game out of reach. “When the game is on the line and you’ve got to perform,” said fullback Matt Suhey, “[McMahon] is the kind of guy who turns it on. He has the mentality of a running back or an offensive lineman stuck in a quarterback body.”
     The final score was 21-0. Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan had promised a shutout and his players had delivered. “We believe every thought Buddy shares with us,” safety Dave Duerson explained.
     “We beat a good football team,” said Ditka. He could scarcely conceal his glee when he added, “They manhandled the 49ers.”
     The unstoppable Bears were headed to the NFC championship game.

Excerpted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c) by Christopher Tabbert.

The Fog Bowl

KEVIN BUTLER AND FELLOW PLAYERS IN THE FOG

     When Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan resigned after the 1986 Super Bowl to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, the uneasy truce that he and Mike Ditka had observed for four years was fractured forever. Since they no longer had to work together, each man was now free to say just what he thought of the other. Both men made full use of the privilege, and their long-simmering enmity bubbled over in a series of recriminations back and forth through the media.
     The feud was good theater, and it sparked interest in the Eagles-Bears playoff game at Soldier Field on the last day of 1988. Unfortunately, the crowd of 65,534 and the national television audience saw only the first half. The second half was rendered all but invisible by fog.
     Neal Anderson’s four-yard touchdown blast put the Bears ahead 14-6 with 6:21 remaining in the second quarter. This took place under sunny skies. But when Kevin Butler added a field goal some four minutes later, the fog was rolling in from Lake Michigan and creeping over the stands. Within minutes, the whole field had been obscured.
     For the rest of the game, the spectators could not see a thing. Nor could the TV cameras capture the action going on behind and within the soupy curtain of fog. “I felt like I was on another planet,” a CBS producer remarked. For the players and officials on the field, visibility was better—but still less than 20 yards. “Have I ever played in anything like that before?” said Butler. “I haven’t even driven in anything like that before.”
     Philadelphia’s Luis Zendejas kicked two field goals (his third and fourth of the game) through the mist in the second half, and Butler booted another to make the final score Bears 20, Eagles 12. The game was quite unremarkable but for the fog. Quarterbacks Mike Tomczak of the Bears and Randall Cunningham of the Eagles tossed three interceptions apiece. The Eagles outplayed the Bears in most aspects, but they frittered away one opportunity after another—particularly in the first half, when Cunningham had two touchdown passes called back for penalties and another would-be touchdown strike dropped in the end zone.
     Despite 430 total yards and 22 first downs, the Eagles never breached the Bears’ goal line. “Credit the Bear defense,” Ryan said. “Every time we got down there, we didn’t make anything happen. We stopped ourselves. The effort was there, the heart was there, but it just didn’t happen.”
     The Bears were delighted to have gotten away with the victory that few people saw. “One good thing will come out of this,” said center Jay Hilgenberg. “We’ll have a short film session tomorrow. I mean, what are the coaches gonna show us?”
     Bob Verdi had the last word on the game that was known ever after as the Fog Bowl. “Somewhere over there on the lakefront,” he wrote, “there’s a guy who left his seat late in the first half to find a restroom and he’s still out there, trying to find his wife.”

Reprinted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c)2009, 2010 by Christopher Tabbert