"Sweetness" and Might

By Tom Callahan

America does not need the Chicago Bears to tell it that iceboxes are irresistible. For some reason probably larger and possibly even more surprising than William Perry, the country just needs the Chicago Bears. One pro football team or another wins most of its games every year, but this season more than last, more than many winters past, the actual football playing has seemed an adjunct to the celebration. Though they have their appealing characters, including the game's regal running back, Walter Payton, the Bears are far from the most comely players in the National Football League. In fact, beginning with a quarterback who cuts his own hair, young Jim McMahon, they could be the least glamorous people ever to dine at a Super Bowl, which may start to explain their charm.

It's Chicago, of course. That always clangs a national cowbell. At recurring Cub and White Sox calamities (DePaul's dependable basketball disasters are fairly localized pains), the city's slumped shoulders extend over a remarkably broad piece of the nation. But some things are not meant to be shared and, until now, the Bears have embodied most of them. No outsider is as wary of freezing conditions as a Chicagoan is proprietary of frostbite. Any Sunbelt slur is returned with a blast of icy superiority. "Bear weather," they call it. A Midwesterner's notion of comfort is plainly more profound than climate, and it is his wisdom that few towns are as provincial as the ones that fancy themselves cosmopolitan. Chicago has no problem with newspaper headlines as dispassionate as GO BEARS!

The past draws the country too. For the Bears are the past. Their lineage goes back to the running boards on the very Hupmobile in that Canton, Ohio, auto showroom where the American Professional Football Association and the Decatur Staleys were concocted in 1920. George Halas did most of the talking. The A.P.F.A. soon became the N.F.L., and the Decatur franchise, originally a sales tool for a starch manufacturer named Staley, shifted to Chicago in the custody of the amazing Halas. It might be an exaggeration to say that the entire fabric of sport was sewn in this singular man, but it is a fact that Halas shared one field with Jim Thorpe and yielded another to Babe Ruth. He was a most valuable player in the 1919 Rose Bowl and for a moment a rightfielder with the New York Yankees, but indelibly he was Papa Bear.

When players were players and even agents were agents, the Bears had Red Grange and Cash & Carry Pyle. Other names are like trumpets sounding. Bronko Nagurski. Bulldog Turner. George McAfee. Sid Luckman. (If you'll pardon a sentimental addition, Willie Galimore. He even sounded like running.) Later: Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. People say the Bears are 22 seasons between championships, but 1963 was so momentary and illusory that it seemed more of a flashback than a turnaround, a memory of glory in the midst of a 40-year desperation that, almost no matter what happens in New Orleans this Sunday, has probably evaporated for good. If 1963 reached back to 1946 for inspiration, Halas reached back to 1963 for Mike Ditka.

In one of his last brisk assertions before he died in 1983 at the age of 88, Halas retrieved his old tight end from Tom Landry's coaching staff in Dallas and charged Ditka with restoring a mood. When he was a player, Ditka's style had been to pin teammates on the locker-room wall if they neglected to meet his standards. As a coach, he is hard on the furniture. "When the players walked in the first day," recalls Payton, "Mike was standing there with his arms folded. He nodded to [Assistant] Ted Plumb, who started calling roll. I thought, 'We're in the Army now.' "Ditka, 46, is from Aliquippa, Pa., and his people are from the Ukraine, Nagurski stock. A Canadian who has lived most of his rich life just across a frozen lake in Minnesota, Bronko, 77, once claimed to have no personal knowledge of summer. That's the Bear toughness. "Some teams are named Smith," Ditka says. "Some are named Grabowski." He bends his mustache into a snarling smile. "We're the Grabowskis."

Even Payton, the teddy bear whose cloying nickname is "Sweetness," counts himself among the brutes. When Payton passed Jim Brown last season to become the leading rusher in league history (14,860 yds. to date), Brown gave him a blessing that the proud Cleveland runner would have withheld from Pittsburgh's Franco Harris. "Payton is a gladiator," he said. "Walter follows the code." Brown was a better runner; so was Sayers. But for running, blocking, throwing passes and catching them, Payton is all-around the most productive football player of the two-platoon era. "For most of his career, teams have been able to key on him alone," notes Defensive Tackle John Dutton of the Dallas Cowboys, "and still no one has stopped him." Matt Suhey, Payton's current backfield mate, figures that "the best ground-gaining combination of all time is Walter Payton and any other running back."

How Payton has endured these eleven seasons, physically and spiritually, still so near to the top of his game, is more than a wonder. He logged a record nine straight 100-yd. running games this season and led the team in receptions. After Chicago thrashed the Los Angeles Rams, 24-0, to take the National Conference championship, one Bear after another stopped by Payton's locker just to touch him. "Eleven years of climbing that mountain," he sighed, speaking not altogether figuratively. As the boy once ran the hot sandbanks by the Pearl River close to his home in Columbia, Miss., the man has made training device of a black dirt hill near suburban Arlington Heights. "I have to work harder every year," he says. "Let's put it this way, when I first started playing football, I didn't use as much adhesive tape as I use now." So at least two months before each season, his regimen begins.

Always he tests himself against youth, most recently in the person of an indefatigable Indiana University football player named Kevin Kelly, 20. "My goal was to make him drop," says Payton, 31, who gauges the hill's angle and rise at about 45DEG and 50 ft. "Ever jog up 25 flights of stairs? It burns. Your legs, your buttocks, your back, your chest, your stomach--everything wants to leave you." Then, Payton smiles, young Kelly asks him, "Ready to go again?" But more telling than Payton's muscular capability for playing this game is his emotional capacity for enjoying it. "He's a man-child, a grown-up kid," says Safety Gary Fencik, a ten-year observer. "He's always out there throwing and kicking. I've never known anyone who likes to play outdoors so much. It's not even football. I used to worry that he'd get hurt. I used to pray every night. But he's got a frame that just seems invincible." A frame of mind?

The analogy of a child is helpful in discerning Payton, who has the smile and voice of a choirboy. Always Walter, never Walt or Wally. His given middle name is Jerry, though, not Jerome, as if the diminutive has always been right there just below the surface. Even his signature, a high-stepping kick in the open field, is a remnant from the first grade. "After school the teachers would line us up and escort us to the edge of campus. Everyone moved so slow. didn't know why I had to stop." When he finally broke free of authority, Payton kicked loose in a burst of unremitting joy. At seven he received a present of a set of drums, and absently now he turns almost everything before him into percussion instruments, including linebackers. Payton is fond of the phrase, "Tomorrow is not promised to anyone," but repeats it with out conviction. Delivering his annual retirement estimate of "two more years," he betrays no real sense of mortality. Back in the worst days, whenever the Bears were out of the running, all there was left to do was watch Payton run. Well, he is not the whole offense anymore, but he is going to the Super Bowl.

While Ditka attempts to hold on somewhat, the football is now fundamentally the property of that idiosyncratic punk rocker or just rocker or just punk McMahon, who favors red spandex tights and wraparound sunglasses with checker board panes. He puts nobody in mind of Sid Luckman. Trying to unknot the lace on his toy holster with a fork, McMahon stabbed himself in the eye at six, and the little buckaroo has been jabbing conventions all the 20 years since. Emphatically a non-Mormon at Brigham Young University, he set records for scandalizing Provo that will never be broken. Stashed away his junior year as an accommodation to Marc Wilson, McMahon now says of the Los Angeles quarterback, "He's not a bad player. He just doesn't belong with the Raiders. He belongs with Dallas, where everybody's Goody Two-shoes." New or leans has not battened down for such a visitor since Jean Laffite.

McMahon's relationship with Ditka recalls Halas' trials 30 years ago with Doug Atkins, the prototype of the freethinking Bear as well as the only player who ever outcussed the old man. "He was undoubtedly the greatest defensive end in football," Halas explained later. "You're not going to throw a championship out the window trying to discipline a guy like that." At one point this season there was some question whether Ditka and McMahon were even talking. "That's ridiculous," Ditka said. "Just the other day I told him on the sidelines, 'Shut up.' " But when the Rams game fell on a blowy day at Soldier Field, Ditka trusted McMahon to come out throwing to his breezy receivers like Willie Gault, the track star, and Dennis McKinnon, the football player. On the other hand, when Ditka dispatched a draw play in the third quarter, McMahon snorted and whipped a touch down pass to Gault. Los Angeles Coach John Robinson said he "played like a great quarterback today. He had presence and command." Now, there's a slogan for a headband.

The other Bears think he handles himself like a defensive player, a high compliment in Chicago, for this is eternally a defensive team. Ditka's shutout department is run independently by a straight-talking old ramrod named Buddy Ryan, an Oklahoman partial to cowboy boots and farm hats that say HORIZON SEEDS. In an era when most coaches feel obliged to soothe the players' psyches, Ryan is a link to the past. He took one wide look at "the Refrigerator" last summer and declared the Clemson first rounder to be "a wasted draft choice." But this was not an unusual introduction for a Bear rookie. "That's because there ain't one of them that knows what the hell he's doing," Ryan says.

Consider the formative years of Middle Linebacker Mike Singletary, the team's conscience. He is now the hub of the "46" defense (retired Kamikaze Doug Plank's old jersey number, a monument to mayhem). However, during Singletary 's rookie season in 1981, Ryan summarily yanked him in favor of an experienced hand of meager skills. After a few minutes on the sidelines, the chastened player murmured to the distracted coach, "I know what I did wrong now. Should I go back in?" Ryan looked at him as if unable to recall who he was. "What? No, no, son. We're going to try to win this game." Singletary appears strangely civilized out of uniform, which is more than Tackle Steve McMichael and End Dan Hampton can say. Most of his statements are as direct as a third-and-one collision with battering Ram Eric Dickerson. "To be honest, I didn't like Buddy very much at first, but there's nothing I wouldn't do for him now. When he comes up to you and says, 'I guess I had you wrong. I really thought you could do the job,' you like to die. I'm not playing for my family or Chicago, but for him."

Next to the fact that 23 different Bears have scored touchdowns this year, the most outlandish statistic is that ten of them were playing defense. Considering that no team had ever marched unscored upon through the playoffs before, it takes some nerve for the Bears to insist that they were even better defensively last year. Besides nerve, they also have evidence. The Pro Bowl safety Todd Bell and the splendid linebacker Al Harris held out for more money this season and have missed the entire festival. Richard Dent, a particularly wanton defensive end, chose to work while he grumbled. Dent threatened to forgo the Super Bowl, but backed down when Ditka seemed inclined to play the game anyway." I'm sick for Todd Bell," says Fencik. "He's the best safety I've ever played with. It's not just a matter of losing two players' talents. It's a matter of--hey, they're part of us."

Fencik, 31, is a Yalie with a taste for administering concussions, one of merely 15 Ivy Leaguers in the N.F.L. "When you don't go to school on an athletic scholarship," he says, "there's a special pleasure in playing college football. It's something you're doing sort of for free, almost for fun, no strings attached. Also, you have a little different perspective on other things you want to achieve like getting an education. There are a lot of guys walking around the N.F.L. with certificates of attendance." He is more startled by the number of Bears walking around with no bad memories. "Do you know, over half of these players have never been on a losing Bear team?"

Among them, of course, William Perry, 23, the least accomplished member the defense, the least essential attachment to the offense, the most famous football player in the world. "I thought I'd just come in and play behind the All-Pros," flects the Bears' 6-ft. 2-in., 304-lb. regular defensive tackle and part-time running back. "You know, play a little short-yardage defense, some special teams, make a few tackles hopefully. But to end up on offense and stuff, scoring touch downs and everything, being on a team that's 17 and 1 too. It's just a lucky time." A lucky time. "Big Will," laughs McMichael lightly, delightedly. If any teammates begrudge Perry his windfall, they have been discreet. "When he first got into the defense, I'd have to tell him every place to go. We'd make the call in the huddle--break!--and he'd look right at me. Big Will."

Coach Ryan says, "He's improving, but he's got to lose some more weight. If he reports in shape next year, he could be a player. Otherwise, write him off." That would be terribly hard now. As much or as little as Perry is, he personally never claimed to be anything more. This may have been his dignity and surely was his grace. "The Perry thing, as much as anything," Ditka says, "made people think, 'Hey, these guys are having fun.' It was kind of flukish, the way it happened." If the Perry thing gave a sort of melancholy life to that smoky old carnival bark, "Monsters of the Midway," the Perry person made the mood of the sideshow bright. "Everything has been a thrill to me," whistles this cheerful man through his ventilated smile. "The whole season. It's funny to see me doing TV commercials. My wife and I sometimes look over at each other and just laugh. One day somebody won't ask you for your autograph. You won't be on TV, and that'll be O.K. too."

In the meantime, The Super Bowl Shuffle, an outrageous brag-and-stomp recording for charity, has gone gold in Chicago. The Loop has gone more than a little loopy. Two weeks ago, TV viewers in the maternity ward were trying to time their contractions to deliver at halftime. And now "nickel defense" bottles are appearing in store fronts as the public chips in to defray Linebacker Wilber Marshall's $2,000 fine for excessive on-field violence and McMahon's $5,000 penalty for advertising sporting goods on his forehead. (Last week he donated his headband space to Commissioner Pete Rozelle in tribute.) On its editorial page, the Tribune tried to explain to overwhelmed out-of-towners that "the Bears have just reversed Chicago's feeling that was somehow a city on the slide, a city of rusting smokestack industry, of violence and perpetual political scandal." Clearly, "only someone who has lived in the Snowbelt in January can understand what the Bears have done to Chicago. They have given us something to hope and cheer for in January, the time when ordinarily that bleak post-holiday depression sets in, and all we have to look forward to are subzero temperatures, blizzards and watching our cars rust. This January, cabin fever has been replaced by Bears fever."

New England is in roughly the same throes. Though the Bears hoped to avenge their only loss against the Miami Dolphins, the Patriots are the more seemly opponents. For the 20th Super Bowl, fresh new teams are a sound idea. Chicago defeated New England last September, 20-7, but the Bears should be reminded that three weeks before they edged the Washington Redskins in the 1940 championship game, 73-0, the Redskins clobbered them, 7-3. As if bracing himself against an old despair, Payton says, "The worst thing in the world is to reach for a star and fall short." Whoever wins the Super Bowl, how could anyone fall short now? --By Tom Callahan