This is the Bears’ town, and a baseball fan might as well tell the sun not to rise as argue otherwise. From the moment their training camp opens in July the Bears tend to dominate the city’s sports coverage, which this summer has been especially galling for White Sox fans, whose team seems playoff bound and entered this week with the American League’s best record. Sox fans fully expect the Cubs to dominate normal baseball coverage, but when the Sox play as they have this season they take an ascendant position in the daily sports sections–ascendant except for the Bears, that is.
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To be sure, football is the most popular American sport. It’s a gambler’s sport, and there’s always a Rinaldo Cantabile around the neighborhood to take anyone’s action. It’s also a tough sport, and Chicagoans like toughness. Of late it’s helped that second-year head coach Lovie Smith has reinstalled an aggressive defense. Abandoning the bend-don’t-break posture of Dick Jauron and Dave Wannstedt, Smith has set fan favorite Brian Urlacher free to roam from sideline to sideline and lay claim to a place in the Bears’ pantheon of great middle linebackers. Yet the current Bears aren’t as tough as the 1985 NFL champions, which brings me to something else that sticks in a Sox fan’s craw.
Yet I have mixed feelings when I see those Bears hanging around today. Memories of that season, such as the mauling of the Cowboys in Dallas and Singletary standing up the Los Angeles Rams’ Eric Dickerson in the playoffs, are as precious as the Super Bowl videotape I’ve packed away in the basement–but that team should have won more championships. Bill Walsh’s San Francisco 49ers won more, as did Bill Parcells’s New York Giants. But the brittle McMahon went down with an injury near the end of the ’86 season, and Ditka defied convention and the doubts of his own team by making Doug Flutie the quarterback. The following year, Ditka lost the team entirely when he backed the replacement players during the players’ strike. Both those seasons, ’86 and ’87, he was badly outcoached by the Washington Redskins’ Joe Gibbs in the playoffs, and the Bears never really challenged for the Super Bowl again. They began a long downward slide that persists to this day.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joe Robbins–Getty Images.
