Brett Favre appeared at Soldier Field this month like a figure out of the Iliad. In addition to taking the Pack to two Super Bowls and one championship since the Bears’ last title 20 years ago, Favre had beaten the Bears in front of their home fans 11 straight times. Yet this season found the Bears resurgent and the Packers on the wane, with Favre sometimes looking like the only real player left on his team. Bears fans had little sympathy; they wanted him laid low, preferably his carcass tied through the heels with ox hide and dragged across the stadium turf. When Favre led the blocking on an end around in the first half, was knocked to the ground, and got up patting the nearest Bears player on the rump, WBBM AM color analyst Tom Thayer, a former Bears guard, reacted with disdain. To adapt (Richard Lattimore’s) Homer, as there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions, but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other, so there can be no love between Bears and Packers.
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Favre proved he was still dangerous, taking advantage of a roughing-the-passer penalty to march the Pack to a go-ahead touchdown early on. He refused to submit even after Mike Brown sacked him savagely in the first half and Charles “Peanut” Tillman blindsided him in the second. Grizzled, beaten, injured when he bashed his forearm on a helmet throwing a pass, he nevertheless fought on, and it took all that the Bears’ defense could muster to halt his Chicago win streak by a score of 19-7. At the end it seemed every player on each team was limping or favoring an arm or shoulder, and when the final gun sounded the Bears defenders, led by middle linebacker Brian Urlacher, surrounded Favre–not to drag him across the turf, but to congratulate him. The fans might have wanted Favre, breaker of Bears, humiliated, but the players knew better.
At halftime of Friday’s game (which was little more than a sideshow that the Bulls were in the process of losing, to fall to 9-9 on the season), the sellout crowd roared as a figure emerged from a corner entryway. Pippen? No, it was Jordan, of course. But Pippen did get his due, first in taped remarks from old friend and rival Charles Barkley, acting the mixer when he said, “Michael Jordan should be kissing the ground that you walk on.” Jordan rolled his eyes and smiled, but when he addressed Pippen’s role in the way they drove each other to greatness, he all but acknowledged Barkley was right. Jackson, in town to coach the night’s opponents, the Los Angeles Lakers, gave a glimpse into the dynamics behind the scene when he said Pippen and Jordan played good cop/bad cop with teammates in practice: “Michael was giving the guys hell, and Scottie was patting them on the back.”
