The Bears stopped at Soldier Field last week on their way from training camp in Bourbonnais to San Francisco to open the preseason against the 49ers. This midsummer practice session in the home stadium has become an annual event known as Family Night, and last week found it developing a playful, unprepossessing mood all its own. The field just to the south of the stadium was filled with inflated slides and obstacle courses for kids, as well as a stage where a pedestrian band served as a diversion for the adults. Just inside the gates, Bears alumni signed autographs before the current team took the field. With general-admission seating at $5 a ticket, the place, in effect, was thrown open to the fans, creating an atmosphere that made me think of Versailles taken over by the rabble.
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These were salt-of-the-earth Bears fans in Bears caps and Bears pants and even Bears masks, but most of all in Bears jerseys–Brian Urlacher jerseys in particular, which must have outnumbered all the others combined by three to one. These fans knew their way around the Soldier Field concourse, but during the season few are privy to the sweet seats in the lower reaches. So they poured in and filled those seats (only the middle level on the east side was roped off for stadium-club members), 22,000 strong up close watching the Bears run through some plays. It wasn’t the most exciting sporting event I’ve ever seen, but it was the most joyful experience I’ve had watching sports in quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Bears’ first exhibition game was a dud. Last Friday Grossman looked again like a quarterback just trying to get comfortable after spending too much of his early career on the sidelines with various injuries, and Tillman was burned several times, just as he had been in the Bears’ first-round playoff loss last January to the Carolina Panthers. Still, no game matters for another month, and no one should conclude anything from preseason football, especially not from the first game.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/AP Photo/Jeff Roberson.
