9/12/16
The above quote thundered by the ultimate Chicagoan, the
late, great Mayor Richard J. Daley, admittedly in an entirely different
context, serves as a fine lead-in to my new blog “Insights, and Rants, of a
Cultural Bear Fan.”
While cutting the lawn yesterday morning before the first
game of what promises to be yet another hapless Bear season, I was listening to
the “experts” opine on the Bears. I was struck with the notion that what Chicagoans,
and Bear fans across the country, need is a continuing commentary not by those
with deep insights into the workings of modern professional football but,
instead, by a guy who has been a fan, in varying degrees, of the Bears for a
longer period of time than most of my potential readers have been alive. Yours truly is no expert on the Bears; you,
my reader, doubtless know more about the intricacies of the Bears, and the game
of football, than I do. I am, instead,
a cultural Bear fan.
What is a cultural Bear fan?
For the last 30 or so years, those of us who are
interested in faith, religion, and spirituality have witnessed the growth of
what is perhaps the country’s largest religious denomination, after
ex-Catholics: a group known as “cultural
Catholics.” These are people who were
born and, in most cases, raised, Catholic but who no longer practice their
faith with any degree of intensity.
They haven’t left the Church and still identify as Catholics and perhaps
go to Mass occasionally (and so are sometimes identified as “Chreasters,” those
who go to Mass on Christmas and Easter), but know little about the faith and
give it a generally low priority. In
Chicago, and doubtless across the country, many cultural Catholics became so
due to regular partaking, live or otherwise, in Sunday afternoon pro football games
and engaging in the seemingly requisite painstaking attention to the many hours
of preliminaries that go with those games, but I digress.
Cultural Catholicism is a perfect analogy for the
condition from which I suffer, that of being a cultural Bear fan. I was born and raised a Bear fan. My dad had been a Bear fan since not long
after the franchise moved north from Decatur.
He and his partners had season tickets at Wrigley Field for years. While Dad never pushed me to be a Bear fan,
he certainly encouraged the enthusiasm for the former Staleys that arose
naturally in a young, sports crazed kid.
My interest began when I was eight years old with the ’65 Bears, the
greatest Bear team not to have won a championship, grew for several years,
waned, grew again in the ‘80s, when I had the honor and the privilege to have
attended the ’86 Super Bowl, and waned again until I had a son who developed a
deep enthusiasm for the Bears. So while
I identify as a Bear fan and watch some games, I miss quite a few when
something more important and/or more fun finds its way onto the agenda. Other than one game last year with my boy, I
haven’t been to a game since the late ‘80s as the “greatest team ever” (grist
for an upcoming post) faded into customary Bear mediocrity. While I can name most of the ’65 Bear roster,
I could probably name 10 current Bear players on a good day.
So where in the world do I get off writing about the
Bears, largely to people who follow the team much more closely than I do?
First, sometimes it takes someone with a different
perspective, a more detached perspective, to point out obvious things to fans
whose constant attention, and excess emotion, cause them to miss what is
obvious to a more casual observer who has the benefit of historical
perspective. I am, in this case, the
guy who hovers over the forest in order to extricate those lost in the trees.
Second, having just finished my fifth decade of being a
Bear fan, I, to put it tritely, feel your pain.
When I was in college, during one of those periods when I was an
hysterical and nearly encyclopedic Bear fan, my whole week was ruined when the
Bears lost on Sunday. Consequently, I
had a lot of rough weeks in college, which may explain a lot, but, again, I
digress.
While I managed to extricate myself from being a
passionate Bear fan, and thus avoided a lifetime of emotional distress and
dyspepticism, I have never been able to completely divorce myself from the
team. I sat down last year, or maybe it
was the year before, with my boy and warned him. I told him that it wasn’t too late for him;
he didn’t have to be a Bear fan.
Geography, I explained to him, does not dictate our destiny in careers,
business, romance, or in sports enthusiasm.
He was, I explained, free to choose any team for which to cheer. I even suggested that he perhaps become a
(I’m probably going to wish I hadn’t written this as soon as this post goes
up.) Packer fan. After all, the Packers
are what Papa Bear Halas intended when he co-founded the National Football
League…a team firmly attached to a city that develops players internally and
that WINS. The Packers aren’t flashy; they’re
tough. They take a workman’s approach to
a game that was intended for blue collar, hard working people. They’re a lot like the Bears, except that the
Packers, and Packer fans, are familiar with the post-season. And Wisconsin is a wonderful state in which
many people from Chicago and its environs spend inordinate amounts of time in
the summer. If it weren’t for the
largely groundless hostility between the two teams, the Packers would be a
natural choice for Chicago fans looking for an alternative to the incessant
heart break and broken dreams that constitute being a Bear fan. In response, my son asked me why I haven’t
abandoned the Bears for more promising prospects, perhaps to the north. I explained it simply:
“Mark, I am like a pickle. Once a cucumber becomes a pickle, it can’t
go back to being a cucumber. I became a
Bear fan when I was far younger than you are now and much younger than you were
when you became a Bear fan. It is too
late for me. Though both seem logical
for me and often seem tempting, I could no sooner become a fan of any other pro
team than I could become a Protestant.
But it’s not too late for you; you are young and free and on the cusp of
making many decisions that will have an enormous impact on your life. Save yourself! Abandon the hopeless Bears! Embrace another team, if not the Packers,
then some other team that actually wins a championship more than once every
twenty or so years.”
My boy simply replied “No. I can’t.
I guess I’m just a Bear fan for life.”
Sad how certain addictions span generations.
Finally, I normally write about things like finance,
economics, and politics. I notice that
there are a lot of people out there making fabulous livings writing about
finance, economics, and politics who know next to nothing about the subjects on
which they write. If they can pop off
about things about which they know pathetically little, surely I can write
about football and the Bears, about which I know at least a bit.
So, by way of introduction, welcome to “Insights, and
Rants, of a Cultural Bear Fan.” You
might learn something. More likely,
your thinking about the team we just can’t quit may be changed. Most likely, you’ll have a little fun during
what promises to be another miserable season.
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