THE BEARS’ WINNING TRADITION?

9/15/16

The Bears' first round pick meets the press.   He comes to the microphone and tells the assembled crowd that he is happy to have been picked by the Bears, especially because of their “winning tradition.”

The Bears trade for the latest quarterback who “has the potential to transform the franchise.”   He meets the Chicago press and says that he is happy to be contributing to the Bears’ “winning tradition.”

The Bears bring on yet another new coach, general manager, “director of football operations,” etc. who is going to “turn the franchise around.”   At his first press conference, he talks about how excited he is, especially because of the Bears’ “winning tradition.”

The Bears television broadcast team, clearly from out of town, comments at the onset of the game, and numerous times throughout the contest (the latter usually to express surprise and/or disappointment), about the Bears’ trying to resume their “winning tradition.”

Hmm…

Are all these guys under the impression that they landed, or are calling the game from a stadium, about 200 miles north of here?

Winning tradition?   What winning tradition?

Yours truly is pushing 60 years old.   In my lifetime, the Bears have become the world champions twice…in 1963 (before there was a Super Bowl) and in 1986.    Other than that…nada, zip, zilcho, bupkes.   The Bears did make the Super Bowl in 2007, only to be completely dominated and humiliated after the first play of that game.   During the 1986 regular season, they looked like they were going to repeat before the wheels fell off in the playoffs, never to be reattached.   And they probably missed winning the NFL championship in 1965 because they got off to a 0-3 start before dominating the league for the rest of that near championship season.   But they only won, in the proper sense of the term, twice…in 60 years!!!

Oh, yeah…back in the halcyon days of George Halas and the other league founders, the Bears were the Monsters of the Midway, but that was a long, long time ago.   Those days have been lost in the mists of time, even for those of us who can remember Bear teams of 50+ years ago.

The Bears have had a few great teams in the last 60 years.    They have had some of the greatest players ever to play the game, e.g., Sayers, Payton, Butkus, Singletary, Hampton, and maybe a few others I have forgotten.    But a winning tradition?   2 championships in a long lifetime does not a winning tradition make.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH JAY CUTLER?

9/14/16

As Bear fans, cultural or otherwise, we have been endowed with an inalienable right to a lifetime of frustration.   Generally, the frustration is incessant; sometimes, it is broken by fleeting moments of glory, such as ’86.   Those brief periods of joy, however, ultimately serve only to intensify the pain of the mediocrity that is the lot of the Bear fan by teasing us with a mere taste of how enjoyable being a fan could be…and is to the people in such places as Green Bay, Boston, Denver, Seattle, and other less worthy cities.

Sometimes this frustration is a generalized feeling of pervasive mediocrity.  Sometimes, this frustration is more focused, more centered in one particular actor in the incessant miasmatic march that constitutes Bear football.   For the last ten years or so, while the futility has been quite widespread throughout the organization, it is quarterback Jay Cutler that has been the focus of our, er, discontent.

 Jay Cutler is Bear quarterback of the future for whom the future never seemed to arrive.  Now that he is 33, it is apparent even to those few die-hards he manages to retain in his retinue of enthusiasts that Mr. Cutler will never achieve the type of greatness that was always, somehow, just beyond his grasp.   The star of the future has become the “what might have been” of the past.

So what is the problem with Jay Cutler?

Some of Mr. Cutler’s most ardent detractors, and even a large measure of more objective observers, contend that he lacks talent, that he is, to put it bluntly, a lousy quarterback.   That this clearly is not true is apparent even to those of us whose eyes for the game are not as keen as those of the typical bleary-eyed overindulger in fantasy football and the like.   When Jay Cutler is good, he is very, very good.  Some of us, admittedly perhaps handicapped by a degree of insight less intense than that of more committed fans, would go so far as to say that, on his best days, Jay Cutler is as good as just about anybody playing quarterback in the NFL.

No, the problem with Jay Cutler is not lack of talent.   He can be a great quarterback and has been a great quarterback.   But he usually isn’t a great quarterback.   And that’s the problem:  for whatever reason, Mr. Cutler is horribly inconsistent.    One game, he looks like Joe Namath.   Then, for the next game, or seven, he looks like Jack Concannon.

That Mr. Cutler is inconsistent is no great revelation, except perhaps to those who, defying logic and the clear evidence, insist that Mr. Cutler is consistent…consistently crummy.    Why he is inconsistent seems to be the issue.   But why should we care why Mr. Cutler is inconsistent?   I am not a psychologist and, with a few exceptions, neither are you.    If I were that interested in Mr. Cutler’s, or anybody’s, psyche, I suppose I would have taken up such studies in college and pursued a career trying to figure out what, besides economics, religion, and sex, motivates people to do the things that they do.  However, as a non-psychologist Bear fan, I only care that Mr. Cutler is inconsistent; I care not a whit why.

A local pre-game commentator remarked last Sunday, referring to Mr. Cutler, that you can’t change a player’s DNA.   He is correct; we are stuck with Mr. Cutler’s peculiarities and inconsistencies…but not because of the immutability of his, or anybody’s, DNA.   We are stuck with Mr. Cutler because Bear management decided to

·         first, acquire a guy with Mr. Cutler’s eccentricities,

·         second, build a franchise around a guy with Mr. Cutler’s quirks and oddities, and

·         finally, sign a guy with Mr. Cutler’s peccadilloes to a contract that locks the Bears into him, at a pay package about as good as those given to people with much greater consistency, until 2020.

No, the problem is not with Jay Cutler.   He is not the future of the Bears, or of any team, for that matter.   He is an enormously talented guy for pitifully brief periods of time.   He would make a fine backup quarterback in the NFL and even a good starter with a team in Canada or perhaps a team satisfied to dwell in the cellar of the NFL.   And if he could have somehow extended his brief flashes of greatness, who knows where he, and the Bears, might have been?

The problem lies not with Mr. Cutler, but with the Bear management that made the mistake of placing the franchise, and much of the franchise’s budget, in the hands of such a tragically flawed athlete.  That Mr. Cutler is not, and was not, the future of the Bears didn’t become apparent this year, or last year, or the year before that.   But weak managements, and weak people, have a tough time admitting mistakes, especially big mistakes.   So instead of giving sunk costs their due years ago, dealing Cutler to another time, and moving on, Bear management signed Mr. Cutler to a contract that is the envy of all but a handful of NFL players.   Management pursued this ruinous course of action in order to avoid looking foolish.   They failed.

THE ’85 BEARS: THE GREATEST TEAM EVER?

9/12/16

While I probably should have started this new Bear blog with a less controversial topic, like abortion, I decided to dive right into the Big One for Bear fans:   the ’85 Bears as the best team ever.

The other night my wife and I watched the WTTW special “ ’85:  The Greatest Team in Pro Football History.”   It was magnificent.   Well written, well thought out, well argued.   The commentators ranged from Mike Singletary and Jim McMahon to George Wendt and Bill Murray.   The writers even threw in a few local young comedians who, not being an aficionado of popular culture, yours truly did not recognize, but who added a trans-generational flavor to the show.   The writers even cleverly included Phil Simms, who felt the full wrath of that vicious Bear defense in the playoffs, and Dan Marino, who skillfully declawed that same otherwise ferocious defense in the Bears’ only loss that year.

Like the recent ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on the same subject, “ ‘85” argued convincingly that the Bears of that magical season were indeed the best NFL team ever.   Not only were they great ballplayers, but they were amazing characters:   Ditka, Ryan, Singletary, Fridge, Walter, Dent, McMahon, Gault, Otis, Duerson, Fencik, Plank…the list goes on and could never be fully inclusive.  The Bears of ’85 were indeed an athletic and cultural icon that will not be forgotten for a long, long time.   (I have learned over time that only a fool uses words like “never,” so I refrained from using it in the last sentence.)

As I said in my introductory post, “WHAT THE HELL DO THEEXPERTS KNOW?”, I was a huge fan of the ’85 Bears.   After Mike Ditka sort of took over the team (Never forget Buddy Ryan and the defense.) and the Bears began the multi-year march to the Super Bowl, I started to get interested in the Bears again after a several year hibernation period in my fandom born of a realization that while watching the greatest running back ever was entertaining, the joy was offset by continually falling short of any kind of proximity to the championship.   During the ‘85 season, I attended several games, including the Super Bowl.  That trip to New Orleans was one of the great weekends in my life up to that point; more on that in a less circumspect post.   The general point is that I was as big a fan of the resurgent Bears as anybody; finally, a team better than my beloved ’65 Bears represented the world’s greatest city on the gridiron.  I, my city, and much of the country, and even the world, reveled in it.

All that having been said, yours truly feels compelled to add some clear-eyed insight into the ’85 Bear mania.

First, it’s pathetic that we Bear fans are still celebrating and pounding our chests over a team that went to the Super Bowl 30 years ago.   In that span of time….

·         The Iron Curtain has fallen.

·         We have had five presidents, four of whom have served two terms.

·         Everyone has gained access to the internet in one fashion or another.

·         My wife and I have had three children, all of whom are either in college or have finished college.

·         Many of you have been born.

·         The Bears reached the Super Bowl once and were humiliated on national television.

Perhaps even more to the point, how many times have the Patriots, whom the Bears humiliated in the ’86 Super Bowl, gone to, and won, the Super Bowl?   How many times have the Bears’ nemeses to the north, the Packers, gone to and won the Super Bowl?   Plenty of times; I’d tell you the exact numbers but I’m trying to refrain from Googling while writing these missives.

While those who see the positive sides of life revel in the joy that the ’85 Bears brought us, those of us who see things more realistically enjoy that aspect of these periodic memorials but also lament, and lambast, the sheer incompetence in the Bear organization that has resulted in our having to take our joy from an event that is nearing the realm of ancient history.

Second, were the ’85 Bears the best team in NFL history?   Probably not.

The obvious reason that the ’85 Bears were not the best team in NFL history is that they never repeated.  Great teams become dynasties.   The Bears should have been a dynasty; they were among the youngest teams, if not THE youngest team, to win a Super Bowl.   But they never won again.   Why?   Who knows?   My favorite theory is that it was Buddy Ryan’s leaving the team for a head coaching position out east.   Who can blame Mr. Ryan for that?   Maybe it was Jim McMahon’s failure to stay healthy.   But note that McMahon missed several games in both the ’84 and ’85 seasons and Steve Fuller did a more than admirable job subbing for him.  Maybe it was Mike Ditka’s coaching style, which was becoming increasingly anachronistic even as the Bears were steamrolling their way to destiny in 1985.

It doesn’t matter why the Bears didn’t repeat; what is important is that they didn’t.   That is why they can’t be considered the greatest team ever.   It was interesting, but not at all surprising, that it was Phil Simms and Dan Marino, the only two Bear opponents appearing as commentators in “ ’85:  The Greatest Team in Pro Football History,” who brought up this point.   Objectivity can lead to clarity.   Come to think of it, that is perhaps the whole point of this blog, but I digress.

Perhaps another reason that the ’85 Bears were not the greatest team in NFL history, and the reason they didn’t repeat, was that Jim McMahon, for all that he did for that team, was not a great quarterback.   He was perfect for that team…a tough, fearless guy who enjoyed the game and played it with childlike gusto, an inspiration for his teammates and a guy who personified the attitude towards the game, authority, and the opponents that characterized this assemblage of characters who became the world’s dominant team for a year or so.   Especially apt was John Madden’s description of Jim McMahon as “a quarterback who always wanted to be a lineman.”   That was McMahon, as tough, and as wild, a guy who ever played the position.   But a great quarterback in the style of Manning, Favre, Brady, Marino, Bradshaw, Unitas, Starr, or any number of other present or former QBs I have failed to mention?   No.  

Maybe in ’85 a great quarterback didn’t matter as much, especially with an impermeable defense and the greatest running back who ever lived, albeit in the waning days of his career.   Indeed, as I pointed out above, Steve Fuller led the Bears to a number of victories as McMahon’s backup.   But the great teams of today, and probably even of the ‘80s and ‘90s, were characterized by great quarterbacks.   Jim McMahon was great for the Bears, but he wasn’t a great quarterback.

If we confine our discussion to performance over a single season, one could argue that the ’85 Bears were the greatest team ever; it would be nearly foolhardy to argue otherwise, though there are some in Miami who would take that chance.   The ’85 Bears certainly brought great joy to a city starved for that commodity by any of its sports teams.   And the Bears that year captured the imagination of the world.   But great teams repeat; the Bears didn’t.

“WHAT THE HELL DO THE EXPERTS KNOW?”

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.