Love in the Time of Horse Collars

In 1979 my father refused to prosecute Dan Hampton. The then rookie Chicago Bears defensive lineman had been arrested for driving under the influence the night after he helped the Bears to a victory over the Green Bay Packers. If there is any truth to the story, it’s not that my father thought Hampton was innocent or should go unpunished, it’s that he simply passed the case to another state’s attorney. A win against the Packers didn’t absolve the future Hall of Famer, but Dad would be damned if he were the instrument of that punishment.

The story my brother told in his eulogy also came from that time. At a sentencing, a man my father prosecuted stood up and pointed at my father and said, “That’s the only honest motherfucker in this courtroom.” So the Hampton episode wasn’t malfeasance, but simple rabidity for the Chicago Bears.

That same year, with my mother’s blessing, he skipped my sister’s birth to watch the Bears game in the hospital waiting room. It was their third child, and no one was ever bitter about it. My mother still says it was better that he stayed out of the delivery room, that he would have driven her crazy.  As for my sister, she could hardly fault him for an absence in a moment she would never remember when he was always present for the ones she would.

The origins of his fandom are as absurd as shirking a case out of loyalty to his team or missing his only daughter’s birth. His father was the son of Italian immigrants, and other than a passing allegiance to the Miami Dolphins when he’d snowbird to Florida late in life, wasn’t much of a football fan. My father’s brothers weren’t fans either, at least not in the mold of my father. Jimmy, the oldest, had an interest, but more from a gambling angle and Johnny has probably never watched a football game in its entirety. Perhaps it was because my father was born in 1946, the last year the Bears would win a championship until 1963. But this is speculative, especially considering his formative years occurred when baseball was America’s game, two professional football teams played in Chicago, and the NFL was just beginning to use television as a medium to promote its sport. How could a greaser from Taylor Street become a man who recorded every game—even the dismal pre-seasons of the Avellini years—on Betamax? I never thought to ask him. My most reasonable conjecture is that fandom is not genetic or environmental, but more of a progressive neurosis.

***

February 4, 2007. Super Bowl XLI. My father is sitting in his spot on the couch in the den where he spent every Sunday for over thirty years watching football. Where he will die in a hospice bed 13 years later. DVR has not gone mainstream, so Dad’s VCR is still in play. He pauses at commercial breaks, and when the game resumes, leans forward, aims the remote, and clicks record. We know to be silent during these intervals and shift clear of the remote’s radio waves. But my brother will occasionally block the path to the VCR to get a rise out of my father, who took the game and his recordings so seriously you’d think he’d be using them for coaching purposes.  He has upgraded to VHS by this point, but the Beta tapes marked  “1985 NFC Championship Game” and “Super Bowl XX”  in his lawyer’s scrawl are still in the entertainment cabinet.

Taping the games was a rich source of teasing over the years. “Stop the tape,” my brother, a perpetual realist, would say midway through the 3rd quarter of a particularly inept Bears’ effort. But my father rarely did. The VCR rolled all four quarters. He would tape over the duds the next week of course, but he always saw it through. He kept a bank of blank cassettes in the event of a Bears’ winning streak which rarely came.

He kept recording. I don’t remember him ever giving. But in 2001 he nearly relented during a game against the Forty Niners. Down by 19 in the fourth,  he kept hitting “record” and captured perhaps the greatest comeback victory in Bears’ history, capped by an interception return in overtime by Mike Brown. I would like to say we knew better to tease him the next week against the Browns, but we didn’t. We badgered him,“Shut it down Big guy, it’s over”.  Down 21 to 7 in the fourth quarter, and no offense to speak of, it was over. But the Bears scored 2 touchdowns in 32 seconds, the second, an absurd fingertip catch on the last play of regulation that sent the game into overtime and gave Mike Brown the chance to do what he did the week before to a half-empty Soldier field. The Bears seemed destined that year—a defense with a young Brian Urlacher and Brown—only to be ousted in the first round by the Eagles. We’d seen it all before. Anyone who is not a Patriot fan knows the pain of a year of playoff football followed by years of droughts.

By 2006 we were so weary that getting to the Super Bowl seemed like a miracle. But there was something gnawing at me aside from the usual fanfare and the 5:30 kickoff time. I was anxious for the start, anxious for the outcome.  It had been over 20 years since the 1985 Super Bowl season. Being a Bear fan, hell a Chicago fan in general, chances like this come once a decade and here it was in all its glory to be and all I can think about was its disappointment, win or lose.

***

I was 9 years old in 1985. I  spent hours huddled at my nightlight studying the players and their statistics in the official program guide given to me as a birthday present that October.  Hampton had eleven and a half sacks in 1984 and went to the University of Arkansas. Kenny Margerum (a backup wide receiver) and I shared a birthday and a first name. Walter Payton’s longest run was 72 yards. Other than the glory years of the 1940’s I imagine the 1980s was the greatest era to come of age as a Bears fan. I remember the loss to the Forty Niners in the NFC championship game the winter before as a blizzard of my father’s swear words.

But ‘85 was full of hope. And Dad taped every damn game on Beta including the December Monday Night debacle against Miami, their only loss that year. A loss that could still anger my father ten, twenty, thirty years later.  “Ball bounced off Hampton’s helmet…” he’d sigh. He forever called it a “cheap” loss, a fluke. He died believing that. In reality, it was Dan Marino in his prime, doing what Hall of Fame quarterbacks do. To my brother and I, that night was a source of uncontrollable laughter as we pretended to be asleep and listened to him motherfuck the television. The Bears were 12 and 1. They would film the ridiculous Super Bowl Shuffle the day after that loss and go on the most lopsided playoff run in NFL history. But Dad didn’t know. He was so emotionally invested he would have canceled Christmas if they had lost again. It was in those moments I learned, shamefully, to give myself to the game, to the Bears, even if they never gave anything in return.

I sat on the floor in front of my father’s chair and watched the Bears rout the Giants and Rams in the Divisional and Conference rounds of the playoffs that year, but I went shopping with my mother and my aunt Connie the day of Super Bowl XX. I don’t think anyone in my family would remember my missing the only Bears championship in the last fifty years, but as sacrilegious as it sounds I missed it. I can’t explain why I abandoned my devotion, but perhaps it was some inchoate understanding of what I felt during the pregame of Super Bowl XLI. What if they won? What if the feeling of winning did not live up to my expectations?  What were my expectations? What would my father do? If he wasn’t pleading in frustration at the television, what was football? Sitting in my aunt’s kitchen on that bleak January Sunday I felt empty, a vague nausea I still get at the end of every football season, but can’t explain.  Depression inherited from my father. Seasonal Affect Disorder commingled with a kind of regret for the entire season.

I came home as the game lapsed into its final seconds, back then the biggest rout in Super Bowl history, but nothing had changed. The raucous Bears carried Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan off the field. I was no better or worse off for it. The season was over. Another one would begin midsummer.  I don’t even remember if Dad was happy. Had I missed something? I’ve had more than thirty years of Bears’ seasons—some memorable, most miserable—to consider it.

The day after Super Bowl XX was so bitterly cold my school kept us inside for recess. Televisions were rolled in on carts, and we watched the ticker tape parade. The weather the next day was the same. Televisions were rolled in, and we watched the Super Bowl Shuffle followed by the live launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Perhaps this explains my dissociative response to winning. It is muddled with explosions and death. Something somber and consequential.

***

I stopped watching football altogether when I stopped playing it after my sophomore year of high school. A hiatus that lasted until I was out of college. I suffered none of the malaise of the Dave Wannstedt years. Have no recollection of the infamous Halloween debacle in 1994 against Brett Farvre and the Packers. I have vague memories of my father’s frustration at Wanny’s rambling post-game press conferences. But I had sworn off football for literature convinced the two were incompatible.

But moving back home after college and living in my father’s house, football was inescapable. That year, after botching the hiring of Dave McGinnis, the Bears hired Dick Jauron. It was the beginning of something, and I was the prodigal fan returned.

And so followed a resurgence and more than two decades of planning my Sundays around Bears’ games long after I had moved out of my father’s house. My wife didn’t understand, but like my mother learned to live with it. The first year we were married I rushed her visit with an old college friend and sped home from Des Moines to catch a noon kickoff.  After twenty years, she may have forgiven me for it. Fortunately, none of my sons were born during a Bear game.

My father’s passion had worn off on me. My brother, sister, and I would gather every Sunday at my father’s and watch as we did when we were kids. My Uncle Jim would come too, always with Focaccia and cheese and pepperoni from Joseph’s Deli. This was the peak. The magic of 2001, the Urlacher and Peanut Tillman years, and plenty of “wait till next year” years.

But when Devin Hester returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown in Super Bowl  XLI  all my childhood angst returned. What if they’d won? Would it redeem the intervening years of heartbreak, anguish, and much of the time, frustration, and sometimes boredom? Sundays were sacred. Football was church. And there I was doubting the salvation of victory.

It was either the bathos of victory or the misery of losing. Somehow both felt the same. Not merely losing a game I have no control over, but the loss of time. Hours not merely watching games but listening to post-games (if you want to be entertained and awed by invective listen to archived audio of Doug Buffone and Ed O’Bradovich on their post-game show after a Bears’ loss), watching highlights, and reading profiles when I could have been playing catch with my sons, raking leaves, painting the bathrooms, writing a novel. If this isn’t the erratic emotion of a fan, I don’t think I’ve been doing it right.  Or else it’s a simple desire for a return on investment that you know may never come.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be a Patriot fan, glutted by success. The ennui that must follow each year. I don’t imagine any self-respecting fan would admit to that. In Chicago, the ‘85 Bears are still celebrated and it’s been over 30 years. What if they had won two Super Bowls? Three? Four?  What is the saturation point?  I don’t know enough Patriots fans to ask if they ever tired of Tom Brady like the rest of the world. Or maybe I am just a weary Bear fan tired of leaning on a 35-year-old championship.

It is the anticipation that I love more than the outcomes.  A team bringing you to the brink. Even my wife, who knows nothing of football, watched as Cody Parkey lined up for the last-second field goal in the Divisional round a few years ago. After being iced with a time out she was appalled,“That’s just not fair, “ she said. “He made it. They can’t do that.”

I tried explaining that it is a regular part of the game. One that is rarely effective, but often employed. She could sense the tension, and could not help getting caught in the moment. It is these interstices that I love (or else I am a masochist).  The outcome in the balance. The waiting. An entire Sunday spent for a single moment hours later that might be worthwhile. A makeable kick. The promise of another week. What followed was the now famous “double doink” miss, and another unceremonious ousting of the Bears from championship contention. But had they won and gone on to win again and then win a Super Bowl would I have felt any different? There would be a parade and a few weeks of talk, but everything eventually goes back to the cyclic march of another season. The absurd deluge of draft analysis and free agency followed by scrutinizing players and coaches. The sports writers, the talk radio. And I follow it, not like I used to, but I do. Although these days I feel more like Chazz Palminteri’s character, Sonny in A Bronx Tale, when he says to the young Cologero, “Mickey Mantle don’t care about you, so why should you care about him?”

***

Dad hated the television broadcasters. He thought John Madden was a buffoon and  Pat Summerall a bore. He hated Frank Gifford as much as he would later hate Joe Buck (he could tolerate and even liked Troy Aikman) so he muted the television during every game and tuned to the local radio announcers on a small transistor radio.

I grew to prefer the staticy buzz of the crowd noise. The screams and sighs and cheers of Wayne Laravee, Hub Arkush, and Dick Butkus who were never shy about who they were rooting for. Dad listened to the 1963 championship on the radio perhaps that’s when the habit formed, but he preferred the static and the hometown bias. Satellite television created a longer delay, so the radio broadcast was always a tick or two or three ahead, a point of contention between my brother and Dad. Even after Dad found the Sports Sync Radio with an eight-second and later a 22-second delay, my brother shunned the radio broadcasts.  By that time our Sunday gatherings were less frequent. We couldn’t miss our own kids’ soccer and basketball games for the Bears, just as Dad never missed any of ours.

So he bought me a SportsSync for the rare occasion I could watch at home.

***

Four months after his death and in the midst of the pandemic the Bears opened their season against the Detroit Lions. I woke up that Sunday in a panic that I didn’t immediately connect to my father not being alive or the strangeness of not being in his den or texting him ten times during a quarter—“Nagy sucks.” “What is he doing?” “Why won’t he run the ball?” “Trubisky is shit.” “Trubisky may be alright. “Trubisky is shit”  “Defense looks good.” Text simply, “So frustrating. Another great defense wasted.”

Perhaps cheering for a team is only suffering, and the only way to free yourself is to not watch. After my father died, that’s what my brother did. I spent most of the COVID season in my basement watching alone. I have always invited my young sons to watch with me, but have debated whether I want to continue the cycle of neurosis.

That opening week the Bears made a fourth-quarter comeback nearly as miraculous as the 2001 season. And they did it again a few weeks later against the Falcons. I was hooked despite not wanting to be.

It is a stupid game. Brutish, violent, and with the intricacies of offenses these days (the Bears’ notwithstanding) overwrought, with too many stoppages and gruesome injuries. I hate to love it.

I suffer a mild depression when the Bears lose four straight. But a quixotic impulse has me anticipating a Sunday night game with the Packers as if the season had just begun. Preparing for a Packer game as a Bears fan in the Aaron Rodgers era is nothing short of despair. But the years-long futility somehow provides a sliver of hope. They have to beat him at least some of the time.  In an act of desperation, Nagy resuscitates draft bust Mitch Trubisky to replace the unavailable Nick Foles.

I suppose this is as close as I get to religious faith. They could win. There could be a God.  Down by 4 scores midway through the 2nd quarter the game is essentially over. Trubisky throws two interceptions and has a fumble returned for a touchdown. Rodgers looks bored as he dissects the Bears’ defense. But I stay awake till eleven o’clock to watch the Packers mercifully grind the clock out. Although I am mostly aloof throughout the game, I feel sudden surges of rage. An adolescent inclination toward violence and I am evoking one of my father’s tropes.

Whenever  Rodgers would do something extraordinary (and extraordinarily agonizing to a Bear fan)—like throwing a 48-yard hail mary off his back foot on fourth down in the last seconds of a game to deprive the Bears of a playoff spot—Dad would conjure 60’s football.

“Rogers would have never lasted! Dick Butkus would have crushed him. Just crushed him.” My brother would roll his eyes,

“It’s not the 1960’s, Dad. The guy is just good.”

And he is. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining Dick Butkus burying Rodgers’ smirking mustachioed face into the turf or an alternate universe where the Bears have an actual quarterback.

I don’t want to be angry. I want to be indifferent. The season is lost and probably was weeks before. It is irrational to invest emotion into something that I participate in only as a voyeur. My father is still dead. Aaron Rodgers still dominates the Bears and I would have to wake up the next day and go to work. I consider abandoning my allegiance altogether. But the next day I am crunching the numbers and considering the possibilities of the Bears securing the last playoff spot. I feel like my father. For all his angst he was an eternal optimist. Every draft pick, no matter how obscure, was, “this kid is gonna be good.”. Every year was going to be a “good year”.

A few months later, down 21-3 in the 4th quarter of a wildcard playoff game, the Bears probably should have never been in, I turn off my Sports Sync Radio and the television. I am free. Free to not care. Free of all the confounding emotion that comes with being a fan. A kind of grief and the odd beauty in it.

***

It’s hard to justify my father’s explosive reactions to a game he had no stake in. But devotion was fundamental to his being. To his family, the law, justice, and ludicrously the Chicago Bears, who were as much a source of joy as they were frustration.

It wasn’t only the season-ending heartbreakers. Midseason losses in a going-nowhere year could send him into a week-long gloom. When I was a kid I always assumed it was about the Bears, but it wasn’t. He was too complex and intelligent a man. He loved history and movies and Shakespeare. His frustrations I know now were something else. That my father allowed himself to get emotionally involved is not entirely absurd. Fandom may be insane, but it is also a gift, a commitment, a hope you concede to year after year. Watching football is a distraction, a three-hour respite from the doldrums of existing. But it ran deeper for my father. His mother died when he was fifteen. A few years later, he was drafted into the Army and served in Korea. Between these two traumatic events was the 1963 championship. I think he learned to channel all his disappointments, grief, and hopes into the game of football. He didn’t lose often in the courtroom, his passion and pursuit of truth were too pure. He was honest which may have been why his political pursuits always failed. But he never let on that it crushed him. A lesser man may have.

It feels absurd to connect all these events or to look for significance in a game, an entertainment, that is wound so tightly to our baser nature. Perhaps it is merely my own reckoning. Some people run marathons or play golf. Some collect porcelain Disney figurines, some buy fancy cars and wear toupees. My father watched the Bears and so do I.  I don’t think it’s as simple as that, but love of any kind never is.