Bursting through the clubhouse doorway, Mike Ditka wrapped his tight-end- sized forearms around 70-year-old Max Swiatek.
”He must have loved every moment of it,” Ditka whispered by way of sharing the victory over the Rams that gave the Bears their first shot at a Super Bowl.
”I got to believe he was smiling up there all afternoon,” replied Swiatek, long-time custodian of the team`s inner sanctum.
The unseen participant in their three-way celebration–the ”he” of their shorthand of joy–was the late George Halas. Fifty years ago, Halas hired Swiatek as a teenage ”gofer,” and the ex-Lane Tech baseball player has worn his heart on his sleeve for Papa Bear ever since.
Back in 1935, he was killing time waiting for spring training and a tryout with a Cubs` farm team, Swiatek explained while exchanging pat-on-the- rump congratulations with a steady stream of players. One morning, he wandered over to Wrigley Field hoping to see the Bears play by working on the pre-game clean-up crew. In those days, volunteer groundskeepers who filled four bags worth of scrap paper and bottle caps earned themselves free admission.
”Mr Halas came along and saw what I was doing,” Swiatek remembered.
”`Come on with me, son,` he said, `maybe I can find a better way to get you in.”`
Bowing from the waist, Swiatek suspended his narrative while the team paused for a post-game moment of prayer. All around the room were heroic-scaled men whose blood-and-dirt-smeared uniforms reflected the violence they had just been wreaking upon their gridiron opponents. Now, with the self-conscious grace of an altar boy, they dropped to one knee to follow their coach`s example in offering silent thanks for their victory.
”Of all of the young fellows that have come and gone, Ditka is the one who reminds me most of Mr. Halas,” Swiatek said when the Bears` devotions were finished. ”Mr. Halas liked to say: `Never go to bed thinking like a loser.` Ditka, he understands that.”
Indeed, it is little wonder the Bears` head coach does, considering his own hard-knocks schooling in that philosophy. The last time the team won a championship, Ditka was a player and Halas was his coach. Whenever Ditka made a mistake, Swiatek remembered, Halas would yank him out of the game and chew him out for it on the sidelines.
”I used to feel sorry for the opposite side when that happened,”
Swiatek said. ”Ditka would go back in there and start running the other players right into the ground. No way he was going to risk having to face another of Mr. Halas` tongue-lashings.”
By this point, the Soldier Field locker room was beginning to look like an alumni renunion. Dick Butkus, who now looks down from a broadcast booth to watch a younger generation of linebackers do the bone-crushing stunts he once held patent to, came in to offer his congratulations.
”We really kicked their butts all over the field today, coach,” he proudly said to Ditka. In his use of the plural pronoun, you could sense that while his body is now confined to the press box, Butkus` soul still lines up with his teammates on every defensive play.
Television has long since transformed professional sports into a game of agents and incentive clauses, mega-bucks bonuses and annuity-producing product endorsements. But the Bears` locker room, at least, is still a magic world exempt from the passage of time: In it, grown men who command six-figure salaries still call their leader ”coach” with the same clear-eyed sincerity that the rest of us have not felt since high school years.
”Mr. Halas was always more of a father to his players than anything else,” Swiatek said. ”Back in the 1930s, when we still trained up in Wisconsin, he`d give me the keys to his big Continental and tell me to take this or that player who hadn`t made the team to the railroad station and put him on a train home.” More often than not, Swiatek recalled, those youngsters would break through the silence of their disappointment to offer a paean to Papa Bear.
”`Well, I feel pretty bad about being cut. But it was worth it, just for the chance to meet Mr. Halas,” they would tell Swiatek. ”You know what Mr. Halas told me? He said: `Son, you`re not ready for the Bears. But your whole life is still in front of you and you`ve got to be properly prepared for it. So I want you to go back and finish up your schooling. Will you do that for me?”`
For his own part, Halas held himself to that same semper fidelis standard that he enjoined upon others. One time, Mrs. Halas called Swiatek over to ask if he could find her a pen with a built-in miniature flashlight bulb.
”Mr. Halas never stopped thinking football even for a second,” Swiatek explained. ”Even in their bedroom, he kept a pile of 3-by-5 file cards on a night stand, so whenever he had an idea for a new play, he could jump right up and sketch it out. Mrs. Halas told me that what with her husband switching the lights on and off at all hours, she hadn`t gotten a decent night`s sleep since training camp opened.”
That perennial striving for perfection didn`t end even when Halas`
coaching days were over. A few years before his death, the Cubs management decided to honor the man who invented professional football by having Halas throw out the first ball on opening day of the baseball season at Wrigley Field.
”Mr. Halas had me go out and buy a couple of fielder`s mits, and bring them down to the team`s offices,” Swiatek said. ”By that point, he couldn`t stay on his feet for too long at a stretch. But every afternoon for two weeks before opening day, we`d go out in the corridor outside our ticket offices. He`d stand at one end of the hallway, and I`d go all the way down past the elevator bank. Then he`d steady himself on his canes, and we`d throw a baseball back and forth for 10 or 15 minutes. That`s just the way he was. Whatever he got involved with, Mr. Halas wanted to make sure it was done right.”
Swiatek`s role in his employer`s quest for the best varied over the decades, depending upon the team`s circumstances. Before World War II, Halas used to keep Swiatek at his side while he prowled the sidelines on game days. Whenever one of the assistant coaches, who were stationed in the press box, had a bright idea, he`d scribble it on a piece of paper and wave down at Swiatek, who would then run up through the stands to bring the suggestion down for Halas to see.
When the team`s trainer was called up for military service, Swiatek was promoted to keeper of the rubdown table for the duration. Even now, Swiatek keeps shelf-loads of aspirin and stomach remedies in the storeroom at the Bears` downtown headquarters that is his weekday duty station. That way, he explained, when one of the office crew is feeling under the weather, Swiatek can tend to him, just as he once rubbed the aching muscles and bandaged the black-and-blue thighs of Ed Sprinkle and George Blanda.
”I`m here in the locker room for all the home games,” Swiatek said.
”But these last couple years, I didn`t go on the road with the team. They wanted me to. But somehow, I`d rather be down there in our offices on weekends when we`re not playing at home. It`s funny, but I have this feeling that Mr. Halas still hasn`t left the place.”
Considering all their years together, Swiatek`s inability to let go of Halas is not hard to understand. In 1963, when the Bears won their last championship, Swiatek was the first to share Halas` joy.
”He grabbed me all around. Tears were coming down his cheeks and he kept repeating: `We made it, kid! We finally made it! I always told you I`d get you one of those championship rings,` ” Swiatek said, while pointing to the oversize ring that never has left his finger.
When Mrs. Halas died, Swiatek assumed the role of Papa Bear`s constant companion, and for the last 17 years of Halas` life was rarely away from his side. By then, Halas had relinquished his coaching duties, and was preoccupied with trying to get the city fathers to put up a new sports stadium. Many days, Halas would have Swiatek take him all over Chicago looking for a suitable site for his pet project.
Still, every year he would have Swiatek drive him out to the Bears` Lake Forest training camp, so that he could take a look at the team`s incoming class of prospects. Right up to the end, he would ride around the practice field on a golf cart, scribble down his observations, and send Swiatek off to run them over to the newer generation of coaches to whom he had entrusted the team`s fortunes.
”One of the last times we went out there was just after he`d chosen Ditka to be his coach,” Swiatek said. ”He just sat there looking out onto the practice field for a while and was silent. Then he turned to me and said: `Max, I`ve made a lot of mistakes in my day. But this time, I`ve got a hunch I`ve finally picked a winner. You better get your finger in shape. Soon, you`re going to be wearing a Super Bowl ring. You listen to Stash, I`m going to get you one.` Stash was Mr. Halas` nickname `cause his middle name was Stanley.”
Halas, of course, didn`t live to see his prediction vindicated. His final years were spent going in and out of the hospital or being bed-ridden at home.
”He had that hip problem going back a long time, and toward the end it started to get real bad,” Swiatek said. ”But he never gave up. I remember from his coaching days that after a defeat–even when we`d lost by a big score –Mr. Halas would never get down on his players like some coaches do. Instead, he`d call them together in the locker room and say: `Okay, we made some mistakes out there today. But I want you fellows to leave here with your chins held high.` ”
During those last years, the doctors prescribed a course of physical therapy to slow down the deterioration of Halas` muscles. But Papa Bear wanted no part of professional physical therapists. Nobody`s hands were going to touch him, except those that he had long-ago watched as they eased the post-game aches and pains of his football players.
”Every day in the hospital, I`d work on his hips and legs. I`d put 3-pound weights on his legs, and make him lift them up and down for the number of repetitions the doctors had prescribed,” Swiatek said. ”Mr. Halas would force himself to go through the exercise, and he`d say to me: `Max, you`re tough on me. I guess that`s what I`ve always liked about you. You are my right hand.` ”
With that, Swiatek broke off for a few minutes to say goodbye to some of the last departing players and coaches.
”My life`s pretty much complete. My own wife passed on a little while ago. But there`s one more thing I`d like to have before my own time comes,”
Swiatek said, when his hosting chores were finished.
”I`d just like to get one more of these.” He was pointing to the 1963 championship ring on his figure. ”Not for me–you can`t wear two rings at a time, can you? But if those fellows will just get Stash his Super Bowl ring, I`d be the happiest man on earth.”
