It is morning, and former Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon is asleep when a couple of characters named Gus Cappas and Dino Tsoros let themselves into his Northbrook home through a back door and start taking things. They have been doing this for weeks, and so far they have absconded with enough jerseys, helmets and game balls to outfit a couple of teams. Their pilferage has left many shelves and some walls of the McMahon home bare.
“We take what we want,” says Cappas.
“And what we can carry at any one time,” adds Tsoros.
On one of the rare mornings McMahon was up before noon, he encountered Cappas and Tsoros as they were ogling about a dozen framed magazine covers on a wall in the home’s library.
“What are you thinking of taking now?” McMahon asked.
“That one there would be good,” said Cappas.
He was pointing to the cover of Philly Sport magazine, shortly after McMahon was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles in 1990. “The Quarterback From Hell,” the headline reads.
“Some greeting, huh?” McMahon said. “But by then I was used to it.”
The devilish image perhaps will always dog McMahon, and to be sure there remains a bit of the devil in him even as he now, at 42, settles into what has long been his best position–family man–and begins a career as restaurateur and real-estate developer.
The image, though, is a big part of the package, seeded in the “Mad Mac” and “Punky QB” tags he earned when he played for the Bears from 1982 to 1989, taking the team to its only Super Bowl in 1986. He was the Day-Glo leader of a colorful cast of characters that seemed to come not from the ranks of college football but from central casting, along with such playful monikers as Sweetness, the Fridge, Danimal and Mongo.
After leaving the Bears, McMahon quarterbacked the San Diego Chargers and the Eagles, played increasingly smaller roles with the Minnesota Vikings, Arizona Cardinals and Cleveland Browns, then ended his career with the Green Bay Packers. In his final season, in 1996, he threw four passes, completing three.
McMahon’s was the sort of nomadic life common these days in professional sports, where quarterbacks are modern-day versions of the gunslingers who roamed the Old West: Have Arm Will Travel. “A lot of people think I stopped playing when I left the Bears,” says McMahon. “Hell, I played for another eight seasons.”
But he is so identified with and so emblematic of the Super Bowl Bears that many people can’t think of him in anything other than a blue and orange No. 9 Bears jersey, embellished perhaps by a headband and sungalsses. Even Mike Ditka, McMahon’s former coach, sometime nemesis and golf partner, can’t shake this notion. “Jim will always be a Chicago Bear,” insists Ditka. “Those other teams he played for, they were just a mirage.”
Few athletes in the history of Chicago have so polarized fans, intrigued casual observers and mystified almost everyone.
In part, that’s the result of an aggressively non-conformist style and attitude that manifested itself in what many then considered such naughty behavior as chewing tobacco, drinking considerable amounts of beer and sporting silly haircuts, clothes and the famous hand-lettered ROZELLE headband that mocked NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s ban on sponsor logos. Given that many of today’s athletes don’t get the bad-boy label until they are indicted on a felony charge or fail repeated drug tests, McMahon’s most notable transgression seems laughably innocent: He once mooned a TV station’s helicopter hovering over a Bears practice session.
“I’ve never really cared much about what people thought about me, except the people I care about,” he says in what passes for one tenet of his live-and-let-live philosophy.
To those who do not know him, and that would be most of us, he can seem aloof or arrogant. To those who do know McMahon, and that would be his family and a few close friends, many of them former football players, he is “loyal,” “fun,” “a wonderful father,” “a great husband,” “a giving friend” and other descriptions that belie his public persona.
“Jim is a very private guy, even shy,” says Cappas, who has known McMahon for 20 years. “That’s part of the reason he still intrigues the public. He doesn’t put himself on a pedestal. He doesn’t walk around like, ‘Jeez, I’m somebody.’ He just wants to be treated like an ordinary guy, as difficult as that can be given his image as a rebel and a mischief-maker.”
Cappas and Tsoros are McMahon’s principal partners in a new restaurant named The Chicago Stadium, which is scheduled to open on Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview later this month. It is an ambitious project, a $4 million to $5 million vision of a bygone arena on West Madison Street, including a memorabilia-packed, multilevel sports bar with 30 TVs and eight big screens, a second-floor steakhouse that will be called McMahon’s Place and private party rooms.
Some of the memorabilia is being supplied by the morning raids that Cappas and Tsoros make on McMahon’s collection. “I told ’em, ‘Take whatever you want,’ ” says McMahon. “I’ve had this stuff for a long time. What’ll I do with all the empty shelves and walls? I’ll put up more pictures of the family.”
That family consists of wife Nancy and four children, Ashley (18), Sean (17), Alexis, called Lexi (14), and Zach (11), a dog and a cat (both 4), all of them with room to breathe in the 15-room home.
“It surprises a lot of people that we are even here,” says Nancy. “We’ll be out to dinner and people will come up and say, ‘Hey what are you doing back in town?’ Well, we’ve never really left. I suppose there are a lot of places we could live. Jim and I are both from California. But this is where we decided to put down roots. This is home.”
After Jim was signed by the Bears in 1982, the fifth pick in the first round, he and Nancy moved into a townhouse in Northbrook, where they grew ever fonder of the area, its easy accessibility to the Bears practice facility in Lake Forest and to O’Hare and, as the kids started coming, its public school system. Though the family would later relocate for six months every season to wherever Jim was tossing footballs, Northbrook is where the family has tried, to a surprisingly successful degree, to fashion a private life and to raise normal, well-behaved children.
“I’ve got to tell you, the McMahons are really lucky,” says a mother of three who lives in the suburb and whose children have attended school with the McMahon kids. “I’ve had problems with my own kids and a lot of kids up here are screwed up, using drugs, spoiled by the affluence. Jim and Nancy have great kids. They can be proud of the way they raised them.”
When he has not been out of town pursuing business ventures, doing charitable endeavors and playing football or golf, McMahon has never missed one of his kids’ school plays, recitals, games or other functions. “He’s just a great father,” says Ditka. “He is utterly devoted to those kids. And Nancy is the greatest.”
On the couple’s fourth wedding anniversary, a few months after the Super Bowl win in 1986, Jim took Nancy for a short ride from their townhouse. He slowed the car in front of a three-acre property and waited for her to notice the sign stuck in the lawn: “Sold to Jim and Nancy McMahon.” It took two years and more than $2.5 million to build the 12,000-square-foot English manor-style brick and limestone house, and to wander through it now is to experience a comfortably lived-in home, but one with two distinct personalities.
“I told her the downstairs is mine and she could do anything she wanted upstairs,” says Jim.
That lower level is a jock’s palace, dominated by a regulation-size racquetball court that also serves as a basketball court and mini hockey rink. There are twin locker rooms with separate showers, a weight room, a tanning bed, a sauna and steam room. There are couches and TVs, billiard and Ping-Pong tables, an air-hockey game, a foosball table and, at the moment, a prowling male cat named Lucky.
“Because,” says McMahon, “it is lucky to even be here. I hate cats. But Lexi wanted a cat. She gave him the name.”
She also named the dog, a friendly female yapper named Bailey, who is not allowed to go in the living room, a sun-splashed area dominated by a grand piano (only Ashley plays) and a photo of the kids taken some years ago, above the mantel, and photos of Jim and Nancy shot in stark black and white by Victor Skrebneski.
There’s a formal dining room on this floor and its table is covered by huge jigsaw puzzles. One is of the World Trade Center, another the face of a wolf.
“The kids like to do these?” McMahon is asked by a visitor.
“No, me,” he says. “It’s a time killer and they are hard, pictures within pictures. The kids got me this big magnifying glass to help. I’m going to get them framed and put them on the walls.”
Inside the main entrance to the house, a formal Y-shaped staircase leads up and fans out to two wings of the house–one side the children’s rooms and the other a master suite for the parents. The girls have separate rooms, all soft colors and pretty fabrics, and a massive pile of stuffed animals.
“You think that’s big?” McMahon says, indicating the stuffed-animal collection. “It used to be three times as big. Now that the girls are older, we keep loading the car every once in a while and taking the stuffed toys to the local hospital.”
Ashley was home recently on break from classes in her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “I didn’t really get homesick,” she says. “I did a lot of traveling when Dad was playing and so I adjust pretty well to new places. I really miss my room, though. And my parents.”
“She calls home every day,” says Nancy, with delight.
“Yeah, but she’s thinking about majoring in journalism,” says Jim, with disgust.
His relationship with sports reporters has always been contentious. No newspapers are delivered to their home because, Nancy says, “We just got so tired of people writing negative things about Jim.”
One writer who is friends with McMahon is Tribune columnist Bob Verdi. In 1986, the unlikely pair collaborated on the bestselling “McMahon!”
“The thing that ever stands out about Jim is the way he laughed at himself and the surroundings in an artificially serious NFL,” says Verdi, who is also an investor in the Glenview restaurant.
There is nothing serious about the boys’ quarters, which are a two-level affair. Sean sleeps upstairs and his walls are covered with, his father says with disdainful resignation, “all sorts of Britney Spears crap.” The walls of Zach’s room are filled with photos of him with such stars as former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, basketball’s Charles Barkley and baseball’s Ken Griffey Jr. There’s even a picture of Zach with Joe DiMaggio. But if one sports star dominates the room, it’s his father, on half a dozen posters.
“I think Zach’s been in more locker rooms than I have,” Jim says. “But it was always important that I didn’t spoil the kids. I took Sean back to where I grew up and he couldn’t believe how bad it was. I look at this room. My whole house could have fit in here.
“I think we’ve done a good job so far. The kids are great,” he says. “I’ve never heard anybody say anything bad about my kids, and that’s pretty unusual in this kind of neighborhood. Nancy’s the one who basically raised them. But I think they listen to me when I yell.”
Sean rolls his eyes and says, “When he yells, we kind of laugh.”
“When I swear at them, they know I’m serious,” Jim says.
“You swear all the time though,” says Sean.
He’s right. McMahon’s conversation, in private and public, is laced with words common to locker rooms, neighborhood bars and Marine Corps bases.
“He’s a loudmouth at games,” says one Northbrook father whose sons have played sports with the McMahon kids. “He’s got that former jock mentality, I think. He’s like an overgrown kid.”
McMahon would not disagree. “I yell. So what? I yell when Sean gets cheap-shotted by another player. I’ll yell, ‘Break his —— neck!’ I think Nancy gets a little embarrassed when I do that. But I never mix it up with other parents unless they start lipping off. When I was growing up, in my family, we yelled a lot.”
McMahon was born in New Jersey, the second of six children of Jim and Roberta, an accountant and a housewife. When he was 3, the family moved to a lower-middle-class, rough-and-tumble section of San Jose, in northern California.
“I got my ass beat a lot when I was a kid,” he says. “But I deserved it. I was a hoodlum, sneaking out of the house at night, vandalizing my school, stealing, getting drunk and smoking my dad’s cigarettes.”
During his junior year in high school, McMahon’s family moved to Roy, Utah, where he starred in football, leading the local high school team to records of 11-1 and 8-2. He was also good at baseball and basketball and was offered scholarships to a number of universities and colleges. Mostly to please his parents, he decided to attend Brigham Young University, with its pass-happy football program in a less-than-freewheeling social environment.
“I was in Utah for seven years and I’d never go back,” he says. “If you’re a skier, hunter or fisherman, it’s a great place to be, but I don’t do any of that stuff. And some of the rules about drinking–a lot of those people believe that drinking a Coke is like consorting with the devil.”
He wasn’t much of a student, leaving 19 hours shy of a degree. “Did just the bare minimum,” he says, “just enough to get by. I never wanted a job. Hell, I knew that I was going to do what I did.”
What he did was throw footballs, and few collegians have ever done so with more skill. By the time he finished his BYU career, which was interrupted when he sat out the 1979 season following knee surgery, he had set 71 collegiate records for passing and total offense. Inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1998, he still ranks among the top 10 in many categories.
But the best thing to happen to him at BYU was meeting Nancy Daines his freshman year. She was a Mormon and the middle of seven children of a civil engineer, Nolan, and housewife, Janet. The family lived in San Carlos, Calif., a middle-class suburb 20 miles from where McMahon grew up, but a world apart.
“She was a good-looking woman,” recalls McMahon. “And she wasn’t a typical Mormon. She wasn’t sheltered.”
“I just needed a date for a dance,” says Nancy. “I saw him walk in the cafeteria, and I told my friend, ‘I’m going to ask that guy.’ I did, and after our first date I knew there was something there. I felt so comfortable. He was so much fun.”
The first date took place on Feb. 24, 1978 (both easily recall the day). They were married on May 1, 1982, just weeks after McMahon was drafted by the Bears.
“We haven’t changed since we met,” says Jim.
“He’s right. I heard a lot of negative things in college,” says Nancy. “Jim swore, Jim drank and a lot of people were like, ‘I can’t believe she’s dating him.’ But I loved him, and Jim taught me not to be hurt by what other people said. We haven’t learned anything new about each other in 25 years. With Jim, what you see is what you get. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. We can’t really be worried about what other people say.”
But they have been troubled by what other people have done.
“I don’t like attention, people looking at me, bothering us,” says Nancy. “Dating him all the way through college gave me a little taste of what fame was like. But that couldn’t prepare me for what happened when he was with the Bears. We couldn’t even open the drapes. There would be people staring in the house, going through our garbage, taking pieces of our lawn.”
“Now, what the —- would someone do with a piece of our lawn?” muses Jim.
Even after the family moved into their more secluded current home, the curious continued to come, often pulling into the driveway and getting out of their cars to take pictures or, more brazenly, knock on the door and ask for autographs.
“I told Sean, ‘You see a car we don’t know, just pelt it with rocks,’ ” says Jim.
The house is hidden from the road by tall trees. There’s a swimming pool, a hot tub, a spacious lawn and a small golf practice area grown somewhat shabby.
“I should be practicing more,” says McMahon.
Since his retirement from football, golf has been his principal sporting activity. He plays in about a dozen tournaments on the Celebrity Golf Tour, a 16-weekend-a-year gathering of retired sports stars and some entertainment personalities to “play some golf, have some beers and raise some money for charity,” says McMahon. Last year he placed 35th out of 100-some regular tour members.
Unlike many former professional athletes, he is not crippled either by lingering injuries or the pains of withdrawal from the spotlight.
“I don’t miss football,” he says. “Fifteen years was enough. Sundays were fun. I liked playing. I don’t like watching.”
When the Bears drafted quarterback Cade McNown in 1999, many writers and fans took the kid’s swagger as a sign that he might be the long-awaited coming of Punky QB II.
McMahon did not attempt to mentor the youngster, but did offer some advice. “I told him, ‘Dude, all you got to do is play hard in this town and they’ll love you. If you win, it’s even better. They’re good fans here. They understand who can play and who can’t.’ “
Obviously, McNown did not listen, and he’s no longer a Bear. But no one, not even some of his detractors, ever questioned McMahon’s desire to play hard. He was as tough as McNown seemed soft. He stayed in one 1984 game after suffering a lacerated kidney and played much of another season with a hairline fracture in his hand. There were enough strains, pulls, bumps and bruises to keep a small hospital busy.
There are those who maintain that if he had not been plagued by injuries, the 6-foot-1-inch, 190-pound McMahon might have been destined for the Hall of Fame. Those injuries resulted in his going under the knife a total of, “OK, let’s see . . . I think 15 times. Five to each knee, two on my right shoulder and one on the left, one on my right elbow,” he says.
That’s only 14.
“Well, maybe I forgot some,” he says. He fails to mention that when he was six he accidentally punctured his right eye with a fork and required surgery. The eye has remained sensitive to light, which is why he so frequently wears sunglasses.
In 1993, McMahon began to study martial arts and says, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for my body. Before, I couldn’t even bend my legs. Now I’m in better shape than when I was playing.”
All his kids are active in sports, but McMahon says he is not encouraging anyone to play football.
Sean’s game is hockey. “I enjoy watching him play,” McMahon says. “I’d like him to be a good athlete, and I think he can be if he wants. I didn’t push him into football. In hockey or basketball, he’s got his own identity. He doesn’t have to be compared to his dad.”
Ashley plays tennis and lacrosse, while Alexis favors volleyball and softball. Zach plays baseball and hockey, and when he was 10 and first donned the uniform and pads needed for tackle football, he said to his father, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.”
Nancy plays tennis once in a while, but she seems to have found her talents best suited to a quieter but no less demanding realm. “I love being a mom,” she says. “As much as Jim loved football, I love being a mother. And I like to think that I’m as good at doing that as he was at football.”
She is a calm presence in a house where people are always coming and going. At 42, she looks 10 years younger, with a bright smile and, for all her self-professed shyness, a lively and engaging personality.
She has become a master juggler of schedules, aided by a planner color-coded for different family members and their activities: orange for Ashley, blue (Sean), pink (Alexis), green (Zach) and yellow (Jim and Nancy). Most pages are fully rainbowed. On Sunday mornings, colors combine as all but Jim attend church. The kids have been raised Mormon.
“I was raised a Roman Catholic,” says Jim. “But it was important to me and to Nancy that the kids have a religious foundation. She’s the one who takes them to church. I don’t go. I’m not a practicing Catholic. Now, I think I’m Greek.”
Cappas and Tsoros laugh at that. “It’s kind of true,” says Cappas. “This [restaurant] deal would never be happening if we didn’t know and like each other. This bond is based not only on money but friendship.”
“But we better make money,” McMahon adds.
The Chicago Stadium is not McMahon’s first foray into the restaurant business. In those dizzying, make-a-quick-buck days following the Super Bowl, McMahon was among several teammates–Gary Fencik, Ditka, Walter Payton, Dan Hampton and Kevin Butler among them–who got involved in restaurants.
His was called McMahon: One of a Kind, which opened in April 1987 in what had been for many years a Mexican restaurant named Hacienda del Sol, at Lincoln, Sedgwick and Armitage Avenues. It was decorated with the requisite sports paraphernalia, as well as some odd celebrity photos (Dr. Ruth, Bruce Willis, Johnny Carson and local porn film star Seka), McMahon’s high school basketball and football uniforms, a torn Dick Butkus jersey and many, many pictures of McMahon. As a reflection of his disdain for the Fourth Estate, the downstairs space was labeled “Jim McMahon’s Press Club–No Press Allowed.”
After a number of management changes, the place folded in 1989. “It was disappointing,” he says now. “Seeing the place packed all the times I was in there and not getting any money out of it. I guess the overhead was ridiculous for the space we had and I was always getting told that I had to be there all the time. But I told them, ‘I can’t be down here every night. I have a family. My wife can cook.’ “
This time around, he promises, will be different, and indeed he has been attentive to all sorts of details, from the wines that will be served to some of the hiring of staff. He frequently visited the construction site. His enthusiasm is obvious.
“I think this will be fun,” he says to pals he’s showing around. “When I’m not out of town, I’ll be at the restaurant. When my kids are in school, I’ll be here, and when they’re not in school, my kids will be working here.”
“We want them here,” says Cappas. “Their friends can work here too.”
Cappas is a 60-year-old former South Sider who was starting halfback for his Lindblom High School football team (the name as published has been corrected in this text). He grew up in the restaurant business, first working at his father’s shot-and-a-beer joint at Archer and Western Avenues. He met the McMahons in 1982 when he owned and operated a Glenview restaurant called the Prime Minister, a popular hangout for sports stars, many of whom lived in the area and appreciated the fact that Cappas respected their privacy. (In his autobiography, McMahon called the Prime Minister “the greatest restaurant in the world.”)
Two years ago, Cappas sold the Prime Minister, got married and retired. “But after two days I was going nuts,” he recalls. “I called Jim. We’d been talking about doing something for 15 years. I called and said, ‘OK, let’s do something.’ “
They hooked up with Tsoros, who had come to the U.S. from Greece courtesy of a basketball scholarship to Queens College in New York, and now is the owner of Praxis Construction, which has 120 buildings dotting the Chicago area.
“We hope this restaurant will be the start of big things for Jimmy and for us,” says Cappas, his enthusiasm fueled by the fact that such retired sports stars as hockey’s Bobby Orr and football’s John Elway have already expressed interest in having the McMahon-Cappas-Tsoros team help them explore building similar old-time-stadium themed places in Boston and Denver. The threesome are also involved in commercial and residential projects in the suburbs.
“Jimmy turns down all sorts of things,” says Tsoros, who is 45. “They want him on TV, to make commercials, do football commentary. He will make some speeches, do some commercials, infomercials. But the reason he is still one of the biggest stars around is because he doesn’t sell his name and face to everybody like some of them do.”
It is an April afternoon at the McMahons’. Cappas and Tsoros are, as usual, looking around for items to decorate the restaurant. Sean is eating macaroni and cheese. Ashley is hemming a pair of pants that Zach will wear in a school play the entire family will attend that night.
“This tooth is loose,” Zach says, gingerly jiggling one of his teeth.
“Go on, just pull it out,” urges Sean.
“The last baby tooth of my baby,” says Nancy, wistfully.
Alexis is at a friend’s house. Jim is in another room, yelling at himself for his inability to quickly master a new video game.
“—-,” he shouts, putting the game aside. “I’ll get it though.”
“Like I said, I never wanted to have a job. And this restaurant thing isn’t a 9-to-5 deal. Look, I’m doing OK. I’ve made some good deals and I’ve made some bad deals. But I still need to make a living for my family and I hope this will do that.
“Over the years, I’ve turned down a lot of things. Movies? Plenty. I wasn’t going to waste four months of my time sitting in a trailer when I could be home with my family.”
Walking into the kitchen, McMahon catches Cappas eyeing something affixed to the refrigerator. It is a portrait made of construction paper in various colors, mostly blue and orange. It has a smiling face, topped by a white paper head and a blue jersey with the number 9.
“I made that with my friend Joey in school,” says Zach. “It’s my dad.”
“That’s really nice,” says Cappas. “I really like that.”
“Don’t even think about it,” says McMahon.
