In the past week, Tickets321 in Chicago sold more than 100 Super Bowl XLI tickets to Bears fans willing to risk enough money for a mortgage payment in the belief their unbeaten team will be playing Feb. 4 in Miami.
The going rate online for the perfect Bears fan’s New Year’s Eve bash is $10,000 for eight tickets to the Dec. 31 regular-season finale against the Green Bay Packers. You also can get a Soldier Field parking pass for the next home game, Oct. 29, for $109–four times the face value.
The new “Sexy Rexy 8” T-shirts for $13.95 seem like a bargain in comparison.
The recent money-is-no-object Bears frenzy makes no sense to some. But it makes perfect sense to others around Chicago who understand the vise-like grip the team has on the city’s heart.
Scarborough Research estimated last August that 56 percent of all Chicago consumers in the past year either watched a Bears game on television, attended a game or listened to one on the radio. It might be time for a new survey.
The reaction to the Bears’ 5-0 start, the most excited Chicago has been over its football team in two decades, has helped the city’s sports fans quickly forget the White Sox missing the playoffs and the Cubs meandering through a horrible season and a manager search.
Articulating the devotion to the Bears can be as tricky as explaining one’s devotion to his religion or a spouse, even for longtime Chicagoans such as Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Mike Ditka and others who understand the city like a dear friend.
“Maybe it’s something in the water or the air, but win or lose, the Bears are suffused intrinsically into everything we think, feel and sense about Chicago,” said Don Rose, a longtime political consultant dating to Mayor Richard J. Daley. “They make us feel good about ourselves. They are always the Bears and this is always Chicago. The Bears are us.”
Either Mayor Daley could have recited Rose’s words in a speech and they would have rung as true in the 1960s and ’70s as they do now. Blagojevich, a noted Cubs fan, believes the Bears have made themselves so popular since their inception in 1921 because of a style that has stayed consistent and given working Chicagoans an example to follow.
“Chicago has a spirit of hard work, determination and a no-nonsense attitude, and regardless of their record [over the years], the Bears play hard and they work as a team,” Blagojevich said.
Despite the recent legal problems of a trusted political confidant, Blagojevich acknowledged being swept away by the Bears’ start this year.
“A lot of fans feel this team could be as great as the 1985 Bears or any of the great teams of the `Monsters of the Midway’ era,” he said. “If the Bears keep playing the way they are now, there’s no team they can’t beat.”
Ditka’s take
Ditka, coach of the only Bears Super Bowl winner, achieved local immortality as a result. He knows from experience that too many games remain for him to echo such a bold prediction. But Ditka understands the football fervor he helped create, and says the Cubs or Sox would have to begin their seasons “about 75-1” to stir emotions as much as the Bears’ 5-0 start has.
“This is the greatest sports town in the world, [but] I always thought this was a North Side town with the Bears and Cubs, and it probably still is,” Ditka said at his restaurant earlier this week. “But the Sox brought a lot of joy. The Bulls brought a lot of joy. In the past years–way back–the Blackhawks brought a lot of joy.
“We need a winner again, especially in football. It’s kind of like a working man’s town, and I think they relate to football a little bit more here.”
Andrew McKenna, a lifelong Chicago-area resident and a member of the Bears’ board of directors, has served in the same role with the Cubs and White Sox. He attributes Chicago’s affinity for football–Bears football–to the absence of an NBA team until the Bulls in 1966 and hockey being more of a niche sport in the city.
With the city’s millions of sports fans splitting their allegiances between the Cubs and the White Sox, everybody could agree on the Bears after the Chicago Cardinals left town in 1959.
“I don’t know if there’s any one reason, but the Bears captured Chicago’s spirit with the `Monsters of the Midway’ in a meat-packing town,” McKenna said. “Part of the affinity for this Bears team is the development of the quarterback [Rex Grossman]. You have to go back to Sid Luckman to see something like that.”
George Halas would be proud but maybe not surprised, according to Jeff Davis, the author of “Papa Bear.” Davis traced the Bears hysteria so obvious today back to the day in 1922 when Halas struck a handshake deal with William Veeck Sr. for Halas’ football team to play in the Cubs’ ballpark.
“It still is the spirit of Halas carrying on nearly a quarter century after his death [in 1983],” Davis said. “He wrote and handed out his own press releases, sold the tickets, signed and paid the players. He coached them to more wins than any other team and made [the NFL], through his wit and guile, the richest and most powerful sports organization on earth. It’s no coincidence that Chicago responded to this native son and his Bears.”
Image never varies
The tradition of thinking of the Bears as a working man’s football team has survived the modern changes to the game, even this season when the first five games have revealed an element of finesse often overlooked when describing the appeal.
People conditioned to classifying the Bears as playing in a “Black and Blue” division or embodying a smash-mouth persona don’t care if the method of winning includes a touch passer and speed rushers. As long as the new Bears win, they conjure up old images.
“Carl Sandburg famously described Chicago as the city with `Big Shoulders’ and the Chicago Bears personify this spirit, a blue-collar team for a blue-collar town because they are hard workers, hard hitters, and diverse,” said Newton Minow, a powerful Chicago lawyer still well-known for calling TV a “vast wasteland,” in 1961 as chairman of the FCC.
“Players like Luckman, [Dick] Butkus, [Mike] Singletary, [Walter] Payton and [Gale] Sayers, and more recently [Brian] Urlacher, represent what Chicago is all about. And that’s why we love them.”
With due respect to offensive stalwarts such as Payton and himself, Sayers credits the Bears’ trademark tough defenses with creating a lunch-pail identity embraced in a city that likes to consider itself rugged.
“The Bears always have been known for their defense and people seem to identify with that,” Sayers said. “There are White Sox fans and Cubs fans, but this is a Bears town.”
The man who runs that town likened the appeal and success of the Bears to good government. Mayor Daley, a Bears fan who was instrumental in helping the team obtain financing to renovate Soldier Field, almost sounded envious describing the way Lovie Smith has coaxed his players on both sides of the ball into working together toward a common cause.
“They are playing as a team and that’s what you have to do with the City Council,” Daley said.
“You have to play as a team. There will be differences. There will be differences every day with aldermen, affordable housing advocates, but if you don’t play as a team and get some things done, then we sit on one side of the street, sit down and everyone screams and yells and nothing gets done. You have to really work as a team.”
Can ’85 be recaptured?
Can this Bears team, the story of the NFL season after the first month, continue to captivate a city that comes more alive with every victory?
“The current club will go 14-2 but until proven otherwise will never put the side headlock on Madison Avenue or Michigan Avenue the way the ’85 Bears did, so help me George Halas,” said Chet Coppock, the Chicago sports broadcasting maven who has attended 56 straight Bears home openers. “The roar of Papa Bear, the cutting edge of Ditka, `Sweetness,’ `Hamp,’ `Mongo,’ `Silky D,’ and an offensive line that would’ve made Hulk Hogan leap over the top rope made ’85 a year that will not be repeated. This current club has people excited but not galvanized.”
It’s only October, and 112 days until Super Bowl XLI. A lot of galvanization can occur by then.
Nothing would surprise Patrick Mannelly, the team’s long-snapper and most tenured Bear along with Olin Kreutz. Like millions of Bears fans, Mannelly can tell this season feels different from any of his previous eight seasons in town.
“My biggest barometer is people know who I am,” he said. “When we’re 1-4 or like that, nobody cares. But when people know who the long-snapper is, you know you’re winning and it’s a Bears town.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
