Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football by Rich Cohen Read Free Book Online

it from Zuppke, who learned it from Stagg. When asked where he got his plays, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne said, “I took them from Stagg, and Stagg took them from God.”
    Halas reached six feet his junior year. Meat and potatoes brought him to 170 pounds. He had speed and was nasty on defense, finishing plays with that extra dig that became a Bears trademark. As Ditka said, “Victory is a matter of imposing your will.” Halas broke his jaw on the field, and his leg. He was the kid on the sidelines, waiting stoically as a trainer stitches his lip, piercing and pulling, breaking the string. Illinois won the Big Ten his senior year. For Halas, this team became the model for all the others. It was not just the excellence but also the closeness of the squad: the hours on trains and buses, the locker room talk, the society of boys. As the season came to an end, players began to make career plans. Though Halas earned a degree in civil engineering, he did not want to be cooped up in an office. He wanted to kick and tackle in the snow, bust his jaw and run free. Once you get the taste of the sport, you never want to do anything else.
    There was a senior banquet following the season. Everyone got drunk, Zuppke said a few words. He was intelligent, less dictator than tactician. He was born in Berlin. They called him “the German.” He reminded the boys that they’d never play the game again. Pro football was still crude and rudimentary, a sandlot game, the provenance of working-class thugs. Zuppke congratulated his men, then spoke that bit of doggerel that every coach speaks at the end of the season: “You’re the best bunch I’ve ever had.” You smile and tear up but never believe it. “It’s a shame,” Zuppke went on, “just when I teach you fellows how to play, you graduate and I lose you. Football’s the only sport that ends just as a man’s career should be beginning.” But George Halas was special: he was the kid who actually took the coach seriously. Remembering Zuppke’s speech years later, he said, “Those words were to govern the rest of my life.”
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    America had entered World War I before the football season. Halas had waited until the last game, then enlisted in the navy. In honor of his service, the school awarded him the credits he still needed to graduate. He wanted to go overseas, fire guns and fight for freedom, but was instead sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Lake Bluff, Illinois, where he was added to the roster of the football team the navy brass was assembling from its bounty of conscripts. Halas was ranked an ensign, but all he did was play. In this way, he got to know the other football standouts of his time: Paddy Driscoll from Northwestern; Hugh Blacklock from Michigan State; Jimmy Conzelman from Washington University. If you look at the first busts in the NFL Hall of Fame, you’ll be looking at much of the navy’s World War I team.
    The players were assigned to Navy Special Services, fitted with dress whites and travel sacks, then sent on the road. They whistle-stopped from college town to college town, where they whipped just about every football power in the nation. The games were meant to boost morale and serve as a recruiting tool. Halas soon took over as coach, his first experience in a job that would define him. They beat Michigan and Illinois, and battled Notre Dame to a tie. The season ended in Pasadena, California, where the navy played a team of All-Star marines in the Rose Bowl, then called the Tournament East–West football game. This game stands at the peak of Halas’s amateur career. It’s the moment he realized how good he’d become. The stadium was packed; the nation’s best players were out there in smocks. Halas carried the ball on offense, covered the speedsters on defense. If you came across the middle, you were going to get hurt. For Halas, it was one of those perfect days when the sun shines and the dirt flies and everything is