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

revealed: He could read each play before it had been called, knew where the ball was going before it got there. He did not follow nor anticipate. He knew. He caught a pass from Paddy Driscoll, turned upfield, and ran for a touchdown. In the second half, when the outcome was still in doubt, he read “pass” in the eyes of an opposing halfback, drifted back, jumped. He was up there a long time before the ball found him, nestled in his arms, went to sleep. He hit the grass running: seventy-seven yards through a tunnel of lunatics. They dragged him down at the 3. He was named Rose Bowl MVP, then smiled all the way back to Illinois. He got drunk with the boys, laughed, told stories. Then it was over. The war, the team. Everything. He was back in Chicago shortly after Armistice Day, the delirium of Clark Street, the el rattling past. Confetti, banners, the celebratory howl of a town drunk on promise, and meanwhile the sharp-jawed athlete stands like a boy in a Sherwood Anderson story, asking himself, “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
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    A few years earlier, when Halas was playing baseball for the University of Illinois, he had been scouted by the New York Yankees. He was a right fielder, a switch-hitter with a knack for getting on base. The scout invited him to tryouts, but the war intervened. He decided to head to spring training after he was demobilized. His mother objected. Halas had a degree in civil engineering, and she wanted him to use it. To her, he must have seemed like the college graduate who refuses to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. But if he was going to spend the rest of his life in an office, why hurry to get started?
    He arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, in the winter of 1919, carrying a glove and a letter from the scout. They put him in right field and told him to shag flies. It was the dead ball era. Babe Ruth was still in Boston, where he spent most of his time on the pitcher’s mound, a left-handed ace who, now and then, when he came to the plate—big powerful man that he was—drove a pitch into the deepest recesses of Fenway Park. George Halas was the exact sort of player that prospered in that ancient dispensation: the dead ball was all about bunting for singles, stealing bases, coming into second spikes high. He looked like Ty Cobb, the foul-tempered star of the major leagues—something the scout had probably noticed. And played like Cobb, too, without the talent. Halas was a fighter, a battler, a hustler, a go-getter, but despite the occasionally inspired play, he was not an artist on any field, baseball or football, which is why he is remembered less as a player than as a founder, an innovator, and a coach.
    The Yankees already had some of the players who would be part of their great teams of the 1920s. Lefty O’Doul was pitching, as were Bob Shawkey and Carl Mays, but for the most part the roster was a grab bag of the old and infirm, leftovers, has-beens, spare parts. Frank “Home Run” Baker, Ping Bodie, Duffy Lewis. The most famous player on the team is remembered less for what he did on the field than as a warning to workingmen who want to go skylarking: Wally Pipp, the first baseman, who, in 1925, decided to sit out a game—because the season is long, the body weary—opening a spot for Lou Gehrig, who occupied it for 2,130 consecutive games. Not long ago, during a preseason Patriots game, when wide receiver Wes Welker was out with injury, his replacement returned a kick for a touchdown. Pulling Welker aside, Patriots coach Bill Belichick asked, “What’s the name of that guy who played first base for the Yankees before Gehrig?”
    Halas was a switch-hitter, unusual for the time. He was a fine fielder, too, able to break on the ball with the crack of the bat and cover vast swaths of outfield. He was speedy, mean and, if he knew a fastball was coming, he could hit. One afternoon that spring, he faced the Brooklyn Robins’ Rube Marquard, who threw a