Category Archives: Professional

Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Marino, Dolphins Just Babes Against Bullies

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Dateline: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

Uh, about that wing being built at the Pro Football Hall of Fame to celebrate the accomplishments of Dan Marino of Miami.

Put away the hammer and saw for a few more years. Pack up the spotlight and send back all those autographed footballs collected from assorted end zones with Marino’s fingerprints on them.

Rent out the space for something useful, like a used-car lot. Wait until Marino grows up and wins a couple of Super Bowls, like Joe Montana of San Francisco.

Or until Marino learns to throw the ball lying on his back, or only to his own receivers, or until he gets a defense that doesn’t think it is against the rules to get in the way of the other team.

IN ONE MISTY afternoon on the campus of Stanford University, Marino was exposed, not as a boy wonder, but merely as a boy, befuddled by the adults of the 49ers, who allowed him only one touchdown pass and none after the first quarter.

“Marino had only a fair game, but he’ll be back,” said 49ers’ coach Bill Walsh. “He’s a brilliant quarterback.

“He’s a great quarterback, a great young quarterback.”

The longer the game went, the younger Marino got. By the end, you expected Marino to curl up in the huddle with a pacifier in his mouth.

“It was our poorest offensive game of the year,” said Miami coach Don Shula. “Our defense never stopped them. We just didn’t have the answers.”

What was supposed to be the greatest Super Bowl ever ended up being the greatest mismatch.

THIS WAS BABIES against bullies. The 49ers even looked better during calisthenics.

And this wasn’t just a bunch of overweight guys with fish on their hats who wandered into Stanford Stadium on stolen credentials. These were Shula’s Dolphins, the most prolific offensive menagerie on record.

They could score so fast the stadium clock needed to be a stopwatch. You had to take off your shoes to count the touchdowns.

This was the team with the state-of-the-art passing attack, inexhaustible and indefensible.

“All we heard all week,” said Montana, “was about their offense. We knew we had an offense, too.”

WHAT SAN FRANCISCO had was more weapons than Miami. Not only was there Montana, the game’s most valuable player, but Roger Craig, who scored three times for a Super Bowl record, and Wendell Tyler, who did not fumble, and Dwight Clark and even a third-string running back, Carl Monroe, who caught the first of Montana’s three touchdown passes.

Montana was as nimble as Marino was inert, dashing away from a timid Dolphin pass rush, running once for a touchdown and, at one point, posing the question of whether he could rush for as many yards as Marino could pass for. Anyone without a microscope would have thought the Miami defense had missed the team bus.

“Montana had a lot to do with that,” Shula said. “He was outstanding in every way. When you get beat the way we got beat, you just take your hat off to the victor.”

If this had been a prize fight, the 49ers would have been given the decision on a TKO, just as soon as Montana found Craig for a 16-yard touchdown late in the third quarter.

THE 49ERS COULD pass and run, often at the same time. Miami couldn’t even walk. So insecure was Miami’s running game that the Dolphins tried it only nine times, with little effect.

Miami had one bullet, Marino, and on this day it was only good for shooting itself in the foot.

Marino threw the ball 50 times, a Super Bowl record, and completed 29 to friends and two to San Francisco, one each to Eric Wright and Carlton Williamson, who weren’t supposed to have the speed or the savvy to stay with the Marks Brothers of Miami, Duper and Clayton.

Duper caught only one pass, and while Clayton caught six, none was ultimately of consequence.

Marino’s most effective pass was a dump-off to running back Tony Nathan.

“We knew we were the key to beating these guys,” said Wright. “It would all come down to what kind of day we had.”

THE SECONDARY and the pass rush, led mostly by Fred Dean, Gary Johnson and Dwaine Board, tested Marino’s noted quick release as it had never been tested in his young career.

To get the ball off in time, Marino would have had to throw it back between his center’s legs.

There can be no doubt now that San Francisco is the best team in football, complete in all phases, while the Dolphins are only as good as Marino can make them.

“This team is one of the best of all times,” said Walsh.

Instant history is dangerous. Just a day before, we would have believed that about Marino. PHOTO: UPI Telephoto. San Francisco running back Roger Craig is upended by Miami cornerback William Judson after a short gain. Craig scored three touchdowns to set a Super Bowl record.

Chicago Tribune, Football, Prediction, Professional

Trying to Figure the Super Winner

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Dateline: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

I’m a numbers guy when it comes to picking football winners and here are the most important numbers to consider in choosing a winner of Super Bowl XIX. The odds of an earthquake actually destroying either the Miami Dolphins or San Francisco 49ers on Super Sunday are 10,000 to 1, reported to be the same as the last time nature tried to shake this city into the bay.

A lot less was at stake in 1906, of course, there being no Super Bowl but merely the infancy of the future Paris of America, which has since been more or less restored, to the eternal gratitude of hairdressers everywhere.

The odds are considerably more promising that Stanford Stadium will be rattled around a little bit, something like 500 to 1, which the 49ers may be counting on to stop the passing of Dan Marino of Miami. It is the only defense that has not yet been tried.

THE OPPORTUNITY to witness this Super Bowl in person has been sold for as much as $1,000, the most impressive number ever associated with football ticket scalping. This would seem to confirm the opinion that this is the most desirable Super Bowl ever concocted, when all it really means is that folks around here never pay less than $1,000 for anything, including bread that tastes like it has already been chewed and a ride on a noisy cable car during which you feel as secure as a scab on a child’s elbow.

Parking places are selling for $100, which I believe is only by the wheel, and TV is hawking without blushing one minute of time for a cool million, the same number as Joe Montana’s salary for a whole month.

This is a Super Bowl that will be won or lost by the quarterbacks. The numbers on each of them are revealing.

Montana of San Francisco leads Marino in marriage proposals 3-1 and in weddings 2-0, making him clearly the veteran bridegroom.

Marino’s inexperience in these matters has been of considerable concern to observers who have watched the two all week, trying to determine which one is most adept at handling pressure.

Every question concerning each man’s marriage plans met with severe irritation, with Marino being the more testy, though Montana seemed to have the edge in regret.

MARINO LEADS Montana in number of flashy sports cars, having had three Corvettes to Montana’s two Ferraris. If either one should become most valuable player in the game, he will not win a new automobile, but a bumper sticker that says, “My other car is a Dodge.”

Bill Walsh, the 49ers’ coach, is very big on numbers, as one would imagine about a man who works for a team whose last name is one.

Walsh begins every game with 25 plays called “the script.” The script is never violated until all the plays have been run in numerical order, no matter the down, distance or situation.

Walsh does this to prevent stereotyping of his offense, and to keep Montana’s mind clear to consider more important numbers, such as the address of the church this time.

It also allows Walsh time to dash to the locker room and change in case he should discover himself wearing in public any piece of clothing that does not have a crease.

DON SHULA DOES not bother with scripts other than the one he read a long time ago which told him that any point is made clearer by screaming.

When considering the numerical influence of either coach, one should not look at the sideline but at the roadside. Shula is part owner of five hamburger franchises in the Bay Area, while Walsh is part owner of none.

The most annoying number is nine, that being the total of Miami defenders whose last names begin with the letter B. This oddity is responsible for Miami’s defense being known as the Killer Bees, or on occasion the Beefense.

The Dolphins and their sunburned faithful take great delight in pointing out how clever they are with nicknames, giving an identity to a defense that would be better off hiding its face behind a hat.

SAN FRANCISCO has the much better defense but has no identity except the one it left behind when its pass rush moved north from San Diego. All four of its defensive backs will be in the Pro Bowl, but so will all three important members of Miami’s offense, whose names all begin with M.

There is no telling how good Miami could be if it used the whole alphabet.

The only number that really matters in all of this is No. 13. That is Marino’s jersey number, or the number of touchdown passes he threw last week. I forget which.

Marino is the only reason anyone should pick Miami, but in all the history of Super Bowls, there has never been a better reason.

I make it, by the numbers, Dolphins, 31-24.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional, Quotes

Marino’s Success Speaks for Itself

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Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

Two things you don’t expect to learn about Dan Marino are: one, he is painfully young; and two, he is fat.

Not that he’s a real porker, not like a pulling guard or a nose tackle, but he has a belly that belongs on a baker, or a bartender, not on the greatest quarterback to ever become a legend over a weekend, which is about how long it has taken Marino to make the world forget Dan Fouts.

Quarterbacks, especially record-setting 23-year-old quarterbacks, ought not to look better with their shirttails out. Marino has a body made for suspenders.

Bless his paunch, a mortal flaw. You cannot imagine what a relief it is to have made this discovery. For if he had one of those speedbump stomachs, he would be just too perfect to stand.

He already has hair that curls around his face with careless insolence, eyes as blue as a Florida dawn, a smile that could melt the heart of a hermit, and he can throw a football with the inspiration of a minor Roman deity, which he is rumored to be in assorted Italian neighborhoods and the offensive huddle of the Dolphins.

IF YOU STARTED out to build a quarterback, Marino would already have all the best parts, though yours would probably be able to touch his toes without sitting.

And you might give him something interesting to say, just for variety. Marino treats conversation like a spaniel treats a rose bush.

“How did you come by your fast release?” Marino is asked.

“Who can say?” he shrugs.

“What do you say to people who already call you the greatest quarterback who ever lived?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is the greatest?” he says.

“Are you surprised to be in the Super Bowl so soon in your career?” he is asked.

“No,” he says.

“Do you think you are a dull person?” he is asked.

“Who’s to say who is dull? Maybe I think you are dull,” he says.

AND SO IT GOES. Marino came to this Super Bowl with a world ready to anoint him for his achievements, past and future, and he has managed to treat it as if it were trying to steal his wallet.

He has been patient with almost all inquiries, but he would clearly rather be someplace else. Three minutes into any interview and he starts shuffling his feet as if his toes were on fire.

An easy conclusion to draw is that Marino is essentially a jerk, a judgment that is as premature as is any on his place in the history of paid quarterbacking.

Marino is not very smart, not in an extra-football sense. If he has ever had a thought that did not include football or fun or family, he chased it out of his head before it left a scar.

In order to get out on the town with his teammates this week, to avoid the fans who gather to gawk and tug at him, Marino has had to leave his Oakland hotel in disguise. What the disguise is has not been revealed, but rumor has it he has been undetected as a scholar.

“I don’t think about things,” Marino said. “Have I ever sat down and thought at this moment in my life if I am destined to be a champion? No, I don’t do things like that.”

A DEEP THINKER, HE ISN’T. Marino’s explanation of how he does what he does with the football is no more complicated than this: “I just turn it loose and have fun.”

One suspects if he were to ever really understand his gift, in the way that a mechanic understands an engine, the fun would be gone. For him and for us.

For now, Marino’s innocence, or his arrogance, whichever it is, produces simply marvelous results.

Marino lives by instinct, on the field as well as off it, an approach to life that has served him fairly well so far. Fame has always come to Marino on his terms, or not at all.

Marino has a specialness that visits a few humans without any basis in reason. Just as Edison was destined to be more than a tinkerer, Baryshnikov more than a dancer, Charles Manson more than a nuisance, so was Marino destined to be more than just another quarterback.

EVEN DON SHULA is not quite sure what makes Marino so special. “I’d rather just pat him on the back and say, ‘Atta boy, Dan’,” Shula has said.

And Marino is a baby still, reacting with a child’s suspicion to adults who have wronged him.

A magazine story during Marino’s junior year at Pitt quoted him as saying he could throw the ball better than anybody in college and could throw with anybody in the pros. Marino did not say it exactly that way, even if he believed it, and he has been careful since to avoid saying anything the least bit colorful.

“I’m just being myself,” he said. “I am not being purposely dull.”

No argument here. No one could be that dull on purpose.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

He Fits the Mold Only If It’s Cracked

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SAN FRANCISCO — Russ Francis, the tight end, was asked to define his role as one of the San Francisco 49ers’ offensive weapons.

“A weapon?” he asked. “Is that what I am? Is there any government agency I should register with?”

It is possible to get a straight answer from Francis, but foolish to insist on one, much the same as going to the circus for the food.

Francis explained why he once dived from a sixth-floor balcony into a hotel swimming pool.

“If I had jumped, my femurs would have been lodged in my frontal lobes,” he said.

But from the sixth floor?

“That’s all the floors the hotel had,” he said.

FRANCIS LOOKS LIKE a garden-variety football player, big and broad. He smiles more than most footballers, but knowing only that he plays football is like trying to know what’s inside a suitcase by reading the name tag.

Football is what he does, not what he is. Francis himself isn’t quite sure what that is.

“Free spirit, I’ve been called,” he said. “Thrill seeker. A guy with a death wish. I’m just someone who does what he enjoys, things that are available for everyone to do, and not difficult.”

Like falling out of airplanes, or flying them upside down. Motorcycle racing. Wrestling. Surfing. Skiing. Playing a little golf now and again.

“What’s your handicap?” he was asked.

“Everything,” he said. “The cart. The trees. The ball.”

Francis plans to set a speed record in his small, open-cockpit biplane after the Super Bowl. He wanted to have done it by now, but the 49ers were unreasonably concerned about his getting injured.

“I told Bill (Walsh) that I’m going to be going 300 miles an hour 50 feet above the ground,” Francis said. “Injury is not a possibility.”

FRANCIS HAS ALWAYS been this way, from six years as an All-Pro pass catcher for New England to his more recent, and more obscure, three-year tenure as a blocker for the 49ers. He has always been a flake.

“Flake is an ugly word,” he said. “It implies lack of ambition, lack of direction. I take that word as a personal insult. Call me eccentric, different, independent, whatever you like. Those descriptions are probably all accurate. Flaky is not.”

True, Francis has never set his hair on fire or eaten glass in public, as Tim Rossovich, the NFL’s all-time flake, once did. Nor has he terrorized himself and companions in the fashion of Joe Don Looney, who was so cursed by his own eccentricity that when his dog bit a stranger, someone observed, “Poor Joe Don. Just when he begins to get his act together, his dog goes crazy.”

But Francis has always tended to be uncommon. At the height of his talent, fame and wealth, for example, he walked away from paid football.

“Retired,” he said. “For a year (in 1981). It was much needed and refreshing. I recommend it to every football player at some time in his career. You get an unrealistic view of things when you are in the game, and you don’t really understand what it will be like when it ends. There’s a whole other world out there.”

IT IS A WORLD that Francis has challenged with at least as much passion as he has football.

He said that as a teenager he used to visit nursing homes. He was fascinated by old people, and thought he could learn something from their experiences.

“Once I was talking to a man who was 90 years old,” Francis said. “He said the two things he thought of most were, first, that it got there so fast and, second, that there were things he never got around to doing. He had never been up in an airplane and he regretted that.

“I vowed I would never look back when I was old and say, ‘I wish I’d done that.’ If I wanted to do something, I was going to do it.”

Jumping out of airplanes was a place to start. “Skydiving,” he said. “It puts you in touch with pure, unbridled terror.”

AND PRO WRESTLING, which his father made a living at in Hawaii. Francis was a pro wrestler before he was a pro football player. “Don’t talk to me about wrestling being fake,” he said. “When the ambulance comes in the middle of the night to take your dad to the hospital because the stitches didn’t hold and people say that’s not real blood, you tend to get a little touchy.”

Francis has been seriously injured only once in all his off-field adventures, that in a motorcycle accident. His otherwise handsome face still is scarred a bit around the eyes.

“The game of football is more dangerous than anything else I do,” Francis said. “I keep running into a lot of crazy people whose express intent is to hurt me, and I’ve never been able to understand why.”

Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional, Quotes

COLLECTED WORKS OF FOOTBALL WITS

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GEORGE ALLEN, the football coach, had to fill out an insurance form for his players. The instructions asked that he list all employees and addresses, broken down by sex. Allen wrote, “None. Our main problem seems to be alcohol.”

It is not always easy to know what football means. As we head into another Super Bowl Week, the week of words, here is the collected wisdom of everyone who ever had anything interesting to say about football:

“After being introduced and running through the goal posts, football is all downhill.”–Linebacker Doug Swift.

“When you are younger, you think football is a game.”–Quarterback Richard Todd.

“THE TWO WORST things in football are: 1, They think that a 30-year- old professional athlete has to be locked up in a hotel room, with a curfew, the night before a game; and 2, They’re right.”–Safety Cliff Harris.

“Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.”– Author Jimmy Breslin.

“Don’t bother to read the playbook. Everybody dies in the end.”– Receiver Pete Gent.

“Running into the line, you go into a different world. All around you guys are scratching, clawing, beating on each other, feeling pain. It’s too bad more people haven’t been in there, where football is really played.”– Fullback Larry Csonka.

“MY IDEA of a good hit is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head and wondering who he is and what ran over him.”–Safety Jack Tatum.

“Everyone has some fear. A man with no fear belongs in a mental institution. Or on special teams.”–Coach Walt Michaels.

“There’s nothing wrong with reading the game plan by the light of the jukebox.”–Quarterback Ken Stabler.

“Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners. Only survivors.”–Halfback Frank Gifford.

“Football is one of the last great strongholds of genuine, old- fashioned hypocrisy.”–Author Paul Gallico.

“THERE HASN’T been anything new in football in the last 50 years.”– Hall of Famer Red Grange.

“Some players now aren’t sure whether football is a vocation or avocation. You know what it is to me? It’s blood.”–Coach Sid Gillman.

“I tackle everybody and then throw them away until I come to the one with the ball.”–Defensive tackle Big Daddy Lipscomb.

“If any one of my sons would weigh a possible broken bone against the glory of being chosen to play for Harvard’s team, I would disinherit him.”– President Theodore Roosevelt.

“I knew it was time to quit football when I was chewing out an official and he walked off the penalty faster than I could keep up with him.”–Coach George Halas.

“FOOTBALL IS not a contact sport. It is a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”–Coach Duffy Daugherty.

“I played football before they had headgear, and that’s how I lost my mind.”–Baseball manager Casey Stengel.

“Football is a game for madmen. In football, we’re all mad. I have been called a tyrant, but I have also been called the coach of the simplest system in football, and I suppose there is some truth in both of those. The perfect name for the perfect coach would be Simple Simon Legree.”–Coach Vince Lombardi.

“When you are discussing a successful coach, you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person.”–Psychologist Bruce Ogilvie.

“A good coach needs a patient wife, a loyal dog and a great quarterback, but not necessarily in that order.”–Coach Bud Grant.

“IF YOU WANT to drop off the face of the Earth, become an assistant football coach.”–Quarterback Bob Griese.

“Politics and pro football are the most grotesque extremes in the theatric of a dying regime. It is no accident that the most repressive political regime in the history of this country is ruled by a football freak.”–Linebacker Dave Meggyesy.

“Throwing a pass and seeing a man catch it and seeing him in the end zone and seeing the referee throw his arms up in the air, it’s an incredible feeling. It’s like your whole body is bursting with happiness. I guess there’s only one thing in the world that compares to it.”–Quarterback Joe Namath.

“I am not an animal.”–Defensive end Deacon Jones.

“Gentlemen, you are about to play football for Yale against Harvard. Never in your lives will you do anything so important.”–Coach T.A.D. Jones. “If the Super Bowl is the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?”–Running back Duane Thomas.

Biography, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Walsh Doesn’t Fit the Coaching Mold

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IT IS HARD TO imagine Bill Walsh fitting in as a football coach anywhere but San Francisco. Walsh and The City are perfectly matched. Both are distinctive, attractive, literate, eccentric, arrogant and self-absorbed, yet both are fun to be around.

Wandering through Walsh’s imagination is a lot like wandering up and down San Francisco’s hills. There is a delight over every horizon, and even if you get lost, the scenery is worth the trip.

“If unique is what you seek,” said 49er guard Randy Cross, “then Bill Walsh is your man.”

We all know what the best football coaches are like. Their jaws jut, they have gaps between their teeth, their foreheads hang like awnings over their eyes and their life is at the end of the next can of game film. They have the sense of humor of a pit bull and the tolerance of a tax auditor.

WALSH LOOKS LIKE he just stepped out of a library. He talks like he has read half the books there and acts like he wrote the other half.

“The Super Bowl,” Walsh said, before he won one, “is to the American people what May Day is to Eastern Europeans, an added holiday.”

What most football coaches know of Eastern Europe they learned from their placekickers.

The older Walsh gets, the less inclined he is to dishevel the sport that has made him notable, but he once condemned the NFL support structure as “jockstrap elitists” and pro football itself as the plaything of “45- year-old football groupies.”

From the frosty tips of his silver hair to the barbs on the end of his pointed tongue, Walsh is quite decidedly not your run-of-the-cliche football coach.

AT ITS MOST basic, the upcoming Battle of Palo Alto, otherwise known as Super Bowl XIX, is a confrontation between modern and old-school coaches, Don Shula of Miami championing the traditional.

Shula came from Paul Brown, through Blanton Collier, by way of Weeb Ewbank, and was once a boy wonder head coach. He has never spoken of, or to, elitists and groupies, though he has been known to chat with the odd fan. Shula has never found any reason to abandon coaching lessons he learned early. Nothing beats hard work, organization and discipline.

“I don’t have peace of mind until I know I’ve given the game everything I can, because the whole idea is to get a winning edge,” said Shula, summarizing his vision and giving himself a title for his autobiography.

Walsh, at 53, is just two years younger than Shula, but he spent 18 years as an assistant while Shula was winning Super Bowls. Walsh’s long tenure as one of the boys may account for his more free-form approach to leadership.

“EACH OF US has a role to play,” said Walsh. “Mine does not have to be commander-in-chief. It’s kind of like being a submarine commander on a long, undersea cruise. You just can’t run around saluting all the time.”

In spite of his eccentricity, or maybe because of it, Walsh has become known commonly as a genius. He makes quarterbacks the way other coaches make excuses. His credits include Greg Cook, Ken Anderson, Dan Fouts and Joe Montana, not to mention assorted others at Stanford during his tenure there.

“I’m not sure I like the word ‘genius,’ t ” Walsh once protested. “There’s a certain figment of crackpot that goes with that, like a professor in a laboratory.”

Walsh will accept the title of artist, or even expert.

“I think I have as much expertise as anybody coaching football,” he said.

HE INSISTS HE is not consumed by ambition, but it is hard to believe him. He was irked at losing out on head jobs to Lou Holtz (Jets), George Allen (Rams) and Bill Johnson (Bengals) before he got the San Francisco job.

As if he needs to convince the world that none of this is important to him, Walsh has threatened twice to stop coaching the 49ers. Each time he has changed his mind.

Walsh cannot quite conceal his pride in having accomplished what he has, doing it his way, even as he insists, “I am not interested in having my won- lost record on my tombstone.”

Style matters less than results, and Shula has gotten better results than anybody. No other coach has ever been to six Super Bowls, but if Walsh should happen to win this Super Bowl, he will have won two in six years as a head coach, or just as many as Shula has in 22.

FOR ALL HIS varnished exterior, Walsh is not that much different from Shula underneath. As much as he might resist the truth, Walsh is a football coach and not half bad at it.

The chief difference between Shula and Walsh is that Shula does not apologize for his life’s work, and Walsh would have you believe that he has been merely slumming.

Baseball, Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Choice Comments for Our Also-rans

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OBVIOUSLY, WHAT THE JOCKS of Chicago could use more than a second chance, or second place, is an all-purpose concession speech.

They need something handy to whip out during those increasingly frequent moments when they are asked, like bronze medalists, why they failed.

If the time should ever arrive when they do not fail, they are on their own, which is not an imminent problem. For now, I am delighted to provide multiple-choice reactions, useful for all teams, seasons and goats, or whichever Chicago animal has been most recently skewered.

The generic apology is always a grand place to start.

“The people I feel sorriest for are (the fans) (Walter) (Coach Ray) (all of the above). We wanted to win it for (them) (him).”

You see how it works. And it works every time.

In moments of extreme stress, the names of Ernie and Gale may come to mind also, and brief sympathy may be earned for invoking Artis or Minnie, but Bull, in the singular or the plural, is too risky to consider.

THE MOST NOBLE of motives having been established, a selection may then be made from the following:

(“We wanted it too much.”) (“We were trying too hard.”) (“The problem, silly us, was overconfidence.”)

Who can argue with effort? Or conviction?

And this is exactly the point where one is tempted to vow, “Wait ’til Next Year.” Not a good idea. Next Year in Chicago can be traced back roughly to the Battle of Hastings, which was lost, according to dispatches, on a routine ground ball to the right side.

Here are the alternate choices:

(“Soon.”) (“Eventually.”) (“Whenever.”)

It was okay when Chicago sports teams were private disappointments, mumbling into a few sympathetic ears, but they have begun to lose with the world watching and must accept a greater responsibility. They must be prepared to impress strangers as well as keeping their own constituency from investigating alternatives, like Wisconsin or suicide, a tough choice.

The Sox, the Cubs and the Bears, in that order, have been maddening teases lately, and the Bulls and the Black Hawks threaten more of the same. The Sting is the exception here and relieves the author from having to translate alibis Teutonically, no small favor.

IN ALL CASES, the best thing to do is cry. Tears can be overdone, but are always effective. In fact, depending on how dramatic the loss is, tears are expected and may have a variety of their own.

(“Sniff.”) (“Sob.”) (“Weeeeaaghhh!”) This last one should be used only by field goal kickers, relief pitchers or insecure foul shooters, and only when the camera is on. Linebackers, power forwards and catchers should hit something obvious. I suggest field goal kickers, relief pitchers or . . . No matter. Losers are expected to be miserable. Otherwise, losing is pointless, no pun intended.

And yet, Chicago has been elevated from the City of Losers to the City of Nonwinners, which ought to be the next thing pointed out.

This notion is easily planted by anyone who can count.

“There are (24) (22) (12) teams that were at home watching us, wishing they could be here.”

Not to be forgotten is the chanciness of it all.

“When you get into the playoffs, it’s all (a roll of the dice anyhow) (the luck of the draw) (the inconclusiveness of a short series).”

“Playoffs are lots of things, all of which rely on (fate) (whim) (luck).”

“There are no losers, only (survivors) (discards.)”

THE MOST AWFUL possibility to consider each time this happens is that there is something wrong with us and not with them. It is an instinct fertilized repeatedly by succeeding generations of heroes who never seem to be enough in talent, commitment or number.

Hence, every Chicago sports failure must be expected to address the tradition of losing. Insensitive oafs will keep bringing that up every time there is a new casualty, as if a broken heart is the only connection between then and now. Explanations tend to be snippy.

(“I wasn’t even born in 1945.”) (“I never saw Doug Atkins play.”) (“They aren’t making Canadians like they used to.”)

That’s okay. It is too frightening to consider that the problem might actually be among ourselves, in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the elevators we ride or, as I suspect, the pizza.

Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

It’s the Truth: They’ll Be Back

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Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

The emptiness of defeat is always filled with promises.

“We will be back,” said Bears’ coach Mike Ditka, and it sounded more like an order than a wish.

The Bears will be back.

“We have touched the future,” said linebacker Mike Singletary.

The Bears will be back.

“We’ve come so far,” said defensive tackle Dan Hampton. “We won our division, we beat a good Washington team and we played with the 49ers for three quarters. There is no way that this team can really worry about not being back next year.”

The Bears will be back.

THERE IS KIND of a double promise in that because, except to the most sympathetically curious, the Bears were only half here Sunday, here in the home of one of the two best teams in paid football, trying to grab the Super Bowl with one hand tied behind their backs.

Worse than that, the offense made the Bears look like an amputee.

“You can only put those guys (the defense) to the test so many times,” Ditka said. “It has to catch up with you.”

“The offense didn’t give them any help,” said quarterback Steve Fuller. “All we did was put them in bad situations over and over and over.”

“We really needed something from our offense,” said safety Gary Fencik. “They had a tough day and couldn’t generate any points. I thought if we could have just gotten one touchdown in the third quarter, we would have them on edge and guessing, but we never got in that position.”

“If you don’t score any points,” Hampton said, “you can only tie. You cannot win.”

THE BEARS WILL be back.

They will be back if Jim McMahon is healthier and wiser, if they can find a pass catcher with both feet and fingers, if Walter Payton can stay as young as he has, if their offensive game plan stops showing the imagination of preschool finger painting.

If the offensive line can become dependable. If the Bears don’t run into too many more defenses as fierce and as accomplished as their own, which San Francisco’s could very well be.

“Cripes,” said defensive tackle Steve McMichael. “Everybody talks about our pass rush. Did you get a look at theirs?”

Fuller did. He was sacked eight times by the 49ers’ pass rush, which was in its way a kindness to the frail young fill-in on whom so much depended. Fuller would otherwise have waffled passes into danger even more often than he did and would have been without alibi, save possibly temporary blindness.

THE BEARS WILL be back.

Who can believe they will not? To do as much as they did with so mismatched a mix, like Quakers living with Vandals, the Bears can only be encouraged.

“I don’t think I can put it in a nutshell,” said tackle Jimbo Covert. “San Francisco played better than us.”

Which is, of course, as neatly packed a nutshell as you would want.

“We have no excuses,” Ditka said. “We were beaten soundly by a good football team. I am disappointed for the players and for the fans in Chicago. I apologize to the fans and the team.”

No need. The world beyond the Midwest is just as happy with the Super Bowl it got, Miami against San Francisco. The match-up gives the ultimate game an authenticity that neither the Bears nor Steelers could have brought to it, and it confirms a football truth: You need both an offense and a defense to win it all.

“WE ARE THE NFC champions,” said 49ers’ coach Bill Walsh. “I don’t think there is any denying it. We took our end of the NFL and there is no doubt that the two best teams will be playing in the Super Bowl.”

“The 49ers are a great offensive team and a good defensive team,” Singletary said. “You don’t often find that combination.

“We learned what Buddy (Ryan) told us yesterday: You can play good defense and still go home.”

But the Bears will be back.

This was not so much a season as an appetizer, and the final judgment must be made not in the satisfaction of the Bears having done more than was expected but from the disappointment of doing less than was possible.

“This is a real downer,” Covert said. “A lot of people didn’t even give us much chance of winning the division, and we were one game from the Super Bowl. But no one in this room is satisfied. We are a young team. We will be back.”

THE SENSE OF unfinished business will linger, and not just because the Bears’ last brawl of the season ended with two seconds on the clock and Chicago with the ball, but because the Bears want to remember how far away coming close can be.

In the last moments, the 49er fans behind the Chicago bench were gleefully ragging the beaten Bears, showing no respect even for Payton, who sat, as usual, alone on the far end of the bench, staring into his hands and cracking his knuckles.

“Teddy Bears!” they yelled, waving a stuffed toy on the end of a noose. “Cubbies!” they yelled, dredging up a dual insult.

“Super Bowl! Super Bowl!” they yelled.

Singletary finally turned to face the happy tormentors and shook his fist.

“We will be back!” he yelled.

Truth can be born in anger. PHOTO: Walter Payton, who came within one game of the Super Bowl in his 10th year as a pro, realizes he must wait ’til next year. AP Laserphoto.

Chicago Tribune, Football, Professional

Trying to Cross the Genius Gap

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Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO

The most serious consideration in determining a winner between the Bears and the San Francisco 49ers is the genius gap.

The genius gap is even more important than the finesse factor, which pretty much favors the Bears. The finesse factor can be dismissed simply. The 49ers can not dance on broken limbs.

The genius gap takes a little more examination.

No one has ever started an argument by saying that Mike Ditka is no genius and that Bill Walsh is. There has never been the first rumor to challenge this fact of life in the National Football League.

Not even the surprising presence of the Bears in the NFC title game has moved anyone to accuse Ditka of geniusness, though cruelty has been mentioned. THIS IS NO SMALL achievement for Ditka, since any coach who makes it this far is immediately elevated to at least the level of wizard, which, as we know, is a genius with a marked deck.

Modesty prevents Walsh from announcing his own genius, but he has never been known to quarrel with anyone who found it lurking, like designer labels, under common wash-and-wear.

Inspiration is important to geniuses and can attack at the most inconvenient times. Walsh will be engaged in an ordinary human function and be seized by his genius, immediately reaching for whatever paper is close at hand to record a new pass pattern or blocking scheme.

Thomas Edison was cursed in the same way, of course, and being from an earlier time often inscribed his best ideas on the pages of a mail-order catalog.

DITKA HAS NO such burden, being remarkably free of complications. He operates from a single vision: The tougher team wins.

Other coaches may be tempted, for example, to exploit the speed of Willie Gault, but Ditka refuses, he says, to change his offense for one man. Not that Walter Payton is twins, but we must remember that we are dealing with Ditka’s math.

And Ditka can think, after all. He is forever having Payton throw touchdowns as a halfback, a riddle that remains unsolved no matter how many times it is used. Taking a safety with eight minutes to play in Washington is evidence of his cleverness. It so impressed the Redskins that they refused to rub it in by scoring themselves.

The 49ers are the more experienced playoff team, as were the Raiders and the Redskins, both of whom have already been where the Bears want to go. Hunger can be more lethal than genius.

AS THE HOST TEAM, the 49ers have the sympathy of witnesses. No problem. The Bears have long been strangers at home.

The 49ers have a sensational quarterback, but the Bears have one who . . . well, let’s skip that one.

Genius is still the concern. Walsh has been a genius for some time and is comfortable being one. He was, in fact, the first new genius in football since Hank Stram, who invented the moving pocket, it being the answer, of course, to the balky zipper.

Stram no longer creates new and marvelous ways to play the old game, nor does Dick Vermeil, another recent genius, but now they dissect the imagination of others from the broadcast booth, which is where all geniuses eventually migrate, even if this does not explain John Madden.

Don Coryell of San Diego drew the blueprint for the modern genius yet has never been able to read his own writing. Tom Flores of the deposed Raiders is not a genius, but there never has been a better ventriloquist than Al Davis, who is. Joe Gibbs of Washington, a reluctant but verifiable genius, is still bandaging his Redskins after last week’s collision with Ditka’s Bears.

THE OTHER TWO coaches left in the playoffs, Don Shula of Miami and Chuck Noll of Pittsburgh, have more Super Bowls between them than Walsh has game plans. Still, Shula had to go undefeated to give either himself, or his disciple, Noll, one coach of the year honor between them, an insult for any respectable genius.

All of which, I hope, lays to rest the question of the genius gap between the Bears and 49ers, the only reason I can imagine for the point spread to have climbed into double figures. It takes a genius to figure that one out.

Not only will the Bears beat the spread, they will beat the 49ers. I make it 17-13. PHOTO: (color) The 49ers’ offense revolves around quarterback Joe Montana, but he insists on playing a reluctant hero role in San Francisco, Steve Daley. AP Laserphoto.

Biography, Football, Professional

Times Change, but Shula Doesn’t

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Dateline: MIAMI

This is my favorite Don Shula story. Before one of the early Miami Dolphin Super Bowls, VIII if memory and Latin are dependable, Shula was extremely uptight and making everyone around him miserable.

He was even yelling at Paul Warfield, who never made a mistake. Things were too tense, and the Miami players felt they had to do something to loosen Shula up.

Manny Fernandez, the puckish nose tackle, had caught a 4-foot alligator in the Everglades. Fernandez had taped up the alligator’s mouth and brought it to practice in the trunk of his car.

Fernandez and Larry Csonka, in an inspired conspiracy, put the alligator in Shula’s shower stall. After practice, all of the players waited around the locker room to see what would happen.

As expected, they heard a loud scream and furniture crashing in Shula’s office, which is down a hall from the locker room.

“Somebody get that thing out of there!” Shula yelled. By the time Shula got to the locker room, unclothed, unshowered and unhappy, the room was empty, though the parking lot was full of laughter.

The next day at the team meeting, no one breathed. Shula was very stern, very serious. He asked who did it. Who put the alligator in his shower.

Csonka held up his hand.

Shula shouted, “You did that to me, Csonka?” Csonka said, no, Fernandez did. Shula was livid.

“But,” Csonka said innocently, “you won by one vote.”

“One vote?” Shula asked.

“Yes,” said Csonka, “on whether to tape its mouth shut or not.”

ALL THOSE DOLPHINS are gone now, as is, presumably, the alligator. Even the Dolphin training site has changed its name from Biscayne to St. Thomas, but Shula is still showering in the same stall and anticipating another championship football game.

Maybe some things do last forever.

Shula looks at life and finds it good. At age 55, he has his health and his hair, a family and a football team nearly grown, a marvelous quarterback young enough to take him into retirement and to more Super Bowls, five of which already have Shula on file.

“I am blessed,” Shula said. “I am blessed and privileged.”

His oldest son, David, is married and a junior member of the firm, Shula’s Miami Dolphins. His three daughters, Donna, Sharon and Annie, are all in college. His youngest son, Mike, is the starting quarterback for Alabama, and his wife, Dorothy, is happy and busy.

Plus, Shula lives and works in the sunshine of south Florida, no small attraction considering the opportunities and temptations Shula has had to leave.

“Everything,” Shula said, “has worked out for me.”

SHULA’S SUCCESS proves that good things do happen to good people, and Shula’s home and job are testimony to his conviction and his commitment.

His latest edition of Dolphins is not only good, but young. Led by second-year quarterback Dan Marino and the Marks brothers, receivers Duper and Clayton, the Dolphins have only two starters past the age of 30, and they are playing football the new-fashioned way, a very un-Shula-like way.

Earlier Shula teams were built on defense and a relentless ground game. This one throws and throws and throws and plays defense when someone thinks of it; sometimes not.

“Our defense has struggled,” said Shula, who could blame injuries or uncertainty or inexperience or the departure of his lifetime defensive wizard, Bill Arnsparger, for LSU, but would rather not.

“You still have to make the plays,” Shula said.

The point is, the Dolphins have won 15 games and need only to whip the Steelers, which they have already done this season 31-7, to reach Super Bowl XIX, and the defense has been respectable in successively defeating Dallas and Seattle.

“We have the best offense in the league, and we have the defense now,” said end Doug Betters.

MOSTLY THEY have Shula.

In this age of instant cures, disposable dynasties and coaching burnout, Shula endures as he always has, reliably, perpetually, on hard work, discipline, sacrifice and selflessness.

“There are no secrets,” Shula said. “You rely on experience, poise and confidence.”

Only once in 22 years has Shula had a losing season, and that followed the defection of Csonka, Warfield and Jim Kiick, merely three-fourths of his offense, to the old World Football League.

Shula rebuilt, even reclaimed Csonka for a season, then lost his alter ego, quarterback Bob Griese, to age and injury. It took Shula nine years to get back to the Super Bowl, and then in the muddled strike year and with a useful but uninspiring young quarterback named David Woodley.

The Dolphins lost to the Washington Redskins after leading them for three quarters. Shula took the blame and Marino on the 27th pick of the next year’s draft.

He abandoned his power football instincts and began making use of Marino just five games into Marino’s rookie year. Marino has written records that maybe only he can break.

Just one more game from one more Super Bowl, Shula is unarguably the greatest football coach who ever wore a whistle, a distinction for which, at last glance, they still were not giving a Nobel prize.