BEARS DOWN

My pro-football team, the Chicago Bears, has a fight song called “Bear Down Chicago Bears,” and it’s well known by its supporters. It’s a short ditty that’s easy to memorize, mostly because of the repetitions of the “Bear down” theme. Its best lines go as follows: “We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation/ With your T-formation.” That’s in reference to the team’s pioneering role introducing the “T” to the football world, ushering in the modern passing game. The period in question was the 1940s, when the Bears rode high with championships in 1940, ’41, ’43 and ’46.

 But ironically, the “T” and the ‘40s teams that honed them turned out to be the apexes of the National Football League’s oldest continuous franchise. Its chesty and history-loving fans to the contrary notwithstanding, the Bears for decades have been one of the league’s sad-sackiest outfits, one that hasn’t developed a first-rate passing game since the leather-helmeted quarterback Sid Luckman left the fold in 1950. Indeed, the great Sid held most of the Bears’ passing records until just a few seasons ago, a 60-plus-year skein that was unmatched in NFL annals, and I think even he might have been put off by the chronic aerial ineptitude of his former club.

Don’t get me wrong, the Bears are not the NFL’s sorriest franchise. Thirteen of its clubs never have won a Super Bowl trophy since that bauble first was contested in 1967, and four of them (the Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars) never have qualified for the game. The league’s all-time worst won-lost record (255-404, or .387) belongs to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and they’re so far in the last-place hole they might never crawl out of it.

But the Bears certainly rank in the league’s bottom quadrant by most standards since their 1946 championship run. They’ve won only two league titles since (in 1963 and 1985) and have just one other SB appearance to their credit, in 2006. Since that year they’ve posted just three winning records and have finished below .500 the last four seasons.  With a new and untried head coach and young roster, they’ll again be hard-pressed to reach that mark in the season that starts next month.

Further, the post-WWII era Bears have been dull as well as bad, owing most of whatever success they’ve had to defensive prowess. The 1963 champions, led by linebacker Bill George and defensive lineman Doug Atkins, won a bunch of games by scores of 14-10 or so, as did the 2006 crew, led by linebacker Brian Urlacher. The latter team was quarterbacked by Rex Grossman, whose signature play was the fumbled center snap. It may have been the worst to have qualified for a Super Bowl, losing 29-17 there to the Peyton Manning Indianapolis Colts despite being spotted a seven-point lead by Devin Hester’s TD return of the opening kickoff.

Defense with a capital “D” was the hallmark of the 1985 Bears’ champs, a team so dominant that its fans’ eyes still glaze when recalling it.  That unit annihilated its opponents, leading the league in about every defensive category and allowing only 10 points in three playoff wins. No member of that outfit has bought himself a drink in Chicago since, it was that good.

Alas, the ’85 performance was a one-off. It was a young club that could and probably should have repeated, but its locker room wasn’t big enough to contain its leaders’ egos, especially that of its head coach, Mike Ditka. Its aura remains, and allows Bears’ fans to pipe up when the great Patriots, Steelers and Cowboys teams are discussed, but the episode was a footnote in NFL history, not a chapter.

It takes no expert analyst to pinpoint the cause of the Bears’ recent ineptitude; it’s simply that they haven’t had enough good players. Every year the ESPN website makes up a list of the league’s 100 best players regardless of position, and the last two years no Bear has made it, as in zero. That would be hard to do even if it were an objective.

Coaches come and go (three since 2013), and a new general manager came on board in 2015, but the talent dearth remains. The current team has pegged its hopes on Mitch Trubitsky, a quarterback for whom it paid up big to acquire with the second choice of the 2017 collegiate draft, despite the fact he’d been just a one-year starter for a mediocre college team (North Carolina).

The plan was for the young man to carry a clipboard his first season while the veteran Mike Glennon ran the offensive show, but Glennon was so bad that Trubitsky was pressed into starting service in game five and stayed there the rest of the season. Trouble was, the coaching staff had so little faith in him that it installed a high-school-level offense that required (and revealed) few of his abilities, so he enters the current campaign as big of a question mark as he was at this time last season. That’s not exactly a model for player development.

Much the same could be said of Roquan Smith, the linebacker who was the team’s top 2018 draft choice. Alone among the league’s latest draftees he held out for a month over an arcane contract dispute, missing the sweatiest month of training camp. That should endear him to his new teammates.

Overseeing this long-running mess are the descendants of George Halas, the team’s founder. He died in 1983, four years after the death of his son and intended heir George Jr., a/k/a Muggs. That left the team to the family of his daughter, Virginia McCaskey, and her brood of 11 kids.

 Most other NFL teams are owned by big-ego billionaires who have succeeded mightily in other fields. Not the Bears, whose owners scored big only by picking the right parents.  Virginia’s son, George, now is team chairman, having succeeded his brother, Michael, in 1999. Virginia, now 95 and widowed, still is a board of directors member, as are Michael and George. Three others bearing the family name round out the nine-member unit, mirroring the family’s 80% ownership share.

  There have been recurring rumors of the team being for sale, but all have been quickly shot down. Virginia McCaskey has been quoted as saying her family will run the team “until the second coming,” and with 21 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren she has the troops to back it up. It’s enough to make one hope for a messiah.

 

                  

VEGAS UNBOUND

                I’ve long thought that the appropriate United Nations body should declare Las Vegas a World Heritage Site, in recognition of its cultural importance. I’m not saying that its every brick should be preserved in the manner of the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu; it’s a different sort of place deserving different treatment.  Anyway, the city’s citizens are changing the bricks almost daily, so that wouldn’t be possible.

            

                But Las Vegas stands out as a unique world shrine to hedonism, and not necessarily in a negative sense. Any trek down Las Vegas Boulevard reveals the gambling capitol’s international appeal both in the faces glimpsed and the languages overheard, and the daily fact that thousands of people from every part of the globe can mix there delightedly attests to its benign aura. Within its cocoon visitors can cast away ordinary concerns and commune with their inner selves, and if that self is saying “Let it roll!”, so be it.

                Until recently Las Vegas also has held a special place in the American sports world, a kind of domestic Switzerland where fans of every stripe could mix without rancor. Nearly everyone there—townie as well as tourist-- is from somewhere else, spreading allegiances broadly, and its neutral air was reinforced by its lack of local home teams. In a LV sports book fans of the Yankees and Red Sox, Steelers and Browns, Lakers and Warriors could chat amiably, united in the belief that when the chips are down their teams were bound to screw them.

                If you read the sports pages, though, you know that idyllic situation is in danger. Las Vegas got a National Hockey League team last year and a year or two from now will have a National Football League club. Indeed, that team—the Raiders—already has committed to the Nevada burg and is just playing out the string in its Oakland, CA, domicile, waiting for a new LV stadium to be completed for the 2019 or 2020 campaigns. That arrangement sets records for chutzpah, but that’s another issue.

                Through its summer league the National Basketball Association annually becomes a greater part of the Las Vegas fabric and nobody would be surprised if a team materializes there, and sooner rather than later. Major League Baseball, with its longer schedule and greater financial, demographic and geographical demands, presents a greater challenge, but is not out of the question.

                It’s all semi-amazing for a city that, in living memory, was a dusty desert town with nothing but a nearby military base or two to count as assets. In 1960 Las Vegas’s population was 64,000, and it had no suburbs to speak of. Now about 650,000 people live in the city proper and the population of its metropolitan area numbers about 2.2 million. It has the 28^th largest standard metro area in the U.S., bigger than that of Kansas City, Cincinnati, Cleveland and New Orleans, among other cities. It’s growing fast so it will be moving up on that ladder.

                Las Vegas has thrived on gambling and on its state’s relaxed divorce and sex laws, although, sidewalk card-snappers to the contrary notwithstanding, prostitution isn’t legal within its county limits. Air-conditioning and easy air transport also helped it grow, a lot. Civic boosters don’t like to talk about it but much of the gambling used to be crime-mob controlled, something that, I think, added to the city’s allure. And yes, there is a monument there to Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, an early gangster-casino operator. It’s on the property of the Flamingo Hotel, which he helped build.

                For a long time our major sports leagues held their noses when the subject of gambling arose, even while happily benefiting from the fan interest the practice generated. Now, with lotteries and Indian casinos everywhere, and a failed casino operator in the White House, the smell ain’t nearly so bad, and if any whiff remained it was dissipated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that opened legal sports gambling to all 50 states. Soon, Las Vegas will look like Everytown, USA, or, rather, Everytown will look like Las Vegas. Does it matter which?

          

            Las Vegas’s ability to support a big-league franchise was underlined by the box-office success of the NHL Golden Knights, which filled 103% of its stadium capacity of about 18,000 in its first season and, even, outdrew the New York Rangers. The expansion team’s miraculous Stanley Cup-finals run surely helped, but most of those tickets were sold before the season began.

Hockey is a cold-weather niche sport, with no roots in the desert, so it stands to reason that if the Knights could pack ‘em in so could an NBA team, in a sport in which LV has a strong college history.  Full houses also seem assured for the Raiders, when they arrive; if small towns like State College, PA, and Clemson, SC, can fill big stadiums on game days, Las Vegas can, too.

Baseball requires a broader reach to prosper, and beyond its immediate environs there’s not much there there in middle-of-nowhere Las Vegas. This would be especially limiting in the matter of local TV and radio rights, a major source of baseball-team income; squeezed between Los Angeles on the east and Phoenix on the south, any LV club wouldn’t have much of an audience to offer to broadcasters.  Also, its hot desert climate would dictate a pricey indoor or retractable-roofed ballpark. Still, with its average of 100,000 visitors a day looking for evening entertainment, plus the locals, a team would have a good attendance base.

The Supreme Court ruling allowing other states to offer legal sports betting, ending Nevada’s virtual monopoly, is bound to cut into the state’s revenue from that source, making the development of other attractions necessary. More major-league sports would be one such, so look for Las Vegas to make big pushes for that. Partisan neutrality is no asset in such an effort, so bye-bye Switzerland, hello Phoenix-with-casinos, for better or worse.