ROWDY CHAMPIONS . . .’63 Bears Revisited : Had Super Bowl Existed, This Band Would Have Left Bourbon Street on Rocks

There are misty, watercolor memories of the way they were. Of George Halas, pinching pennies. Of Mike Ditka, throwing tantrums. Of Doug Atkins, swilling martinis and shooting pigeons.

Of Willie Galimore, John Farrington, Bill George, Mike Rabold--killed, every one of them, in automobile accidents.

Billy Wade, quarterback of the 1963 Chicago Bears, now a banker in Nashville, Tenn., tells you everything you expected to hear about the team for which he played, and about the team that will take the field Sunday in Super Bowl XX.

“They’re an awful lot alike,” Wade says.

That is how the National Football League champions of 1963 are often remembered: as an awful lot.

Boozers. Braggers. Bullies. The kind of team that punched out early from practice, stampeded toward the neighborhood taverns, then punched out their opponents the next day on the field.

Here in New Orleans this week, they are talking about Bear quarterback Jim McMahon’s night-stalking, about him sitting with three buddies in a French Quarter bistro and introducing them as “my bookies.”

There also are those football fans with short memories who hark back to Raider lineman John Matuszak’s nocturnal prowling, about the wild week he spent in town, a week in which he seemed to believe that a Super Bowl was a very large punch bowl from which to drink.

But to recall the champions of 1963, one needs to look not one step farther along Bourbon Street than in the stately but creaky Old Absinthe House. There, former Bear linebacker Joe Fortunato’s helmet hangs, adorned, as are other souvenirs from sports events of old, by delicate examples of women’s underthings.

“The ’63 Bears played hard on and off the field,” former center Mike Pyle says.

Did they ever. On the grass fields of that decade, they put together a record of 11-1-2 that season, then rallied in their only postseason game on an 11-degree day at Wrigley Field and defeated the New York Giants for the NFL title, 14-10. This was--and remains--the only championship Chicago’s famous football team has won since 1946.

They were not exactly world-beaters that day. Wade completed just 10 of 28 passes for 138 yards, and the leading rusher for the Bears was Ronnie Bull, who carried 13 times for 42 yards. As with the team that would come along a couple of decades later, though, the Chicago defense was just too much, intercepting five of Y.A. Tittle’s passes and holding the Giants scoreless in the second half.

They were not what you would call models of clean living, these Bears. They were big and tough and had tempers.

Bull, now a salesman in Chicago, says most of the team’s attitude was reflected in the manner of its hard-boiled tight end, Ditka, who was the type who hollered and screamed in practice louder than most guys would in a game. “And if looks could kill, Mike would have left a lot of people dead,” Bull says.

It was Ditka who, as much as any other player, battled publicly with Papa Bear Halas over paychecks. Halas was the man who “throws nickels around like manhole covers,” he once said.

But Halas also was the man who, before his death in 1983, brought Ditka back to Chicago to be head coach. Now, Ditka speaks of “Mr. Halas” with nothing but reverence.

Not all the old Bears do.

To this day, former safety Davey Whitsell has very little good to say about the man. He doesn’t make a habit of going around bad-mouthing the dead, but when asked a straight question, Whitsell, who runs a trailer park in La Place, La., and lives in the nearby New Orleans suburb of Metairie, where the Saints train, will not try to disguise his feelings about the old man.

He remembers vividly how tight Halas was with a buck and how the players even had to account meticulously for every piece of equipment.

One year, just before Christmas, backfield coach Chuck Mather mentioned a child who absolutely worshiped Whitsell and wondered if Davey would donate his jersey so he could give it to the kid as a gift. Whitsell obliged.

A couple of days after Christmas, Whitsell drove his wife and three young children three hours from their Indiana home to the Bears’ headquarters on Madison street in Chicago. Players were expected to show up personally to pick up their final checks. In so doing, they could have a little chat with--or lecture from--the franchise’s owner and coach, a la Branch Rickey in the old baseball days.

“You’re not going to get your check until you return that jersey,” Ebenezer Halas informed his player.

For 45 minutes they argued about it, until Frances Osborne, one of Halas’ secretaries, told him to lighten up and give Whitsell his money.

Doug Atkins used to tie one on and then telephone Halas in the wee hours of the morning to complain about money.

Atkins was always driving Halas nuts. One time, when the 6-foot 7-inch, 280-pound defensive end did not show up for practice, he phoned Halas from the bar at a local country club and told him, “I didn’t show up because I didn’t think you were prepared to see me like this.”

Another day, after reporting a day late, Atkins emerged from the locker room wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and his helmet. His teammates already were on the field, practicing. Atkins began to jog, very slowly, around the track. He still wore the helmet. On and on, the players practiced, and on and on, Atkins jogged.

Halas had thought Atkins was just limbering up. But after watching his nonstop gait, he could hold it in no more.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Halas yelled.

“Breaking in a new helmet,” Atkins replied.

The Atkins stories mount up after a while. He was the Matuszak of his day, and then some.

Whitsell says: “You take all of them (NFL players), and we’re talking characters, the kind that weave legends, the kind who partied hard and played harder, and Doug Atkins outdoes the whole bunch.”

Had he not been such a big drinker, there is no telling what he might have done. Atkins, a Hall of Famer nevertheless, says injuries had more to do with how he played than alcohol. But heaven knows he tipped a few, and we’re not just talking about drinks.

After an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Eagles, Atkins got into a discussion with an Eagle player at a bar, picked him off the floor, pressed him against the ceiling with one hand, and drank the guy’s beer with the other.

He heard beer was fattening, so he started chug-a-lugging martinis. One New Orleans sportswriter--Atkins ended his career here--claims that at one sitting Atkins washed down 45 pieces of fried chicken with two pitchers of martinis. You just never knew what he was going to do next.

Halas was setting up his defense one day at practice. An assistant coach said: “Where the hell is Atkins?”

Atkins was up in the crow’s nest of the coaches’ tower, shooting pigeons with a rifle.

“It was a fun team, a fun bunch of guys,” Ditka says. “Some of us have mellowed some. I’m sure Doug has.”

True. Atkins is living the good life in Tennessee and supposedly has even given up his last job, which was selling caskets to undertakers.

The 1963 team was a tough one that should have gotten nothing but tougher from 1965 on, since Chicago’s draft choices that year included Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers. But it never did become the big winner again, and it has been suggested more than once that the Bears of that championship season were better in memory than they were in reality.

Wade, who also is thought of more fondly in Chicago these days than he was by many while he played, does not agree, but appreciates that the 1963 Bears were far from perfect.

“Nobody did it all just right, but our attitude made up for anything we couldn’t do on the field,” he says.

The ferocity of the Bear linebackers was much like that of the current squad’s.

“They were the heart of our club, just like Mike Singletary and the other guys are the heart of Mike Ditka’s,” says a third Mike, Pyle. There were Fortunato, who now lives in Natchez, Miss., and is coming here for Sunday’s game, and Larry Morris, who has been very successful in Atlanta real estate, and Bill George, who died in an auto accident a few years back.

“Not much got past those guys,” Pyle recalls.

In the title game against the Giants, Dec. 29, 1963, Morris intercepted one of Tittle’s passes and returned it 61 yards to the New York five. That set up Wade’s two-yard touchdown run, which tied the game at 7-7 after the Giants had scored on a 14-yard pass from Tittle to Frank Gifford.

Don Chandler’s 13-yard field goal--goalposts were on the goal line then--made it 10-7 Giants at halftime. Then the Bear defense won the game. Defensive lineman Ed O’Bradovich latched onto a screen pass in the third quarter and ran it to the Giant 14. Wade eventually plunged over from the one, making it 14-10, and there was no scoring in the final quarter.

Why the Bears never won another title is difficult to say. Fullback Rick Casares was in his declining years, having already been replaced for the most part by Joe Marconi in 1963. Running back Galimore and wide receiver Farrington were killed in a crash on their way to training camp, right at the height of their careers. And defensive guru George Allen soon went his own way, becoming a head coach, which irritated Halas no end.

“I know that when we won it in 1963, we assumed it would be the first of many,” Whitsell said. “I suppose every championship team believes that. You can’t imagine anything happening that will slow you down. But time and other teams have a way of catching up with you.”

The game changes, and so do the names, and by the time the Chicago Bears make it to another championship game, the alumni cannot believe how much time has passed.

“Twenty-three years. That’s ridiculous,” Pyle says with a laugh. “It was more like 10, right? We’re not that ancient.”

Maybe not. But things do change. For a couple of weeks now, the Bears have been getting attention not only for their play, but for their headbands, their sunglasses, their Refrigerator and their acupuncture.

A New Orleans reporter located Doug Atkins and mentioned all the commotion.

“Can you believe all that (bleep)?” Atkins asked. “What’s the game coming to?”