Bear Passers Always Passed Into Oblivion

The kindergarten kiddies in their store-bought football jerseys wore 40 for Gale Sayers or 51 for Dick Butkus or 34 for Walter Payton. Their daddies spoke dreamily of the galloping of Red Grange or the bucking of Bronko Nagurski or the barking of Bulldog Turner. The most admired Chicago Bears were pass-catchers or ball-carriers or back-crackers.

But quarterbacks?

They were reviled, not revered. A quarterback might be complimented in Chicago, but never on Sunday. I know. I was raised there. Quarterbacks were held in approximately the same esteem as burglars and aldermen. With the possible exception of Sid Luckman, no Bear passer ever seemed to be mentioned in words fit to be heard by a PG-13 rated audience.

They were called “pus-arm” and such. The Steelers had Bradshaw. The Jets had Namath. The Cowboys had Staubach. The Vikings had Tarkenton. The Raiders had Stabler. The Bears had envy. They tried tall guys, short guys, scramblers, dropbacks and even a 6-5, 230-pound moose who once ran for close to 1,000 yards while completing, oh, at least one pass or two.

They tried draft picks, trades and prayers. But as time went by, the Bears continued to get beat and the quarterbacks continued to get booed. “Part of the rich Chicago heritage,” columnist Mike Royko once wrote, “is the right to invite a Bear quarterback to leap in front of a speeding ‘L’ train.”

When they finally gave the ball to Mike Phipps in 1979 and watched him take them from a 3-5 record to 10-6 and the playoffs, it was almost as if the players themselves were dumbfounded. Phipps was given a game ball after one of those successes, and it was the first time a Bear quarterback had been so honored in more than five years.

I once sat on a grassy knoll in Lake Forest talking to Phipps, who was prematurely gray. “My hair isn’t getting any darker playing in Chicago,” the former Purdue star said. “The fans here are hard on a quarterback.”

“Are they right to be?” I asked.

“Hey, they pay their money. They expect something for it,” Phipps snapped back. “If they think a quarterback will respond better to ridicule than he will to sympathy, well, I guess that’s their privilege.”

Even Bill Wade, who quarterbacked the 1963 National Football League champions, was not so popular during his playing days as he has become in retrospect. “I heard my share of boos,” Wade said recently. “I wasn’t exactly King of Chicago throughout my career.”

The parade that followed included Rudy Bukich, Jack Concannon, Bobby Douglass, Virgil Carter, Kent Nix, Bob Avellini, Phipps and Vince Evans. All had shown ability in college. Some had come to the Bears at great cost. None led the club to a championship. Avellini quarterbacked for many years, but if he ever appeared in a major commercial endorsement in Chicago, I cannot recall it.

The quarterback predicament was not exclusive to the Bears. Teams like the Rams, Lions, Packers and Colts have for years been trying to replace successful quarterbacks of old. Even the Patriots, the Bears’ Super Bowl foe today, have not been completely satisfied with Mike Taliaferro, Steve Grogan, Tony Eason and others who have played that position since Babe Parilli. Even a guy named Plunkett didn’t please everybody.

Take it from someone who grew up watching the Bears, there were thousands of treasonous fans among us who were ready to shift allegiance to the Chicago Fire of the World Football League if they would only make good on their promise to try to lure Joe Namath from the other league. This is how sick Chicagoans were of watching our quarterbacks.

I can vividly remember a theater audience laughing out loud at the movie version of “M*A*S*H” when, in the slapstick football game that came at the end of the film, the “ringer” for the 4077th’s opponents was portrayed by Jack Concannon. “If that’s their ringer,” a friend sitting next to me said, “the best player on the field is Hawkeye Pierce.”

Poor Jack. His career did not end triumphantly. Then, on March 18, 1981, a tall blonde arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall. He was supposed to get $3,000 for delivering 2.2 pounds of cocaine. What he got was busted.

A year later, almost to the day, Concannon was acquitted because the undercover drug agents, including the blonde, were judged to have used a form of entrapment. But Judge Earl Strayhorn gave Concannon a scolding for showing a “woeful lack of judgment” and for pulling something that “has gone into the minds of thousands of young people.”

The old quarterbacks have not been visible in Chicago, the way heroes of other positions such as Butkus and Sayers have been. Bukich and Carter both were local TV sportscasters for a while. Avellini had a tryout with the Rams just this season, when the team needed a backup, but his football career almost certainly is behind him now.

Avellini was not easy to get to know. He was very formal or aloof with reporters for much of his career. So it surprised me one night when I was visiting a friend that her roommate, a gorgeous model named Claudia, brought home Avellini, whom she was dating, and Avellini and I wound up having a very enjoyable conversation.

“You know, if you opened up more with people, they’d probably go easier on you,” I recall saying.

“I’m not going to beg people to like me,” Avellini replied.

Certainly the most controversial quarterback of the last two decades in Chicago was Bobby Douglass. Not for his personality but for his performance. Here, we all realized, was a genuinely wonderful athlete. He was as large as a tackle and moved like an end.

The trouble was, that’s where everybody wanted Douglass to go--to tight end. Even the coaches, eventually. But he wouldn’t. “I’m a quarterback.” he declared. “Play me there or bench me or trade me.”

He was a huge left-hander whose passes were rockets. When Douglass threw strikes, his catchers sometimes couldn’t handle them. So he would try to throw more gently, only to find that his accuracy suffered for it. He was like a bowler who could shatter the pins on the first roll but had trouble aiming at the spares.

When Douglass ran the ball, he was a monster. One season he rushed for more than 900 yards. But opponents geared for that, dared him to pass and usually got away with it. Just as Chicago’s defense might do today with run-oriented New England.

Douglass would not change positions, but he would change sports. After retiring, he got a tryout with the White Sox as a pitcher. He went to the minors, where his fastball proved to be much like his forward pass. Nobody could hit it, but he couldn’t control it. The experiment ended after a few weeks.

I lost my fandom many years ago, or at least shed as much as I could, but there is some residue left, I suppose. After a childhood spent watching the Chicago teams fail, for the most part, I reacted to this year’s unexpected presence of a hotshot quarterback in town the way Indiana Jones probably reacted to discovering the lost ark.

I called up an old pal a few weeks ago and said: “Who’s the last good Bear quarterback you can remember?”

“Jim McMahon,” he said.

“Before that,” I said.

“Uh, Jim McMahon,” he said.