McMahon: He’s Here, Big as Life

Hide the women and children.

No, that’s not right. Jim McMahon already has a woman. They have had three children together. And his love for her is so strong that it once caused him to sacrifice his relationship with his parents.

Her name is Nancy. She is his wife. She is a saint. She lives with him. Every day.

Their kids are the joy of Jim McMahon’s life. Golf is his favorite sport. Chicago is still his city of preference. And playing quarterback in the National Football League is his passion.

When the latter is not in season, McMahon can’t get back to the privacy and creature comforts of his million-dollar home fast enough. Located in the upscale northern Chicago suburb of Northbrook, the McMahon dream house features a racquetball court, two locker rooms, a swimming pool, a putting green manicured by the agronomist at nearby Sunset Ridge Country Club, a sand bunker, a playground, a weight room and, of course, a hot tub.

Ask McMahon, 30, what he misses most about the Midwest since he became a San Diego Charger, and he will tell you: “The house . . . sleeping in my own bed.” The McMahons will return to Northbrook after the season.

So consider the women and children of “America’s Finest City” safe. From Jim McMahon. For now.

Alex Spanos, the Chargers’ chairman of the board-slash-president, might not be quite so safe.

Spanos has a heart bigger than the San Joaquin Valley, where he used to drive a truck that catered to migrant workers. Spanos parlayed those early dollars into a fortune by investing in California’s No. 1 natural resource--real estate.

Now he can afford to be generous. But the core of Spanos is tougher than third-and-19. And he is conservative. The quarterback to whom he will pay $800,000 in this, the last year of his current contract, is everything but conservative.

If the questions about McMahon’s arm strength and durability turn out to be legitimate this year, the Chargers will suffer, and Spanos will carefully find a way to channel his displeasure into the public print. He is very good at that. McMahon will respond in kind. It will not be a pretty sight.

If, on the other hand, the instant adrenaline boost McMahon has provided doesn’t wear off, the Chargers and their improved defense have as good a chance as anybody to win the forlorn AFC West.

And if that happens, McMahon will demand a sum of money starting in 1990 that will make Dan Fouts’ last contract look like chump change.

So, no, despite all the excitement of the moment, the voluble Spanos and the disestablishmentarian McMahon will eventually not be safe from each other. It is inevitable.

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” McMahon says.

So, yes. Hide the owner.

But understand. It will not be easy. For several years now, the Chargers’ public relations department has been trying, without success, to sequester the public from Spanos’ often abrupt reactions to his team’s many failures.

Opponents will never be safe from Jim McMahon unless he is recovering from another hairline fracture, or sprained shoulder, or lacerated kidney, or infected turf burn, strained knee ligaments, stiff neck, sore buttocks, bruised ego or sensory overload.

Having broken the huddle, the position of the free safety is usually the first mental note McMahon makes as he approaches the line of scrimmage. How the defense deploys the free safety sets the tumblers clicking inside McMahon’s brain. Once they lock into place, the vault to the end zone begins to crack open. When the rest of his teammates hear the same signals, a touchdown becomes a possibility on every possession, if not every play.

“It’s just a God-given ability that I have,” McMahon says. “I’ve never had a big problem picking things up. They got 11. We got 11. There’s only so many places on the field they can cover. When they’re lined up in a certain position, they can’t cover certain things. To me, it’s not that hard. It’s a chess game is all it is. You just gotta figure your linemen are going to block the people they’re supposed to block and you have to account for the people they don’t block. It’s not that hard.”

And if your linemen don’t block the people they’re supposed to block?

“Some games you can have fun in the huddle,” McMahon says. “Other games you’ve got to get on people’s ass. I’ve never had a problem with that. If somebody ain’t doing their job, I’ll let ‘em know. If I’m not doing my job, I want to hear about it too.”

On Sept. 19, 1985, Bear Coach Mike Ditka was trying to do his job on the sidelines. It was, as ABC-TV likes to say, “A Special Thursday Night Edition of Monday Night Football.” It was the third period, and the Bears were losing to the Vikings, 17-9. The noise inside the Metrodome was deafening. But the noise from McMahon was worse.

Ditka was trying to block it all out. But, dammit, this one was slipping away. And as furious as he was with McMahon at that moment, he was even madder about the prospect of losing.

McMahon had spent the previous Sunday and Monday nights in traction for a bad back. He missed practice Tuesday and Wednesday and aggravated Ditka by sitting in the stands at one of the practices and chatting up ABC broadcaster Joe Namath.

“Ditka wasn’t impressed with that,” McMahon says now. “He felt I wasn’t paying attention or knowing what I was supposed to do. Hell, all the plays are the same. Week in and week out, they’re all the same. If you got half a brain, you can figure that out. But he felt I was not prepared and didn’t know what the game plan was. That was all B.S.”

By Thursday morning, McMahon had developed a leg infection from a turf burn that caused an ugly swelling in his calf and convinced him he needn’t show up for the pregame meeting at the team hotel. This, too, set Ditka off.

So McMahon limped down to the meeting room and propped his throbbing leg up on a table. Ditka, McMahon says, was even upset about that.

But by game time, the pain had subsided. McMahon says he told Ditka as much on the sideline, and Ditka’s response was: “You’re not playing tonight. Sit down.”

McMahon, diagnosed at an early age as hyperactive, wasn’t about to stand for sitting down. As the Vikings built their lead, he hectored Ditka relentlessly. Finally Ditka gave in.

“I think the only reason he put me in was just to get me out of his face,” McMahon said later.

The results were immediate.

“In the next seven minutes, the essence of McMahon came out,” wrote Phil Hersh for the Chicago Tribune. “All the fearlessness, defiance, surpassing talent and catalytic leadership ability were on display, as if this were the microcosmic look that would make the big picture clear.”

On McMahon’s first play, he ditched the call from the bench for a screen pass and heaved a 70-yard touchdown pass to Willie Gault. The next time he got his hands on the ball, he threw another touchdown pass. Six offensive plays later, he threw another. The Bears won, 33-24. The next day McMahon, suddenly the stuff of legends, checked back into the hospital for more rest.

McMahon and Ditka had been Chicago’s answer to the Bickersons from the day McMahon showed up at the Bears’ Halas Hall headquarters with a beer in his hand on draft day 1982. McMahon’s first year in the NFL was Ditka’s first as a head coach. They grew together. They grew apart together.

“My relationship with Jim McMahon is weird and wonderful,” Ditka loved telling the banquet circuit. “He’s weird and I’m wonderful.”

McMahon was more of a public tweaker than speaker. Asked once to describe a Ditka coiffure that wedded hair and forehead in a rather unholy matrimony, McMahon said, “I thought winged tips were something you wore on shoes.”

When the Bears won Super Bowl XX in January of 1986 there was plenty of endorsement money for everybody. Ditka, McMahon and William (The Refrigerator) Perry gave new meaning to the phrase, gross national product. Some of the offers were, well, outrageous.

According to Steve Zucker, McMahon’s agent, a group of secretaries in St. Louis once offered $15,000 if McMahon would have lunch with them. McMahon’s reaction: “People think I’m strange, maybe. I think people are strange, definitely.”

On another occasion Perry backed out of an appearance at a dinner party in Chicago at the last minute. As hard as it is to imagine Perry turning down a free meal, it’s even harder to believe that McMahon’s dollar value as a fill-in went from $10,000 to $15,000 to $20,000 in a matter of minutes. The more he said he didn’t want to show, the more the high rollers were willing to ante.

Finally, all he had to do for the 20 grand was walk out his front door, get in a limo, spend 90 minutes at the party and get back in the limo. He did so and still met wife Nancy at a local restaurant by 8 p.m.

You can read much of this in McMahon’s as-told-to autobiography, now three years old. It’s title is “McMahon.” It’s subtitle is, “The Bare Truth About Chicago’s Brashest Bear.”

The book was on the New York Times best-seller list for months. But in Chicago, it competed with Ditka’s as-told-to autobiography titled: “Ditka.”

In McMahon’s book, he said this about Ditka: “They say there’s a lot of Mike Ditka in me, and a lot of me in Mike Ditka. That might be true. Some of the things he does make me mad, and some of the things I do make him mad. But we both want to do the same thing: Win and let the rest take care of itself.”

In Ditka’s book, he said this about McMahon: “There’s a lot of things in him that are just like I was when I was young and probably like Halas when he was young. He’ll learn as he goes through life what’s important and what isn’t.”

Bear linebacker Mike Singletary, in his as-told-to autobiography, concurred.

“McMahon is one guy who isn’t intimidated by anything or anybody,” Singletary wrote. “He’ll take the challenge no matter what or who stands in his way. In that sense, he’s a lot like Mike (Ditka).”

McMahon’s first exposure to George Halas, the now-deceased founder and owner of the Bears, was an especially joyless one. It occurred during the summer of 1982 at the Bears’ downtown offices.

Ditka had once characterized Halas’ fiscal policy toward players by saying, “He throws nickels around like manhole covers.” And now McMahon and his former agent, Jerry Argovitz, were sitting across the bargaining table from Halas and Jim Finks, then the Bears’ general manager.

Several hours into the meeting, Finks, a tough negotiator in his own right, emerged for air. He was smiling and shaking his head when he stepped from Halas’ office. The Bears, he acknowledged, were winning this one big--thanks mostly to Halas, who was 87 years old at the time.

Much later, McMahon and Argovitz came out to meet reporters. Argovitz looked like a man who had just found out his underwear had been poisoned. McMahon looked dazed.

“(Halas) told me if I got $200 a game, I’d be overpaid,” McMahon says. “He said, ‘You’ve got a bad arm, a bad eye and a bad knee.’ So I asked him, ‘Why the hell did you draft me?’ ”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

The bad eye dated all the way back to McMahon’s boyhood. At age six, he was playing cowboys and Indians with his brother when he discovered a knot in the leather that attached the holster to his leg. He grabbed a fork and strained to unloose the knot.

“Wham,” McMahon recalls. The fork jumped from the knot and stabbed him in the right eye. After a two-week hospital stay, he was released. That the eye still doesn’t adjust properly to bright lights helps explain why McMahon wears sunglasses.

McMahon never warmed to Halas’ grandson, Michael McCaskey, who took over the team after Halas’ death in 1983. And McMahon never missed an opportunity to pillory McCaskey in his book or in public appearences.

An excerpt from the book: “If (McCaskey) had his choice, he’d have 45 players with no personality, no individuality at all. Michael McCaskey would like a bunch of robots.”

McCaskey seethed in private but chose not to respond publicly. The die, however, was cast.

“The book started Jim on the road to leaving Chicago,” Zucker says.

McMahon had always nurtured fond memories of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. In 1980, his junior year at Brigham Young, he completed 32 of 49 passes for four touchdowns in BYU’s 46-45 Holiday Bowl victory over SMU. He returned to the Holiday Bowl the next year and connected on 27 of 43 passes for 342 yards and three touchdowns in a 38-36 victory over Washington State. Then, when the Bears opened the preseason in San Diego in 1982, he entered late in the game with the Chargers on top, 28-7, and closed it to 28-27.

Before the 1987 training camp, McMahon sat at a table in the clubhouse of the exclusive Butler National Golf Club in Oak Brook, Ill. He had just completed a round of golf with Ditka, Michael Jordan and Chicago White Sox broadcaster Ken (Hawk) Harrelson.

The subject of Super Bowl XXII being in San Diego crept into the conversation.

“I’ve always played well in that stadium,” McMahon said. “I’d love to get back there.”

Alas, the Bears lost to the Redskins in the first round of the playoffs that season after dissipating a 14-0 lead. Much is made of McMahon’s 35-3 record as a starter in his past 38 regular season games since 1984. But it should also be noted that he is 0-2 in his last two playoff starts.

In 1986, Ditka had brought in Doug Flutie to replace an injured McMahon. In 1987, the Bears had drafted Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh in the first round. This summer, when the Bears determined a younger, more durable Mike Tomczak was beating out McMahon, the handwriting was on the wall. It looked like graffiti to McMahon.

“Chicago wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of fun the last two years,” McMahon says. Long before the Bears traded him, he told Zucker he wanted out in the worst way.

So last winter, Zucker hustled down to the NFL owners’ meetings in Palm Springs to seek out Spanos. He finally tracked him down one evening at a fancy restaurant.

His message to Spanos: My client would like to play for your football team.

By the time the spring draft arrived, McMahon and Zucker thought they had laid the necessary groundwork. But the Chargers and the Bears couldn’t reach an agreement on a price tag. Unfortunately for McMahon and Zucker, players and agents don’t make trades.

“I was kind of bummed,” McMahon said. “I felt the trade coming last year. But when it didn’t happen, I felt the Bears were going to keep me around just to keep me out of somebody else’s training camp so I wouldn’t be ready to play.”

One of the reasons McMahon and the Chargers now think McMahon will be ready to play in the season opener Sunday against the Raiders is Ted Tollner, the Chargers’ new quarterbacks coach.

The former USC coach tutored McMahon during his senior year at Brigham Young, and the two have stayed in touch since then. McMahon remembered that Tollner wasn’t hung up on quarterbacks watching game film--a pastime McMahon despises.

Ask McMahon to talk about all the coaches he has played for, and he will have more bad things to say than good. But he thinks the world of Tollner.

As do McMahon’s new teammates of him.

“The rumors and how I perceived him from television was, like, totally cocky,” says rookie Dana Brinson. “But from being around him, he’s not like that. He’s fitting in very well. If he’s going to remain that way, I don’t know. But at the moment, all the guys like him. And with him being here, it makes the competition level for all the quarterbacks rise.”

“I’ve been trying to explain this for four or five years,” says Tyrone Keys. “Everybody thinks Jim has an attitude and guys don’t like him. But he’s one of the best team players a guy could ever ever want to meet.”

Keys played on the 1985 Bears and was a 1989 Charger until Monday, when a knee injury forced the Chargers to waive him.

“The public perception makes it seem like Jim McMahon’s really arrogant and doesn’t get along with the guys,” Keys says. “But that’s not true. And evidently he’s been working out. He looks stronger than I remember. He’s throwing the ball with a lot of zip.”

McMahon’s talent is a treasure. So is his friendship, by most accounts, if he has selected you as someone for whom he cares.

The Chargers aren’t as concerned about that as much as they are about whether he can still play. Steve Ortmayer, the team’s director of football operations, likes to point to McMahon’s low career interception percentage (3.7) and say things like: “Jim won’t drive the car off the road.”

But the suspicion persists that if McMahon were a car, the mechanics would report back to Ortmayer that the shocks were worn and the treads a little bare. McMahon underwent right shoulder surgery after his 1986 and 1987 seasons and minor knee surgery at the end of last year.

“They talked about how in Chicago I couldn’t throw the deep ball,” McMahon says. “That was bull. I threw the deep ball a lot last year. My arm is pretty much back to normal. I don’t throw it probably as hard as I used to. But I can throw the deep and intermediate routes.”

The statistics say otherwise. McMahon’s average-gain-per-completion last season was 11.8 yards, the lowest of his seven-year career. McMahon’s best year in that category was 1984 (13.48), before he began having shoulder problems.

Not to worry, says Bruce Allen, a former USFL general manager: “Have you seen the way the Chargers have used McMahon so far? They’ve got him taking three- and five-step drops, getting the ball off before the rush can get to him. The Chargers are my pick to win their division.”

If McMahon can’t still play, the Chargers will be hip deep in hot porridge. But no matter how well or poorly their gamble on McMahon pays, they will never be able to relegate him to the background. The last line of the last paragraph of the last page of McMahon’s 1986 autobiography says: “To be continued . . . “

You can hurt him, knock him, love him, hate him, write him off and trade him.

But you can’t hide Jim McMahon.