After ‘89, Wary Bears Hope Their Winning Recipe Won’t Spoil

Mixing pride with advancing age is the sporting world’s recipe for a Molotov cocktail.

The return of the Bears’ punishing defense to the top of the NFL heap may be one of the young season’s most welcome surprises, but it also could be one of the most short lived. So enjoy it while it lasts. This thing could blow up as early as Sunday, when the Bears play another 3-0 team with a strong defense, the Raiders.

“I don’t think so,” said Mike Singletary, the intense but soft-spoken defensive captain and middle linebacker.

“But we won our first four games last year,” he added, “and about the time everybody started talking about the Super Bowl, we got hammered by Tampa Bay and Houston back to back.”

In 1985, with irascible Buddy Ryan commanding the troops, the Bears’ defense revolutionized football. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, while almost every other club spent its highest picks on draft day gambling on offensive weapons, the Bears kept accumulating defensive gems.

It began in 1979 with the selection of Dan Hampton and Al Harris and stretched through the selection of William (Refrigerator) Perry in 1985. The Bears stocked the team with enough back-breakers over that stretch--Otis Wilson, Singletary, Todd Bell, Dave Duerson, Richard Dent, Wilber Marshall and Shaun Gayle--to win the Super Bowl in January, 1986, and terrorize opponents long after the rest of their game would not have scared some college teams.

Indeed, so strong was the core left behind when Ryan took his scorched-earth philosophy to Philadelphia, that the steamroller kept going with the same brutal efficiency.

Until last year.

Chicago started 1989 by going 4-0--and then Hampton, an 11-year-veteran, went down for his ninth and 10th knee operations. With him went the pass rush and just about everything and anything that could have salvaged the season.

Marshall was long gone, via the free-agent express to Washington, and Wilson was derailed for good because of a bad knee. Harris and Bell had already joined Ryan in Philly. Perry could not push himself away from the table or past most blockers, and line mate Dent, playing with a string of nagging injuries, was chasing him up the scale.

Although Singletary and Steve McMichael performed credibly last season, there was little they could do to fill all the gaping holes on the field--and even less to offset the psychological damage Coach Mike Ditka inflicted on the handful of promising youngsters with his tirade of the week. Chicago slid to 6-10, and the team’s defensive ranking dropped from No. 2 in 1988 to No. 25.

Asked whether the problems hurt team morale, Singletary smiled.

“I never knew,” he said. “But I’ll say this--if you’ve never been there with Mike, haven’t seen the way he does things for a little while, how in the world would you know what to expect or what to make of it?”

It is safe to say that no one expected Ditka to be this mellow by this juncture of the season--nor the Bears to be this good.

In three games, the team has one shutout, has surrendered just two touchdowns, one the result of an interception, collected 11 sacks, forced the same number of fumbles and intercepted seven passes. In the bargain, the Bears’ defense has proved that the precipitous drop in performance last year was in large part the result of injuries and inexperience.

Nobody wants to be reminded that the numbers have come against three teams with just two wins between them and that the players who provide much of the heart and most of the soul on the unit--Singletary (almost 32), Hampton (33) and McMichael (three weeks shy of 33)--already are playing on borrowed time.

“People are going to see our record and figure the defense is behind it. But the real reason,” Singletary said, “is that the offense is keeping us off the field.”