Giving Season Lasts All Year : Bears’ Zorich Honors Mother’s Memory by Passing Out Food to Chicago’s Needy

The heavy sound of Chris Zorich’s knuckles on the thin door echoed through the fumes from a nearby refinery, a smell that coated the decaying neighborhood like paint.

He knocked once, twice, three times.

The tiny apartment was dark and silent, but he knew somebody was home. Nine little girls lived inside. Where was somebody going to go with nine little girls?

Wouldn’t they want to know that Santa Claus was here?

The freezing wind howled around him as he stood on the stoop. He knocked again. And again.

It was Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. He yawned and shook his head.

“I’m dying out here,” he had said--three hours ago.

He had not slept in nearly two days while putting the finishing touches on the crazy idea that one man could feed 197 hungry families.

Earlier at Soldier Field, he had supervised Chicago Bear teammates and other volunteers who filled their cars with boxes of food that Zorich had either bought, or was given. Those boxes were then taken to needy families.

There had been television cameras then, and fans, and warm times. He had posed for pictures, handed out buttons, hugged anyone who would hug him back.

But now, somewhere near Indiana, the sky was black, the temperature had dipped below 30 degrees, the cameras and teammates were gone.

One food delivery remained.

It was in the back of Zorich’s red truck, five boxes of turkeys and hams and canned spaghetti and dozens of other items, even some of Zorich’s beloved comic books.

No. 197.

It was a delivery intended specifically for this apartment. Inside lived a mother and her nine children. Their father had gone out one day and never returned.

Zorich, getting no answer, was getting frustrated.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

He returned to his truck, grabbed the cellular phone from the passenger seat and punched in some numbers. A young girl from inside the house answered.

Yes, they were there, she said. But no, they had been instructed not to answer the door when their mother was at work.

Zorich assured them he had spoken to their mother earlier. He made a joke about a cut-out turkey in their window. Told them he had a real one for them.

Yes, the girl said. Now she remembered.

Moments later, Zorich was standing in a small, dimly lit room surrounded by tiny faces sticking out of heavy pajamas.

Little girls, it seemed like hundreds of them, were giggling and tugging at this Santa Claus wearing the Notre Dame jacket, baseball cap and 42-waist jeans.

The boxes of food, enough to feed this family for a week, filled the room. Tears filled the eyes of the oldest child.

“I wish I had words to thank you,” she said. “I do not.”

It didn’t matter. At that moment, Zorich, a giant knot in his throat, did not have the words to respond.

*

During an era when pro football players are noticed more for how they dance and fight and talk than for how they play, the NFL should give thanks today for one man who is unafraid of presenting a different image.

When friends think of Chris Zorich, defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears, only sometimes do they see one of the vocal leaders of the league’s eighth-ranked defense.

Most of the time, they see something a bit more unusual:

--They see a man sitting on the floor of a house at the Maryville City of Youth, a home for displaced youths.

The man is surrounded by little girls. They are playing an age-old clapping game.

“He looks just as you would imagine an elephant playing patty-cake would look,” said the executive director, Father John Smyth.

This does not happen only once. This happens once a week.

--They see a man leaving Soldier Field surrounded by 15 displaced children and orphans. They are heading for a postgame meal at Planet Hollywood.

Zorich not only buys the children dinner, he eats it with them, this large, bald celebrity at this very trendy restaurant sitting and laughing and playing games with 10-year-olds.

Beautiful women walk past, power brokers wave. And Zorich never leaves the table.

This does not happen only once a season. This happens after every home game.

--They see a man who not only delivers food to needy families at Thanksgiving, but at Christmas--and in March, and in July.

There usually aren’t a lot of people around to watch or cheer in July.

“Usually just four of five of us, with a bunch of rented vans and food all over our house,” said roommate Marlon Parks.

--They see a man spending this Thanksgiving with 65-70 orphans at a downtown restaurant.

“Should be a blast,” said Zorich, so unaffected that he will probably attend the dinner wearing the name tag he wore on Tuesday, the one that read, “Hi, My Name Is . . . Chris.”

What friends won’t see is what will happen after today’s dinner.

Zorich will feed the children until they are stuffed, play with them until they are weary, and then return to his home, alone as on every holiday in the last three years.

“I will put on a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie, I will think of my mom, and I will cry,” he said.

*

To understand why a popular 25-year-old athlete would give up his social life and possibly jeopardize his career to spend time with the poor and weak, one needs only to understand Zora Zorich.

For 18 years, this white woman raised Chris, her only child, in an all-black Chicago neighborhood. Zorich’s black father left before he was born.

Zora was strong but could not elude the muggers or burglars who turned their home into a war zone.

Her son Chris was big, but not big enough to elude the jeers that accompanied his severe stuttering problem, or the jokes about his mixed race.

They were so poor, Chris spent much of his free time standing in line at churches that handed out food. Sometimes, he had to catch two city buses to get to those churches.

Yet together, perhaps only by being together, they could not be broken.

“My mother was an angel on earth,” Zorich said.

Through the warmth generated by his mother in that drafty old apartment, through her hugs and Slavic proverbs, Zorich learned to be proud of his mixed heritage, to be unafraid of conquering his speech impediment.

But his life drastically changed on Jan. 2, 1991, the day after Zorich had been voted Notre Dame’s most valuable player in its 10-9 Orange Bowl loss to eventual national champion Colorado.

In a story that attracted national attention, Zorich returned home from Miami and discovered Zora on the floor of their apartment, dead of natural causes.

It is her memory that has driven him to become the NFL’s most giving player.

Although it is the Christopher Zorich Foundation that finances many of his charitable activities, it is the Zora Zorich Scholarship for aspiring Notre Dame students that he is proudest of.

“I remember when things were bad and we didn’t have anything, my mom was always there for me,” Zorich said. “I want to give other people that same feeling. I want to let them know there is hope.”

He has done this at the cost of many hours of rest, something badly needed by an undersized--he’s 6 feet 1 and 277 pounds--NFL tackle.

He wears No. 97 because his food programs have, traditionally, involved either 97 or 197 families.

His mission, basically, has come at the expense of the rest of his life.

“In a subtle way, this is therapy for him, a way for him to deal with the death of his mother,” said Kevin Warren, Zorich’s attorney “It’s something when you realize that the death of one person has impacted as many as 50,000 people.”

*

Ivan Markotic had been waiting in the freezing wind for three hours for Chris Zorich. It has grown so cold through the narrow streets around the aging brick tenement that, at one point, the 12-year-old boy wrapped himself around a water meter, thinking it was a heater.

Zorich was late because he had just left a neighborhood so blighted, it took him 15 minutes to find a gas station. He was also late because he had made wrong turn at the corner where men were wailing around an open fire.

Then the big red truck pulled up. Zorich jumped out.

Suddenly from the edges of the bleak neighborhood emerged faces, of old women in robes, of young men in beards and T-shirts, of pale children shaking under heavy coats.

On this street corner in south Chicago, Chris Zorich and his boxes of food were suddenly surrounded by the faces of hope, and for an instant, it was as if the darkness had disappeared.