Free Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football by Rich Cohen

he was twenty-seven, was called into Eugene Staley’s office. Staley sat him down and said, “George, I know you like football better than starch.”
    Staley did not blame his employee. After all, Staley brought Halas to Decatur to do exactly what he’d done: build a team. But he hadn’t counted on the cost. It turned out Staley couldn’t afford to employ sixteen men to play football. He’d already lost $14,000 on the team. He felt guilty about the situation: he’d made promises, and a young man had quit his job and moved to a strange town on the basis of those promises. With this in mind, Mr. Staley made Halas an offer, the deal that would bring the Bears to Chicago. Staley would give Halas $5,000 to take the team independent, get them up and running in a new home, a business like any other, with payroll covered by ticket sales. Staley’s only condition was that the team keep his name for another season. This explains the first line in the Bears record book, which lists the Decatur Staleys.
    A few weeks later, Halas worked out a deal with Bill Veeck Sr., the president of the Chicago Cubs. The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned:
    “You okay, Bronk?”
    Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.”
    In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.
    *   *   *
    Chicago was booming in 1922. It was the Jazz Age, the city of the gangster, the great metropolis taking in and spitting out the raw produce of the nation via freight yards and slaughterhouses and lakefront factories. The first skyscraper had been designed in Chicago, and the city was being remade in its image, a line of towers rising and falling along South Michigan Avenue like notes on a musical score. There are certain times when everything is in the right place, when all the players are at their instruments—you want to slow the spinning world and let the moment linger. Big Bill Thompson was serving as mayor in 1922, Al Capone was at his club in Cicero, Louis Armstrong was on the South Side playing his horn, and Carl Sandburg, who was at his house in Evanston, had turned it all into verse:
    They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
    And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
    And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
    And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
    Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
    Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
    Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
    Bareheaded,
    Shoveling,
    Wrecking,
    Planning,
    Building, breaking, rebuilding …
    Halas was living in Oak Park