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

with his wife. Her name was Wilhelmina Bushing but everyone called her Min. They’d met in high school. She’d been in the stands at one of his indoor baseball games, rooting for the other team. She heckled whenever Halas came to the plate; she was beautiful. The combination was irresistible. Halas kept after her until she said yes.
    Their daughter, Virginia, was born on January 5, 1923. Their son, George Jr., known as Mugs, or Mugsy, was born November 4, 1925. In the first years after Decatur, the Bears had a co-owner in Dutch Sternaman, but Halas eventually bought him out for $38,000 and would never share ownership again. He took odd jobs and started businesses instead, anything to make the money he needed to hang on to the team (football would not be a going concern until the 1940s). For a time, he worked at his brother-in-law’s ice plant, the huge blocks clattering down steel chutes, trucks waiting to make the early morning deliveries. In charge of the night shift, he’d get to the plant at around midnight, spend hours checking orders and deploying men, go home for five or six hours’ sleep, have a breakfast of cornflakes and banana, then head to practice. He would eventually quit the icehouse, but he always approached football with the glee of a man who has snuck away from his real job.
    Halas played his last game in 1928. He appeared just four times that season. His body had begun to fail. Hips and knees, his poor head, which, in the course of twenty seasons, had been slugged, crunched, dinged. His reflexes, too, the internal mechanism, which causes everything to speed up as you age … you see the ball, reach for it, but your hand arrives a moment too late. You shake your head and think, Two years ago, I had that.
    At first, Halas retired altogether, bringing in his freshman college coach, Ralph Jones, to run the team. But he couldn’t stay away. The Bears were his life. He’d never really let go. By 1930, he was back on the sideline—only the uniform had changed: from jersey, helmet, and cleats to jacket, loafers, and fedora, a program curled into a megaphone, carrying the West Side growl: Hey, O’Brien, why don’t you shut up, ya fuckin’ pop-off artist! Despite the occasional profession of exhaustion, followed by a brief retirement, George Halas would remain on the sidelines for the next thirty-five seasons. He’s among the most winning coaches in NFL history, with a career record of 324–151–31.
    He tends to be depicted as the personification of the old-time coach, the grandfather with the iron fist. Even his own players regarded him this way: “As a tactician, he was simple,” said the Bears linebacker Doug Buffone. “They’re either gonna knock you down, or you’re gonna knock them down.” But the opposite is closer to true. Halas was one of the great intellectuals of the game, a brainiac, a football genius. As a thinker, he stands in a line that starts with Alonzo Stagg and includes 49ers coach Bill Walsh and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was Halas, as much as anyone, who invented the modern NFL offense and lifted the game from the ground into the air.
    His innovations, various and brilliant, were driven by the oldest of playground motivations: he wanted to kick ass. “I play to win,” he said. “I always will play to win. I speak no praise for the good loser, the man who says, ‘Well, I did my best.’ I have learned to live with defeat but each loss is an agony which remains with me for several days and is dissipated only by the growing prospect of victory.”
    Halas was probably the first coach to use game film—to shoot every practice and play, then huddle in a screening room with players, watching and rewatching, searching for the weak point or hidden detail. It’s become an NFL cliché: the head coach gathered with his men, breaking down each failure but passing over moments of excellence in silence; you don’t get praised for doing what’s expected. But Halas was among