Product Description

The 1985 Bears, with their explosive concoction of talent, personality, eccentricity, and ego, were unlike any other collection of professional athletes that came before them. They changed the way Americans view their sports teams, and no other team since has even approached the phenomenon that swept the nation during the Bears’ run to Super Bowl glory. But the volatility that helped make the 1985 Bears the greatest football team on the planet also contributed to their inevitable implosion. This is the real story of one unique team’s rise to glory and a behind-the-scenes look at their fall from grace.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123247 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 245 pages

From the Publisher
"That 1985 season was the most fun year I ever saw, not only for broadcasting, but for the whole NFL. For the country, really. . . . I mean, the whole thing was right out of central casting. . . . It was like a smorgasbord, a buffet." —from the Foreword by John Madden

"People liked John Wayne to walk into a bar and announce, ‘Whiskey for my men and beer for my horses.’ That was us." —Dan Hampton

From the Inside Flap
The Fridge. Da Coach. Mac. Hamp. The Colonel. Samurai. Mama’s Boy Otis. Sweetness. Ming. Decades after their coronation in Super Bowl XX, the players’ names and memories are as alive as when the Bears were laying waste to the National Football League and hosting a party to which all of America was invited. This story is about more than the greatest football team ever. They were, for a brief, magical moment, a band of eccentrics and athletes who went from nobodies to rock stars and cult figures. They took America on a wild ride in the middle of one of the wildest times in its history. With their personalities, their greatness, and their flaws, they were more than America’s Team. They were America. It was a team whose "Super Bowl Shuffle" recording earned a Grammy nomination. It was a team whose players graced the covers of Newsweek and Rolling Stone and reaped millions in endorsements. It was a team whose personalities were the most sought-after guests for the Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, and Saturday Night Live. The players and their agents transformed sports marketing worldwide, changed the place of athletes in sports media, brought "woofing" and the Gatorade Shower to sports, and raised millions for charity. And in the end, it was a team that blew itself apart from the inside, from upper management on down to the players themselves. This is the real story, the whole story—much of it never before revealed and now told by the players and personalities that swirled around the Bears. From the draft of Walter Payton in 1975 to the day of Mike Ditka’s firing and his tearful farewell with the words, "This too shall pass," this is how the Bears came to be, how they changed sports in America, and how they finally collapsed under the weight of the very things that made them unlike any group of athletes before or since. But beyond all the zaniness and international fanfare, they played the game. Oh, how they played the game . . .

About the Author
Chicago Tribune writer John "Moon" Mullin has covered the Bears since the closing days of the 1985 era and the farewells of Mike Ditka and players from that historic team. He has won writing awards from the Pro Football Writers of America and Associated Press Sports Editors, in addition to an Emmy award for the FOX-TV Bears pregame show. Mullin’s writing has been nationally syndicated, and he is the author of the best-selling Tales from the Chicago Bears Sidelines as well as Tennis and Kids: The Family Connection. He lives in Deerfield, Illinois.

Customer Reviews

Why is greatness so hard to maintain? Find out here..
This story of a football team illustrates a much more profound element of human psychology - how to handle success. Whether success is a relationship, career, business, or any other endeavor, the lessons here are to be heeded or the result will invariably be the same.

To put this in context, the 1985 Chicago Bears football team is arguably the best ever assembled in the modern era. While other teams may have had more success over time, or had 1 less loss, this team is widely regarded as the most dominating. In addition to the on-the-field success, the team created media stars like Mike Ditka, Jim McMahan and "The Fridge", along with established all time greats like Walter Payton, Mike Singletary and Dan Hampton.

So what happened? How did it blow up so fast? A classic tale of forgetting to continue what made you successful in the first place.

The players and the team became successful by playing harder, and using an almost desperate intensity to how they played the game from a play design perspective to personal and individual motivation. At first this focus (the 46 defense, the frenetic play style) took the league by surprise and gave them a decided advantage, but like most of us with any kind of success, once it was achieved they forgot to keep changing to adapt to the world they created. In addition, they succumbed to the temptation of starting to believe their own press, and became infatuated with their own greatness. Once that happens, it slips away quickly. The detail behind the strategy success and infighting that eroded the spirit of the team, are depicted clearly.

After reading this book, which is full of delicious insights and salacious comments amongst the team about each other, it is hard to find where to place the blame. Everyone seemed so wrapped up in the media circus that they all seemed to drift away from the mission.

For the football fan, this is a great book, full of strategic detail and player reactions. For the person who wants to better understand the dynamics of how to keep themselves or their organization from getting too full of themselves and their success, the lessons here are easy to see, though often difficult to avoid.

The book is written exceptionally well, in that it flows easily, is always interesting, follows a nice chronological progressions, and does what it intends - describe the amazing success and quick burn out of perhaps the greatest football team ever assembled.

Fell Way Short
I had high hopes for Mullin's book on the 1985 Bears, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed that the book failed to deliver much of anything that hadn't been reported during and following the 1985 season. Not only did this book fail to prove, unequivocally, that these Bears were the best team in professional football history, but also failed to thoroughly reveal the team's "self destruction" in any significant way. While there were a few of interesting behind-the-scenes stories, the book is dissatisfying in terms of being long on common knowledge about the team and short on inside information. John Mullin is a reporter with a major Chicago newspaper and should have more "reach" into the non-public happenings of the team than he demonstrated in the book. Maybe he wasn't able to publish his juiciest findings--did an overly cautious publishing company dump the good stuff? In any event, the book was dismally underachieving in terms of bringing any new information to light.

Additionally, and this is more a matter of personal taste, I found Mullin's style to be a little disjointed. His stories seem to end abruptly, and he jumps immediately into another topic without a decent segue. Some topics are dropped without conclusion and others appear intermittently throughout the book without any rhyme or reason. His writing style was more like reading 200+ pages of USA Today style "snippets" of information than a cohesive tale of a historically great football team.

In the hands of a more capable storyteller, this book may have been a winner, but the lack of new information and poor organization of the material made this one a loser for me. I kept reading in hopes of something to make the task of reading this book worthwhile, but such a moment never materialized.

Definitely not super
This book follows the rise and fall of the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. Unfortunately, it falls way short of the same greatness that they achieved.
While the book does a nice job of revealing some new stories (like the Jay Hilgenberg saga), it doesn't really uncover much of substance regarding the Bears. It does retell a lot of commonly known tales (Walter Payton's disappointment at not scoring in the Super Bowl) and adds a few tidbits to them.
In the end though, this Bears team was fascinating. It was full of characters and stories from top to bottom. This book disappoints in not giving more meat to existing stories and not uncovering enough unknown stories.