If graciousness were in my playbook, I’d say, “Go! You Packers! Go!” and wish them well in bringing home the bacon to old Green Bay. But that’s a big if. Instead, I’ll note that the sum total of my media experience for the game was turning on CBS Radio when we got back in range (we were driving home from a weekend outing to the Mendocino coast) and hearing, “So the Packers will move on to the Super Bowl, beating the Bears 21-14.” Which only left the suspense of how well or badly the game was actually played. I come away from the game stories I’ve seen feeling like the Packers needed luck to get out of there with the game and the Bears supplied it. Not a bitter disappointment–the Bears were clearly not a great team, but they were entertaining on their better days. It would have been a great story to see the third-string quarterback bring ’em home.
Super Bowl Confidential
By way of one of my bike-riding friends: The Super Bowl Summed Up In One Image.
[Later: My informant, who looked at this more carefully and is apparently less gullible than I, notes that he found a reference that this is a Photoshopped image from a Bears-Packers game.]
Technorati Tags: chicago bears, sports
My Personal Super Bowl Triumph
Indianapolis 29, Bears 17. Thus ends Chicago’s once-a-generation visit to the NFL championship game. The rain and Prince, as well as the final score, lent a soggy, dispirited feeling to the proceedings.
But on the plus side, I feel like I really must have grown as a human being. I watched without dismay or rancor: I let loose with one first-half “god damn it,” but after that nothing stronger than a “God bless America” escaped my lips (the presence of an impressionable and watchful seven-year-old helped check any over-the-top displays, as did the fact the Bears were outplayed for all but the first few minutes of the game. Bottom line: Stuart Smalley would have been proud of me).
Technorati Tags: chicago bears
Today’s Top Question: Why Are the Chicago Bears Called ‘The Monsters of the Midway’?
Two questions, actually: What’s the origin of the Chicago Bears’ nickname, “The Monsters of the Midway,” and how did it come to be applied to the Bears?
Part One is easy. When Kate asked me a couple weeks ago, I knew it had something to do with the Midway Plaisance on Chicago’s South Side, but was fuzzy on why that might apply to the Bears, who played in Wrigley Field (on the North Side) through 1970. That Midway began as a park, was the center for carnival-type attractions during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and ran adjacent to the University of Chicago. And in fact, the original Monsters of the Midway were the U. of C.’s football teams under coach Amos Alonzo Stagg.
But the university, once a gridiron powerhouse, gave up football in 1939. That coincided with a golden age of Bears football. Under team founder and head coach George Halas, they appeared in four straight NFL championship games between 1940 and ’43, winning three of them. One of the victories, the 73-0 destruction of the Washington Redskins in 1940, remains one of the best-known games in league history. After the U. of C. abolished football to better focus on the serious business of education and splitting the atom, the Bears became known as the Monsters of the Midway (and began using the stylized letter “C” that the university had adopted as its helmet emblem).
OK so far. But all the accounts I’ve come across fail to explain just how the Bears began using what had been a college nickname. Invariably, references say the Bears “acquired” the name or that it “was applied” to them. A scholarly study of the University of Chicago football, “Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago,” says the Bears “appropriated” the name.
Something’s left out here. Either George Halas or someone else with the team came up with the idea to grab the University of Chicago nickname (which was long out of date, by the way; my dad likes to recall how in the late ’30s, some locals wanted to set up a contest between the Maroons and Austin High School, a juggernaut on the city’s West Side), or — my theory — it caught on after some sportswriter or headline writer began using it.
More research to come on this pressing question.
Technorati Tags: chicago, chicago bears, sports
Sunset, November 13
Sunset in a neighbor’s window. It was beautiful out here today. Probably close to 70. Clear and dry and except for the short daylight, no clue what time of year it might be, except a nice one. Thanks to the fact the 49ers were playing the Bears today in Chicago, I got to see the contrast with back-there weather. In the first quarter, the temperature was 49 and falling, and it was blowing so hard (gusting over 50 mph, I think) it seemed hard for the players to predict what would happen to the ball from second to second as it sailed through the air. The wind turned a game between two pretty bad teams into a decent entertainment. Important from the native Chicagoan’s point of view: The Bears won.
