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

Author:Cohen, Rich [Cohen, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

To defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, you were either an adjective or a number. Here he is with number 55, Otis Wilson, celebrating a victory over the Giants in the second round of the 1986 playoffs.

Buddy played high school football, a tough number who punched above his weight. At sixteen, he joined the National Guard. He needed the money—$40 a month. “Then the sumbitches went and mobilized us,” he told Sports Illustrated. This was during the Korean War, when the fighting was hot. He arrived in the vicinity of the 38th Parallel in 1951. At night, he walked the perimeter of camp, a pistol on his hip, his mind filled with formations. Everything about the army, from the barracks to the men marching in rank, reminded him of the game. He was promoted to master sergeant, where he learned to haze the privates, shout in their faces, break ’em down and build ’em up—it was the way of the army, and, long ago, before the sports agent and the union, it was the way of the NFL.

Buddy led a platoon in Korea, saw action, then went home. The G.I. Bill put him through Oklahoma A&M, where he played guard on the football team. A big mouth, he loved nothing more than giving the boys a hard education, turning them from a rabble into a unit. Less than a year after graduation, he was hired to coach a high school football team in Granville, Texas. For Buddy, it never much mattered if he was leading seventeen-year-olds or pros—coaching was the thing, building the unit, taking the hill. Ed McCaskey might ask God to convert the Communists, but Buddy was going to force conversion at the point of a gun, a free runner, a blitz. Everywhere he went, his defenses hurt people, and his teams won games. By 1960, he was climbing the ranks, eventually becoming the defensive coordinator at the University of Buffalo. According to the former Cleveland Browns coach Sam Rutigliano, “Even then, Buddy Ryan was the kind of guy who’d pull the trigger before the target was up.”

In 1968, Buddy was hired as defensive line coach of the New York Jets. He’d stay with the team for several years, but the epiphany came in his second season, as the Jets were preparing for Super Bowl III. Buddy spent the week in meeting rooms, listening as the game plan was laid out by head coach Weeb Ewbank. In describing his strategy, Ewbank kept stressing the same point: We’ve got to protect our quarterback Joe Namath. He’s the key. We lose him, it’s over. “If we gotta block eight, we block eight, but Namath doesn’t get hit.” After about the ninth repetition of this speech, a synapse fired somewhere in Buddy’s brain. The quarterback! If Weeb will give up so much to protect this one player, he must be the key. If he protects with five guys, I’ll rush six. If he protects with six, I’ll rush seven. No matter what, I must kill the quarterback! “This clearly made an impression on Buddy,” Jaworski wrote.

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