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blessing, and I got on a plane to Chicago. It was all cloak and dagger there, with Halas’s right-hand man Max Swiatek, his driver and longtime helper, picking me up at the airport and taking me to Halas’s place at the Edgewater Beach condos up on the north side near Lake Michigan. We sat at the kitchen table and he asked me some stuff. I was really keyed up, and I knew it wasn’t him when he said, “What’s your philosophy about football?”
    “Coach, who are you kidding?” I said. “My philosophy is exactly the same as yours. My philosophy is to make the Bears something special, and to kick people’s asses!”
    He just nodded. He looked right at me. He said, “Okay, I’m going to give you a three-year contract to be our new head coach. One hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s it.”
    I said, “No.”
    He was stunned. “What do you mean? You can’t do it?”
    “No,” I said. “I will do it. But I have to have a 15 percent raise each year.”
    I thought I was really being cool. Hell, that would still make me one of the lowest-paid coaches in the league. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about money. Nobody else had offered me anything. It was just something to show I was my own man.
    So he gave me the deal—$100,000, $115,000, $130,000—and we shook hands, signed the contract, and that was that. But what I really wanted was his respect. I meant it when I wrote that letter. I felt the Bears were my destiny. And George Halas was the Bears. His son Mugs Halas had died, and that left George’s only other child, Virginia, and all her children as heirs to the family business.
    But I knew deep inside he believed in me, the outsider, the old tight end. I think he believed that I was a lot like him. When he was lying in the hospital a year or so later, there were only two people he wanted to see—his secretary, Ruth, and me. Nobody else. I talked to him about the players we had just drafted. I told him he’d like Covert, that he was kind of similar to old-time star Joe Stydahar, and the Old Man liked that. He was very sick at that time, but he told Ruth to give me a special bottle of champagne he had. “Give this to Mike,” he told her. “For when they win the Super Bowl.”
    It makes me sad because the bottle is out there on the wall, in a place of honor in my restaurant, and he wasn’t alive when we opened it.
    But I didn’t know what was going to happen. I told the players they deserved to win it all, but nobody could foresee the future.
    We came out for the opening game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and we felt we were in a good position. Platteville had been hot and tough, and Buddy had his defensive unit in good shape from all of the running they did. My guys, the offense, were ready to go, too, especially since McMahon was back for his first start since the kidney injury the previous November. I figured beer must have been part of his cure. Maybe it filtered out the bad stuff.
    We were favored by a touchdown or so, partly because the Bucs were playing in Chicago, partly because our defense was so good, and partly because their star defender, Lee Roy Selmon, was out. We’d set the NFL sack record the year before, so everybody was sure our defense would dominate.
    But it didn’t. We gave up 28 points in the first two quarters, over 300 yards in the game, and were down 21–7 early and then 28–17 at the half. It was September 8, and it was hotter than blazes on our artificial turf at Soldier Field, something like 137 degrees at turf level. Maybe that’s why the fans booed us when we came off at the half, because they were roasting. But I don’t think so. We weren’t playing as a unit. This offensive and defensive split wasn’t good. We had to be one.

Gary Fencik Remembers ’85
Training Camp at Platteville, Wisconsin
    “What a contrast Platteville was to the old days. Before Mike came in as coach we always practiced in Lake Forest, which was in the far north suburbs of Chicago, but