(Ed. note: the following column contains salty language.)
Johnny Lujack and George Connor had never heard such words. Certainly not from a head football coach.
When the two star rookies signed with the Bears in 1948, they learned immediately the preferred vocabulary of their new head coach, George Stanley Halas.
“Lujack and I joined the team in time to hear Halas lecture us about the ‘Cardinal cunts’ and ‘Packer pricks,” Connor recalled years later. Added Lujack: “When I was in the service, I never heard such words.” Lujack and Connor led Notre Dame to back-to-back national championships under legendary head coach Frank Leahy. Their move to the Bears taught them that there is no one way to coach a football team.
That’s something Ben Johnson’s players know well.
Much was made this week about
Johnson shouting “Fuck the Packers! Fuck them! Fucking hate those guys” after the Bears’ mind-blowing playoff victory against those most bitter of rivals. Puritans outside Halas Hall said this was unprofessional. Perhaps they don’t know of that hall’s namesake.
“That was fucking horseshit, you cocksuckers!” Halas would scream, as reported by Jeff Davis in
his biography Papa Bear — or “CACK-suckers,” as Davis noted Halas’s accent made it sound. In a 1960 game against the 49ers, Halas drew a 15-yard penalty for cursing out a ref. Davis reported a similar instance in his book (perhaps the same one), about Halas telling a ref, “You missed that (call), you fucking cunt! You stink!” The ref marched off a 15-yard penalty and responded to Halas, “How do I smell from here?”
“Leahy never used a swear word,” Lujack said. “Swearing was Halas’s cup of tea.”
This was true in his coaching days and it was true much later in life as an owner. In the 1977 season finale, the Bears went to Giants Stadium where a win would clinch their first playoff appearance since the 1963 championship. The
Tribune reported the 82-year-old Halas at the stadium screaming at his players, his opponents, the refs… everyone.
“Rives, you (expletive)!” Halas shouted in a fury, cursing out Bears linebacker Don Rives. And later: “(Expletive), (expletive)! Get rid of that (expletive-ing) (expletive)!”
The Bears won in a thriller, 12-9 on a field goal in overtime. The win knocked Washington out of the playoff race, the final season as head coach for ex-Bears assistant and Halas foe George Allen. As Halas watched TV and saw Brent Musburger complimenting Allen and leaving out the Bears head coach, Halas screamed, “Let’s cut the (expletive)! How about something about Jack Pardee?”
Rivalries are serious business. Halas took them seriously. He gnashed his teeth at the Chicago Cardinals, and throughout title-game tussles with Washington and the Giants, and later in Western Division showdowns with the Colts, Rams and 49ers. None was more serious than the Packers. Take his standard sabotage efforts, for instance. A common Halas tactic was to sell tickets to fans to sit on the opponent’s bench at Wrigley Field. In November of 1947, Halas took that to the next level for the Packers game, hiring a team of private detectives to track down ticket scalpers and buy back the supply so that he could control who came to the ballpark.
That same game, Packers head coach Curly Lambeau was dismayed to find that the phone running from the Packers bench to the coaching booth was dead, forcing his team to twice run 80 yards from the line of scrimmage to the bench and back to get the play call.
Lambeau didn’t blame Halas, though Halas likely would not have minded.
“Teams visiting Wrigley Field constantly complained about lack of soap, towels, programs,” Halas wrote in 1979. “They put it down to stinginess. But why not deprive visitors, if doing so upsets them?”
“I trace the intensity of this rivalry — and I think anyone would — to those two guys,” longtime Packers reporter, PR man and historian Lee Remmel said about Halas and Lambeau. To me, that’s not a coincidence. While the early NFL team owners and executives were a mix of bookies and businessmen, Halas and Lambeau came from the field itself. They were players, matching up against each other at least eight times between 1921 and 1927.
The two carried that into their coaching. If Remmel was alive today, he probably would be tickled by the fan and media bru-ha-ha over Ben Johnson’s curt post-game handshake with Matt LaFleur. That’s an upgrade from what Papa Bear and Curly used to do.
“They never shook hands — never ever — after a game,” Remmel said.
The rivalry’s stakes dipped into tragedy in 1941, when a critical 16-14 Packers win at Wrigley Field was so intense that nine fans at Wrigley reportedly suffered heart attacks, two of them fatal, including Halas’s sister-in-law. The newspapers reported on the deaths as if, you know, that’s just the way it goes when these teams get together.
Woody Allen’s character in
Annie Hall famously described a relationship as a shark that must keep moving forward or it dies, calling his relationship with Diane Keaton’s Annie “a dead shark.” A rivalry is like that too. From Halas to Ditka to Lovie to Ben, from Lambeau to Lombardi to Gregg to Holmgren, keeping that shark alive is up to the head coach.
Recalled Bears legend and Pro Football Hall of Famer Stan Jones, who played for the Bears when Vince Lombardi took over the Packers: “We’d watch films and we’d see Lombardi standing on the sideline, and Halas would say, ‘Look at that son of a bitch.’”
So it surprised Jones to learn from Mugs Halas that the old man was actually friends with Lombardi. “I always thought George Halas hated Vince Lombardi,” Jones said. “He conditioned us to hate Vince Lombardi.” As it should be. In the 80s, when the Bears pushed the all-time series lead past 20 games, Ditka never suggested “It’s not a rivalry.” Hell no! He did the opposite, as did his counterpart Forrest Gregg, who both kept the Bears-Packers hate burning.
In the 90s, when the Packers were kicking our butts twice a year, Mike Holmgren publicly admonished a young Packer for saying there wasn’t “much of a rivalry anymore.” In 2004, Lovie Smith said the first order of business was to beat the Packers, something he did seven of his first 10 games.
Now it’s Ben Johnson’s turn. I don’t think it’s an accident that we’re having this magical season under a head coach who knows that some games are more important than others.
“This is a rivalry,” he said Monday when asked about his curse-filled post-game celebration. “There’s a rivalry that exists between these two teams, something that I fully recognize and I’m a part of. And, yeah, I just don’t like that team.”
The Bears made headlines last year when they demanded that their time on HBO Hard Knocks was curse-free. Johnson’s tirade thus seemed all the more profane. Yet that’s no problem in Halas Hall.
“George and I have talked,” Johnson said about George McCaskey, “and we’re on the same page.”
I’ll say it again:
this is a rivalry. A rivalry is special because it elevates you with one other foe, and this rivalry is special because it’s unlike any other in the NFL today. It mattered to Halas. Over the years, Papa Bear helped the Packers in their own financial survival, from scheduling games with them in their early days to personally traveling to Green Bay in 1956 to make a speech to Packers fans, encouraging them to support a referendum to fund a new stadium.
“I confess I have a deeper feeling of attachment for the Packers than any other club,” Halas said then. “Sometimes I wonder if there would be a Chicago Bears today if there had not been such a terrific rivalry between the Packers and Bears since the early 1920s.”
That was the push and pull for Halas, hating the Packers with all his being and loving them for giving him someone to hate. I suspect that’s what Ben Johnson sees: this is sports, and it’s good to hate someone. It’s healthy to want to beat every team and have one you want to
annihilate. It’s special to want to kill the bums and to know they want to kill you too.
This is Bears-Packers.
We’re supposed to hate each other. We’re supposed to cherish wins a bit more against those hideous green-and-gold ghouls, the ones who say a “Green Bay Sucks!” chant at a Blackhawks game is dumb despite singing “The Bears Still Suck!” year-round. The wins are supposed to feel better and the losses are supposed to hurt worse, and few games in the century-plus-year-old rivalry have felt better (or hurt worse) than the night Caleb, D.J., Colston and the guys carved up the Packers and left them stunned and depressed at Soldier Field.
If folks have a problem with foul language from the head coach after a game like that, well, those cack-suckers don’t know what they’re missing.
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Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s Sports Historian, Bears historian at Windy City Gridiron, a Pro Football Hall of Fame analyst and author of WHY WE ROOT: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan. Check out his new Chicago sports history TikTok!
