Moving from baseball to football, as hockey and basketball begin to percolate, one is struck to discover that the source of continuity among sports these days is an almost universal revilement of owners. The Bears’ Michael McCaskey is regarded as a cheapskate and blamed for many of the team’s woes, as is the Tribune Company for the Cubs’ and Jerry Reinsdorf for the White Sox’. The Blackhawks run true to form, with widely hated Bill Wirtz blamed increasingly for the team’s poor fortunes. The departure of Jeremy Roenick and the Hawks’ inability to sign even his relatively low-budget replacement, Alexei Zhamnov, during the off-season only confirmed that belief.
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Baseball owners have been in the spotlight because of the sport’s labor woes, but sticking to the action on the field, no other sport seems to call for strong ownership the way football does. The sport’s most recent dynasties, in fact, have been dynasties of ownership, not of coaches. Bill Walsh and Jimmy Johnson might have built dynasties with the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, but they did so with the aid of strong owners, Edward DeBartolo and Jerry Jones, and when the coaches went off on their own it was the owners who saw to it that the dynasties were maintained. Walsh’s former assistant George Seifert may be an excellent coach who would have won anywhere with the proper financial backing, but that’s debatable. And no team argues as forcibly for the influence of the owner as Dallas, which became Super Bowl champion earlier this year in spite of the efforts of its coach. Jones put so much talent on the sideline, not even a bonehead like Barry Switzer could mess it up.
Where the Bears figure in all this is that McCaskey, while likely to receive much of the credit for the team’s successes–if any–also gets much of the blame for its failings, which right now are numerous. This is because coach Dave Wannstedt was McCaskey’s handpicked choice to replace Mike Ditka–one of the last legacies of “Papa Bear” George Halas, the former owner and coach who was McCaskey’s father-in-law–and last year received a contract extension into the next century though he remained a largely unproven talent as a National Football League coach. This is because McCaskey, while loosening the purse strings a little to sign a player like Bryan Cox during the off-season, has been loath to try the innovative schemes to circumvent the salary cap that have made Jones a god in Texas and anathema everywhere else. This is also because of the team’s supposedly inferior practice facilities, as well as McCaskey’s ineffectiveness at hardball politics where a new stadium is concerned.
They suffered their worst loss of the Wannstedt era against the Packers, clearly one of the best teams in the league this year. Last Sunday, however, the Bears didn’t have the players to compete against mediocrity. The 2-4 Bears went up 17-7 at halftime against the 1-5 Saints on the strength of a Krieg-to-Curtis Conway touchdown pass (on a nifty hitch-and-go pattern, complete with a Krieg pump fake) after a New Orleans fumble, and a touchdown in the final two minutes on a drive well executed by Krieg. Yet the Saints came out rumbling in the second half. They marched over the Bears’ defense for a field goal, and followed that with a touchdown on a pass over Harris.
Through it all, Conway has seemed the only offensive player talented enough to play on a Super Bowl contender. The defense has been generally woeful, but at least Cox has been a vision there, flying after ballcarriers, clogging up the middle, dealing out punishment whenever and wherever possible. If he hasn’t exactly been a Mike Singletary or a Dick Butkus, he has at least rekindled memories of the way those two functioned on mediocre Chicago football teams. Wannstedt and McCaskey got one right in the off-season.
