As I’ve noted in this space in the past, the Chicago Bears fortunes tend to be a leading indicator for the nation as a whole.

The evidence is writ large across history, and is inescapable for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and voices to cheer:

1. In the mid-thirties, the Bears dynasty dominated football – foreshadowing the recovery from the Great Depression.
2. In 1940, as war clouds gathered on the horizon and Europe knelt before Hitler, the Bears – heavy dogs to the Washington Redskins – punctuated the end of the beginning.  Their record 73-0 win over the ‘skins in the NFL championship gave the nation the courage it needed to face the upcoming challenges, leading – albeit indirectly – to victory in World War II.
3. The twilight of the great Bears dynasties began in ’63, with the Bears final NFL championship for nearly twenty years.  But amid the collapse came hope in the form of the ’63 team’s tight end, Mike Ditka, whose emergence as a utility receiver/blocker/enforcer presaged the entry of Ronald Reagan to electoral politics the next year; we’d hear from both of them shortly.
4. The Bears’ nadir – the late sixties, when epic talents like Dick Butkus and Gayle Sayers shone on otherwise-mediocre years, when Wes Montgomery led the team in rushing with 200-odd yards on the season, when quarterback Bobby Douglass out-rushed the rest of the backfield because if he didn’t he’d get sacked into concussionland, the entire Abe Gibron era – coincided with the Great Malaise, with stagflation, with the Nixon, Ford and Carter years all in one.
5. The nation’s recovery began shortly after Walter Peyton started playing.  And like the recovery, the Bears’ fortunes with Peyton started slowly and fitfully; like America, Peyton needed a leader who could channel and energize all that talent and power.
6. The ’86 Super Bowl – which happened at among the Cold War’s darkest hours – that leader arrived.  The year brought Ditka together again (metaphorically and metaphysically, at least) with Reagan, as well as John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and the like, to begin the trip up the road that would end, five years later, with the fall of communism.  Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope laid the political and moral groundwork for the revolution; but to accomplish big things, a people need big hopes -and that’s what Ditka, Peyton, Singleterry, Perry, MacMahon and company brought us.
7. On the other hand, the Bears’ Super Bowl loss to the Baltimore Clots laid the groundwork for the electoral fiascos in ’06 and 08; when the Bears are down, the nation is down.

And so all I can say today at hearing this news…:

[Middle Linebacker and team leader Brian] Urlacher left Sunday’s 21-15 loss to the Green Bay Packers with a wrist injury in the third quarter.

Bears coach Lovie Smith said Urlacher dislocated his wrist, and no timetable had been set for his return.

Citing unnamed sources, the Chicago Tribune reported on Sunday night that Urlacher will have surgery when the team returns to Chicago. The newspaper reported that Urlacher had an X-ray at halftime, but an MRI was not needed.

“It’s always tough to have your leader go down,” linebacker Lance Briggs said, according to the newspaper. “He knows the defense better than anybody and he communicates everything to everyone else.”

…is “oh, crap”.

The KSTP Eye in the Sky followed Brett Fahhhhrvuh in a black Cadillac Escalade from St. Paul’s downtown airport to Viking headquarters in Eden Prairie yesterday in an OJ-esque media frenzy, followed later by the official contract-signing announcement later in the day.

Meanwhile ungrateful Packers fans have put a bounty on Fayver, belying the fact that they actually had the pleasure of seeing Favreau play in his prime – unlike Vikings fans who are snapping up tickets just as Ziggy hoped.

The Vikings have sold more than 3,000 season tickets since news broke that Brett Favre was coming to Minnesota. That’s in approximately a 24-hour span.

Chief marketing officer Steve LaCroix says the team has sold about 10,000 single-game tickets during that time as fans clamor over the arrival of the veteran quarterback.

Seats for the game against Green Bay on Oct. 5 are only available through a season ticket. There are roughly 7,000 season tickets remaining. The Vikings had to race to beat the blackout deadline for several games last season.

Merchandise is also moving. LaCroix said several hundred pre-orders for Favre jerseys were placed online Tuesday. The purple No. 4s were to show up in stores on Wednesday.

Brett Favre’s signing is the Ziggy administration’s Stimulus Package.

Costly, of short-lived benefit at best, and leaving the team worse off in the end.

You think a Packers/Vikings game was a family-un-friendly cesspool of vulgarity, projectile vomit, urine and feces before?

Just wait until the Vikes/Packers games this year – assuming Favre makes it that far.

Packers fans will be leaping from the cheap seats when they see him in Purple.

Personally, I think Jon Favreau would make a better quarterback.

…at least he knows how to pronounce his name. Cheaper too.

$12M for one year? Ziggy really should have gone with the month-to-month plan.

After months of back and forth indecision, the Hamlet of Hattiesburg has finally chosen to be… A Minnesota Viking:

Brett Favre will be a Viking after all.

Three weeks after the future Hall of Fame quarterback told the Vikings he had decided to remain retired, he arrived in Minnesota and prepared to sign a contract at Winter Park.

Word on the street is that Vikings coach Brad Childress called Brett Favre after being stricken with pangs of guilt over how the Sage Rosenfels / Tavaris Jackson tandem would unfairly tear up the league, obliterating quarterback passing records and leading the Vikings to an almost automatic Superbowl victory. With 40 year old Favre at the helm the Vikings should keep things a bit more even and interesting.

Kidding!

I’m thinking this image may be a wee bit closer to the true story here:

“

The U of M Board of Regents bans alcohol at all U of M athletic events

In a separate measure, the board voted 10-2 in favor of a ban on alcohol at TCF Bank Stadium, set to open on campus in the fall.

I’m trying to remember the last time anyone told me it was possible to watch GoGo football without being hammered.

The move comes after lawmakers passed a measure requiring the university to sell alcohol throughout the school’s new football stadium, or not sell it at all. The university’s original plan was to sell alcohol to fans in premium suites.

That’s right – it was our DFL legislature who decided that if students didn’t have access to booze, then they’d be damned if the people in the skyboxes would!

Thank you, legislature, for looking out for that key liberty!

I got to throw out the first pitch at a Saints game last night.

OK – I got to throw out one of five or six first pitches; the Saints brought a guy who does a club-hopping show on the local CW affiliate, three Coon Rapids city councilpeople (the city was celebrating its fiftieth birthday last night) and me to the mound.  For a guy who hasn’t thrown a ball in anger in probably eight years, I did OK; it would have been high and outside for a lefty, and a near-beaner for a right-handed batter, but I didn’t have to bowl the ball across the plate, and the catcher didn’t have to bolt for it like he was going for a foul, so I was pretty happy.

And as it turned out, one of the councilmen and I might have had a better outing than the Saints’ starter Adam Cox did.

We were followed by the usual Saints game events, and a woman singing the national anthem – one “Andrea”, a bartender from Somerset – who did a version that’d have sounded good, I kid you not, in a strip club.  And I don’t mean that entirely as a bad thing.  You had to be there.

I always love going to Saints games.  Pretty much everyone there does.  I saw a few people from the neighborhood, some Patriot fans (AM1280 is one of the Saints’ sponsors this season, again), and the usual Saints game crowd (although I didn’t see Bill Murray).

I’ll hope to make it again sometime this season.

What does Johnny Roosh think of Brett Favre donning the Purple?

Thanks for asking.

First off, I lost interest in the Vikings after the (…I’m getting emotional) 1998 season, which was poised to be the payoff for childhood memories of four forlorn Super Bowls. If the Vikes want to skip town because I won’t take money off our dinner table and put it into a stadium for the big boys, so be it. I could give a rip.

But, from a businessman’s point of view, if Favre’s tired bones can fill the seats with a choir of beer-swilling, profanity-prone fans and actually make some money selling tickets and selling out so I can tune in for the last quarter, I’m all for it.

Alas, if history teaches us anything about the Vikings, they will find a way to screw this deal (if it happens) and Brett Favre’s career will defy the odds by apending a prologue even more embarrassing than the the would-be, should-be final chapter that is last year’s season with the Jets. Favre’s story could have eneded on a high note.

He does look good in Purple though.

Tigers great Fidrych found dead yesterday:

Fidrych, who won 19 games as a rookie in ’76 but had his pitching career abbreviated by injuries, was found dead by his friend Joseph Amorello beneath his 10-wheel truck at about 2:30 p.m. State police detectives are investigating the circumstances of the accident, said Worcester Country District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.Fidrych, who worked in trucking and construction since his baseball career ended in 1983, had a job scheduled for this morning, but the site wasn’t ready, so he returned home. Later in the day, Amorello, the owner of the A.F. Amorello & Sons construction company for which Fidrych often worked, stopped by Fidrych’s home to say hello and discuss an upcoming job, only to encounter a gruesome scene.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the Northborough Police Department would confirm further details of the accident. Reached via cell phone tonight, Amorello said, ‘‘It was obvious there was nothing I could do at that time.’’

Fidrych’s story reads like a B movie.  Drafted low in the pecking order, pulled out of the minors more or less as an afterthought, Fidrych got his first start when the scheduled starter was out sick.  Fidrych got 19 wins in a rookie season where he was paid – this blew my mind – $16,500.

He became a flash-in-the-pan superstar, got injured, never got near the record of his rookie season, and eventually left the game.

But it was fun while it lasted.  And it may have been among the last times I personally followed the Tigers for more than a game at a time…

…at least be thankful you’re not stuck at this Super Bown “party”

The invite of the year (so far): Barack Obama’s Super Bowl watching party. . .elected officials break out 11 Ds, 4Rs

Senators: Bob Casey (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Arlen Specter (R-PA)

House members: Elijah Cummings (D-MD); Artur Davis (D-AL); Rosa DeLauro (D-CT); Charlie Dent (R-PA); Mike Doyle (D-PA); Trent Franks (R-AZ); Raul Grijalva (D-AZ); Paul Hodes (D-NH); Eleanor Holmes-Norton (D-DC); Patrick Murphy (D-PA); Fred Upton (R-MI)

It’d be a matter not merely of eating the muzzle of a handgun, but of making sure it’s a big-enough one.  At least .40S&W.

Although it certainly makes some peoples’ legs all tingly.

Last month, the NHL took a huge step in the right direction, holding a hockey game outdoors at Wrigley Field,  Although the game was a great idea, and held at a near-sacred American monument, it couldn’t overcome one crucial problem; it was hockey.  I mean, who cares?

But we have another step in the right direction to look forward to: Moutdoor baseball in February.

It’s on February 28, and it’s the Saints, natch:

Some former and current Saints players will go to bat against a team of unnamed celebrities, sure to be bundled up.Saints spokesman Sean Aronson said the baseball field’s base lines will be shoveled, but all the other snow will stay on the field . . . whereever those piles may be.

Festivities will begin at 1:30 p.m. with — what else? — tailgating.

It’s for charity, of course.

…I have nothing to say but this.

And “yawn”.

And 2010 will be the year the Bears go to the Super Bowl.

And so for probably the fortieth of my 42 seasons as a Bears fan, we enter another rebuilding period:

Andre Johnson had two touchdowns and the Houston Texans got a 31-24 win over the Chicago Bears on Sunday to knock them out of the playoff picture.The Bears (9-7) needed a win to keep any postseason hopes alive. The Vikings beat the Giants to take the NFC North title, but Chicago could have got in with a wild-card spot, but needed a victory combined with losses or ties by Dallas and Tampa Bay.

Blah.

In 1940, war clouds were gathering on both horizons, as the nation struggled to shake off an epic downturn.  There were those that said socialism was the only way to defeat totalitarianism; that, perhaps, Hitler and Stalin had the right answer to difficult times.

Into that breach, on December 9, 1940, stepped the Chicago Bears.  Heavy underdogs to Sammy Baugh’s Washington Redskin juggernaut, Papa Bear George Halas and quarterback Sid Luckman led the plucky Monsters of the Midway to the most lopsided win in NFL Championship history; 73-0.

I’m not going to say the win ended the Depression and set the stage for victory in World War II – but the fact remains, we’ll never need to know if either would have happened otherwise.  The Bears came through.

And in 1985, as the nation rebounded from a deep recession but struggled with Soviet power around the world, there were those who believed the Cold War was as close to going “hot” as it would ever get.  This – in the days before Rejkjavik and the fall of The Wall, with Contras and Pershing Missiles and demonstrations against the US around the world – was a dire time for the US, and for democracy.

And when the nation needed it most, the Chicago Bears delivered; Jim MacMahon led the Bears to a victory that set the stage for the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the greatest period of prosperity in modern times.

Indeed, it could be said that the onset of the current electoral and economic troubles – the Dems’ win in ’06, the mortgage crisis – coincided with the Bears loss to the Baltimore Clots earlier in 2006.

So today – with times as fraught as they are – it’s good to know that The Bears are not only still there, but they are still beating up on the hated Vikings.

There is hope, my fellow Americans.  It is on the horizon.  And it wears Black really really dark Navy-Blue and Orange.

Courage.

When I left Katie McCollow’s birthday party at Keegans last night, the Twins were four runs down.

“Call in the fire and pee on the dogs”, I thought, for this season.

Oh, me of little faith:

The Twins had clumsy moments and painful moments.

They had moments that brought their fans hair-pulling frustration and spine-tingling excitement.

They lost Kevin Slowey to a wrist injury. They fell behind by five runs.

But by late Thursday night, the Twins were jumping and dancing in the infield, celebrating a 7-6, 10-inning victory over the White Sox that gave them sole possession of first place for the first time since Aug. 23

So I might start following baseball.

…with my actual day job, I’m bidden to note that today is “National Talk Like A Pirate Day“.

So without any further ado, I will talk like a Pirate.

“I wish management would spend some money so we can get out of the NL Central cellar during our natural lifetime”.

I’m not sure that it warrants a whole national day, but I’m not the one that makes these decisions.

…and the NBC play by play guy sounds for all the world like Norm McDonald.

And now, all I can do is picture Norm McDonald doing play by play…

Buh-Buh-Buh-Backfire

…for Brett

North Dakota – where great things happen but D.nobody really pays it much attention:

Golfing for just the third time, 11-year-old Allan Saylor was whacking the ball around with a friend, not even keeping score. A hole-in-one? No big deal. The sixth-grader fired the ace Wednesday on the 150-yard, par-3 sixth hole at the neighboring Mandan Municipal Golf Course, using a driver borrowed from his buddy.

Just another day.

To: Everyone

From: Mitch

Re: Favre

Who cares.

That is all.

Mitch

P.S. Unless he goes to the Bears.

Has it really been 12 years since Darryl Strawberry played for the Saints?

So much has happened to Darryl Strawberry in the 12 years since he resurrected his baseball career with the independent St. Paul Saints. Success. Addiction. Recurring cancer. Divorce. Jail.

I remember seeing Strawberry – and Jack Morris, for that matter – at Midway Stadium, during the Saints’ “antique resurrection” season back in 2003.

No, wait. It says here it was 1996. Again, I think someone screwed up.

Strawberry said he tries not to think about the worst, all the chances he wasted, all the things that could have killed him long before Tuesday’s event, when he sat on a riser at the Crowne Plaza hotel in St. Paul as the honored guest at the American Association All-Star Game luncheon.

“I was spared for a reason,” Strawberry said near the end of a question-and-answer session with KSTP Radio’s Kris Atteberry. “All the things I had to deal with, there was something which I was called for. I used to think it was about baseball. It’s not. It’s about who I can help.”

Read the whole thing.

…is over.

Begone, Basketball.  Hie thee away, Hockey.  Fuhgeddaboutit, Football.  You served your purpose – keeping the kids occupied during the winter.

Now, you can all just retire from the stage until October.

It’s not a new observation that the Olympics have become a joke; even when I was a kid, watching the ’72 games in Munich (before the massacre), I remember hearing complaints about the doping, the commercialism, the professionalization of the Eastern Bloc athletes, the jingoism the games spawned, and on, and on, and on.

But for anyone who thinks the Olympics’ shameful, politicized nature is a new thing, I present for your review this photo:

When the subject of the ’36 Berlin Olympics comes up, most Americans think Jesse Owens, the black runner who went toe to toe with the “master race” and said “you got no game, beeyotch” (or words to that effect).

Not all of the games’ spectacles were so ennobling. The photo above is a shot of the British soccer team, giving the Nazi salute at an exhibition game in Berlin’s Olympiastadium in 1938, on the orders of one of Britain’s Foreign Office and “Football Association”, who wanted to mollify Hitler in the interest of lace-undie diplomatic nicety.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. David Mellor writes for the UK Daily Mail:

    Was Hitler made more reasonable by that salute, or by the willingness of the world to offer him a massive propaganda boost two years earlier at the Berlin Olympics by turning up without a squeak of protest? Of course not, which leads to some interesting parallels with today.

    In 1936, persecution of the Jews was stopped briefly, dissidents were rounded up and kept out of the way and Nazi Germany put on its best face for the Games.

Why bring it up today?

Because it’s happening again – this time in China:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The move – which raises the spectre of the order given to the England football team to give a Nazi salute in Berlin in 1938 – immediately provoked a storm of protest.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team…The clause, in section 4 of the contract, simply states: “[Athletes] are not to comment on any politically sensitive issues.”

It then refers competitors to Section 51 of the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

In other words, Beijing is putting all Olympic athletes under a gag order.

Oh – and for what it’s worth, my opinion of Prince Charles just jumped from “Hold” to “Buy”:

Prince Charles has already let it be known that he will not be going to China, even if he is invited by Games organisers.

His views on the Communist dictatorship are well known, after this newspaper revealed how he described China’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks” in a journal written after he attended the handover of Hong Kong. The Prince is also a long-time supporter of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader.

Why is the US participating in this sham, which serves only to legitimize the brutal, lethal Beijing regime?

…a lot of happy gambling addicts out there today:

Add it up and you had a stunning 17-14 victory by the 12-point underdog Giants in Super Bowl XLII played in front of 71,101 fans at the University of Phoenix Stadium.

Next year, the Bears, baby.

OK.  On to the serious bidness.  When do pitchers and catchers report again?

Soon?

Please?

Chad the Elder is a hard-core Vikings fan in the same way that the Pope is pretty Catholic:

Cheering for a team is not about calculating the odds and going with the winners. It’s about loyalty and eternal hope in the face of constant disappointment.

It’s a nice sentiment, but…no.

Family? Country? Faith? All ofthose things are about loyalty and perseverance. Sports? That’s entertainment.

I covered this a few years ago. I wrote:

Except for the Bears and, most seasons, the Twins, I’m the king of the fair-weather fans.

I’m a busy guy – work, kids, time-intensive hobbies, yadda yadda. I go through a particularly rigorous cost-benefit analysis for everything on which I might spend time; does the cost (in time) benefit me in enjoyment more than the other things I might do?

That calculation leads me to toss things out pretty ruthlessly; among the detritus, losing teams (like the ’90 Twins) and even entire sports (Hockey).

And let’s be honest; sports need fans like me. It’s only good capitalism.

It’s a calculation I’d never make with, say, my kids (my son at age 14 is, let’s just say, a net loss in the “enjoyment” department for the next year or two), my faith, or my nation.

But a sports team?

I mean, back in the days when players spent their entire careers in one city, and owners were part of life in a region?  Maybe – and that’s a big maybe.
But all those things – the actual reasons to be “loyal” to a team – went the way of the Corvair, and at about the same time.

In a normal free-market economy, sports teams need to deliver – good teams, good efforts, winning records – to provoke audiences to part with their hard-earned money. If the team is phoning it in, punching the clock, nobody but the absolute hard core will care – and the team will fold, and will deserve to. To draw people, they have to appeal to the fickle tastes of…me!

And of course it’s more than just pure capitalism. Indeed, we owe it to our nation, our culture, and our way of life to see it this way:

In the East-German-like sports economy of places like Wrigley Field, Fenway, and the vision the likes of Patrick Reusse, Joe Soucheray and the like have, everyone would troop dutifully, a horde of gray-faced sheep, to the Sports Allocation Centre, for their weekly ration of Sport. The team would slog through the motions, the herd audience would pay $5 for their hot dogs and dutifully clap at the appropriate times, and go home wearing their $399 sweatshirts.

So you see – fair-weather fans like me are not only absolutely vital for the health and survival of sports; we are good for free enterprise, even democracy itself.

You owe it to this nation, and to those who’ve fallen to defend it, to eschew the Vikings until they turn things around.

Thank you, and God Bless America.