Together Foe ever: Bears’ necessary rival
From Halas’ days to present, Team wouldn’t be same without packers, Its despised neighbors to North
I’ll say this about the Packers: They are a rival the Bears can’t live without. The Packers are as needed for the Bears to be the Bears as nectar is needed for bees to be bees.
Without the Packers, the Bears would drift aimlessly, just another pro sports team wandering the blanched entertainment desert, searching for meaning in life and dirt.
As the two wildly opposed teams meet for the 9,000th (OK, 200th) time, it’s hard not to see them as being as connected as two male deer whose antlers are interlocked after crashing heads in vain attempts to kill one another.
Which reminds me, it’s still archery and crossbow season in Wisconsin. Which means a number of Packers fans will be coming in from deer camp for the game, clad in camouflage and maybe even with quivers and gutting knives attached somewhere.
This is how it goes at wondrous and magical Lambeau Field, itself a tailgated and bleachered extension of the Cheesehead raison d’etre, which can be defined more or less as: milk cows, shoot, eat, party, kick Bears’ asses.
The old chestnut that you can throw out the records of rivals when they meet because anything can happen, well, that applies in spades for Bear-Packers. They started playing each other in 1921, and the record is 98 wins for the Packers, 95 for the Bears, with six ties. Sometimes the better team wins; sometimes it doesn’t. But if they play for another thousand years the records will be close to .500. And there will be rancor.
There’s often authentic nastiness involved, which is what we’re looking for, right?
Consider that in 1980, the Bears annihilated the Packers 61-7, with Bears defensive
coordinator Buddy Ryan calling blitzes from all angles even when Packers starting quarterback Lynn Dickey was removed at the end of the rout for backup David Whitehurst.
The Packers were furious. The Bears weren’t quite sated.
“We wanted 100 points,’’ Hall of Fame defensive end Dan Hampton said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of pricks.”
In a way, the beating was payback for the 49-0 thrashing the Packers laid on the Bears back in 1962, when most of us were babies or not born yet. After that debacle, then-Bears coach George Halas — also the NFL founder, by the way — spent the entire offseason trying to figure out ways to beat the Packers, even if the Bears lost every other game on their schedule.
The focus worked because the Bears beat the Packers twice in 1963 — Green Bay’s only losses — and won the NFL championship.
That was a long time ago, and this tilt swings back and forth like a pendulum on an old-style clock. Right now, the main question is which Mitch Trubisky will show up for the Bears on Sunday. It’s fairly remarkable that in the last two years, Trubisky has either had a passer rating below 90 or above 100 in any game.
That is, either good or bad. Very Rex Grossman/Jay Cutler-like. You’ll recall those two quarterbacks drove us semi-crazy with their alternating promise and failure.
If this game were taking place when the
Bears were losing four in a row back in October and early November, you’d say the Packers were mortal locks. But now the Bears have won three in a row, and nobody knows what to think.
The great Aaron Rodgers looked horrible throwing for only 104 yards and a career-low 3.2 yards per pass in an embarrassing 37-8 loss to the 49ers on Nov. 24. A week later, he threw four touchdown passes in an easy 31-13 victory against the Giants. Yes, those are two polar-opposite teams. But it still shows that nobody’s so good in the NFL that he can lay his jockstrap on the turf and foes will kneel down and submit. (As if jockstraps even exist anymore!)
So you think you know who’s going to win this game? Good luck.
What stands out to me above all are some great visuals from up at Lambeau, a place every NFL fan should visit sometime in his or her life. It’s simply the best venue in the game, whether you hate the Packers or not.
I remember a guy there dressed as a green-and-yellow pope, in vestments, miter and with a staff. I remember somebody wearing more freshly killed animal furs than a Kardashian. I remember talking to Brett Favre about the deer he saw, and wished he was hunting, outside the team motel that Sunday morning.
It’s fun, this rivalry. Win or lose, the Bears need it. ✶