Jim O’Donnell: Even with Eberflus gone, new book attempts to detail ‘McCaskeyism’
IT'S A GREAT TIME to be a Bears fan in much the same way it's a marvelous weekend to still have a Harris/Walz campaign sign on the front lawn.
An incomplete head coach no longer answers to a splintering young GM. But that harried exec still looks up the Halas Hall vertical at a blowhard president & CEO whose superior is a team chairman deep in the throes of burnout.
Sappy days are here again. But is that exactly a bulletin from NFL News?
Futility is the Bears way.
A GRAND WAY TO HAVE that point driven home Thanksgiving night was to drive by the empty acres of Arlington Park after witnessing the theatrically historic “Eberflub” in Detroit.
Stadium stalemate meets now sidelined stale mate.
No wonder the team started out as the Staleys.
Trying to make sense of it all is like attempting to dodge the abrupt aisle turns and mean spirit of mad-cart Costco shoppers on Black Friday.
ONE FELLOW WHO IS TRYING is Dan McNeil.
He's the tire-tracked radio sports talker who is in the midst of releasing “I Bear Witness,” a fresh 300-page book about the last four decades of the timeout-challenged football team (Eckhartz Press, $25).
McNeil has been on the reportorial periphery of the Bears since his Mike Ditka days as a tender-pawed staffer at the Hammond Times of northwest Indiana. He later leapfrogged over broadcast patron Chet Coppock — leaving shoe prints on Coppock's back — to fashion a career pursuing the scratch-and-sniff that has become sports talk radio in Chicago.
IN “I BEAR WITNESS,” McNeil summons some of the very best still within both as a sports media guy and a passionate Bears fan. He presents some chippy and some verse about why this organization apparently so fears sustained success.
“I think the biggest thing 'I Bear Witness' does is illuminate 'McCaskeyism,'” McNeil said. “Interference that led to failed coaching hires. Big things like not spending on facilities or free agents to little but still meaningful things like going on the cheap for Super Bowl rings.
“'I Bear Witness' exposes the Misers of the Midway.”
THAT THE MCCASKEY BEARS ARE both operational failures and of severe disrespect to the legacy of family patriarch George Halas is unassailable. And the harder they try to steer, the worse it gets, as CBS telecast to the nation in the final seconds of Thursday's surreal ending at Ford Field.
Had “The Old Man” himself retained the sense to get off the 50-yard line at age 70 in 1965 and hand the head coaching reins to the brilliant George Allen is one of the greatest what-ifs that still continues to haunt 1920 Football Drive in Lake Forest.
McNeil's book picks up as the remarkable renaissance engendered by the hiring of Jim Finks in September 1974 is reaching crescendo with the Ditka-Buddy Ryan Super Bowl XX champs.
HE ACTUALLY BEGINS WITH the first month of the current season. That's book deadline pushing that is commendable testament to his pursuit of relevance and the quick-draw publishing dexterity of Eckhartz chieftains Rick Kaempfer and David Stern.
“We were initially targeting a mid-August release,” McNeil said. “Then with the pre-camp holdout of Caleb Williams, we pushed the goalposts farther back. Now with the downward fluidity of the current season, there is no perfect release date.”
So McNeil's keyboard midnights ended around Oct. 1.
BUT FEW BOOKS GET THE BENEFIT of up-to-the-firing currency. With that point of mitigation, “I Bear Witness” is an engaging work for those inclined to read 300-page books as a primer-plus on the wayward McCaskey Bears. McNeil has a hawk eye for detail, a revisionist's candor for some flights of Mr. Peabody history and has crossed paths with many of the primary players.
He also goes backstage for some sanitized perspectives on Chicago sports talk from Day One at “The Score” in 1992 — then at daytime-only AM-820. That's OK. But he refuses to consistently break on through and properly relegate and hammer many of the sub-pedestrian bores that he's worked with.
IN “I BEAR WITNESS,” Dan McNeil presents a Lego starter kit for anyone who wants to begin to fully understand why the McCaskey Bears are what they are.
What they are this weekend are underachievers lost in space, a $6.6 billion sports entertainment business that can't battle beyond the silver spooners who hold the hearts of a rabid NFL fandom — in a metro area of more than eight million people — forever hostage.
Whatever Friday's fleeting residuals prove to be, have the campaign lawn signs even really been changed?
Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.