A game to remember: Chicago Bears fans recall a super day in New Orleans 40 years ago
Forty years ago Monday, the Chicago Bears' lopsided victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX transformed the team from Monsters of the Midway to the kings of the NFL.
Among the fans cheering the team on were season ticket holders, a raffle winner and the Honey Bears.
To get to New Orleans for the Jan. 26, 1986, match-up, some drove all night. Some took a chartered flight. Some booked hotel rooms, while others eschewed sleeping altogether.
And every one of those loyal subjects would do it all over again to see the team’s only Super Bowl win.
Cheering from the sidelines
Debbie Lemons was a University of Illinois senior when she auditioned for the second time for the Honey Bears, the Chicago Bears’ professional cheerleading squad. A finalist four years earlier, Lemons made the 1985-1986 team.
For this football fan, becoming a professional cheerleader was a long-held dream. And a brief one. In November, the coach informed members the Honey Bears’ contract would not be renewed, but they would get to perform if the Bears made it to the playoffs and the Super Bowl.
“It was exciting,” recalled the Addison resident. “It was something I never would have had the opportunity to do if I wasn't a Honey Bear.”
Post-victory, she and some of her fellow cheerleaders continued to perform at charity events. She had fun, but it didn't compare with her season as a Honey Bear.
“I would do it all over again,” she said. “If they still had Honey Bears, I'd still be trying out.”
Dad's day out
Lifelong sports fan John Franson attended his first Chicago Bears game in 1971, the year the team moved from Wrigley Field to Soldier Field.
“I was hooked,” he said. “It was like walking into a cathedral.”
In 1985, Franson — then a 29-year-old married father of a 2-year-old with another child on the way — had been a season-ticket holder for three years. He was shopping for a new car at a Chevy dealership when a salesman invited him to fill out a raffle ticket.
“I didn't even know what the prizes were,” recalled Franson, who wasn’t listening to WGN radio when Chicago Bear Jay Hilgenberg pulled his winning entry.
The prize included two tickets to the Super Bowl, airfare, rental car and hotel accommodations.
“It was the time of my life,” said the West Chicago resident, who ultimately purchased a Chevy. “It worked out for Chevy, too.”
“It was the best sporting event I ever went to,” Franson, now 69, recalled. “I'm a die-hard Bears fan. For me to win something like that … it was meant to be.”
Exiting the stadium, Franson purchased a T-shirt emblazoned with the final score: 46-10. He kept the shirt until it was ragged. The mood in the French Quarter was electrifying.
“You felt the comradery. Everyone on the street was high-fiving,” he said.
No longer a season-ticket holder, Franson attends a couple games a year. Given the chance, he'd do it all over again. And he’d pay for the privilege.
Waving the banner
To this day, Pat Healy still displays the orange and blue banner she and her late husband Joe obtained during their Super Bowl excursion, which included accommodations courtesy of a cousin, a priest whose order operated the retreat center where they stayed along with other family members.
It wasn't luxurious, said the Arlington Heights resident, but it was clean and welcoming.
“Everyone was in a wonderful mood,” she said of the crowds gathered on Bourbon Street. “If you had on Bears paraphernalia, it was high fives. You were all friends.”
After the game, the group stopped outside a hotel where Healy noticed some boys cutting down Bears banners from the streetlights.
“We need a flag,” she told her husband, who along with a couple of friends found the kids and gave them $20 for the banner, which her Bears fan husband treasured.
“My son still hangs it up on Super Bowl Sunday,” she said.
A celebration long overdue
Mark Mandernach went to his first Bears game with his father, Dick Mandernach, a lifelong fan and season-ticket holder. It was 1967 and the team still played at Wrigley Field.
“We just loved Chicago sports teams,” recalled the Arlington Heights resident. “Good, bad or horrific, we loved them.”
By 1985, both he and his dad had season tickets. But when it came time to enter the Super Bowl ticket lottery, the younger Mandernach hesitated, thinking he’d wait until next year.
“Sonny boy, there may not be a next year,” his father told him. “Get your butt down to New Orleans.”
A journalist at Wheaton's Daily Journal at the time, Mandernach had limited time off, so he and his friend Scott Pfeifer left Thursday night, arrived in the city Friday morning and headed for the French Quarter, where the celebration had already commenced.
“Chicago was starving for a champion, and here comes Coach Ditka, Sweetness, the Bears defense,” he said referring to the popular former coach and Bears great Walter Payton. “By the time we got to New Orleans, it was like: Where's the trophy? There was no way the Bears were going to lose.”
In a show of southern hospitality, a friend of a friend put them up for the weekend.
“You gotta save your money for the French Quarter,” he joked, “you can't be wasting it on lodging.”
Mandernach’s fondest memory is the spectacle, which his father also attended.
“We didn't sit together, but we were in the same building,” he said. “Being 25 years old, making the road trip with my bestie, being a part of things … knowing my dad went to the game … it's something I'll always carry with me.”