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Da Bears
by Lindsay Hunter
Stranger’s Guide: Chicago
I moved to Chicago when I was 25. My then-boyfriend and I made the two-day drive straight up through the middle of the country in the beginning of June, eager to get to the apartment we’d rented after a half-hearted search through neighborhoods we recognized only because of their proximity to something famous. We settled on one where we could see Wrigley Field through our dining room window. Kind of. If you shifted and squinted.
When we arrived in Chicago, driving north along Lake Shore Drive, with vast Lake Michigan on our right and the gleaming, architecturally manic cityscape coming into view, we were struck at how lucky we were to land somewhere so beautiful, so modern. “There’s Soldier Field,” Ben said, and I pretended to know what that was. I’d grown up in Orlando. We had the Magic, and I’d seen a minor league baseball game at Tinker Field (named after the legendary Chicago Cub Joe Tinker, who relocated to Orlando and gave us the Tinker Tigers, later the Orlando Twins), but Central Florida offered no opportunity for me to cultivate fanship in football. In fact, it seemed like a sport that excluded me, a girl with literary ambitions who hated shorts and sweating, who was once chased down the hallway of my high school by a football player calling me a freak. What I knew of the Chicago Bears was tied to the Super Bowl Shuffle, in which Walter Payton tied football to sex (“runnin’ the ball is like makin’ romance”), and faint memories of the SNL “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” and “Da Bears” skits. From these I concluded that Bears players were like children—they’d make mistakes but they’d still be cherished—that Bears fans were inscrutable, mustachioed men who chewed their words and that people in Chicago ate sausage with every meal (that part is pretty true). Bears fans were of Chicago, and now, I was simply in Chicago.
I wasn’t supposed to stay longer than my grad program. I’d be elsewhere with an MFA in two, three years, tops, thawing out from Chicago’s icy winds (how they would snake into my coat and come out my neck to wrench the snot from my nose and whip it across my cheek), writing my books. But that drive up through the country was 18 years ago, and I’m writing this from a different dining room in Chicago, the one in my home, where I’ve lived for over 11 years. I wasn’t supposed to call this place home, and after a Florida childhood of blistering, relentless heat, I was never supposed to look forward to wearing shorts and exalting in the sun again. And I was definitely never, ever supposed to become a football fan.
Turns out, sometimes, before you have children and you have entire unfilled days, huge swaths of time, and your boyfriend is spending weekends studying for law school, the television becomes a cherished friend. And sometimes, as you’re trying to ignore the fact that you’re supposed to be writing, you’ll hear the siren call of big-network football theme songs. You know the ones. The horn-heavy songs that make you feel like something very fun but very serious is about to occur, and suddenly you’re crouched like you’re on the line, seconds from hiking the ball, rooting for the running back whose life story you just watched condensed into a halftime-length mini-doc. It turns out that football teams are made up of people, and stories, and relationships. And then the people all run at each other. What more could a writer want?
I began, despite myself, to get into it. Not so much for the franchise but for the players, the coaches, all the different people involved. My allegiance was to the humanity of the game, man. The people, bro!
An exceptionally good season helped my fandom along. Two years after we moved to the city, the Bears made the 2007 Super Bowl. I was dazzled by wide receiver and return specialist Devin Hester, who would later outrun a cheetah; I trusted coach Lovie Smith’s unbreakable focus. We had Hall-of-Famer Brian Urlacher at linebacker; we had Peanut Tillman, one of the best cornerbacks in pro football history. That we came pretty close to winning a Super Bowl with injury- and turnover-prone QB Rex Grossman, who once called a game he’d lost “meaningless” and had all of Chicago begging Lovie to bench him and put in second-string QB Brian Griese, or hell, even third-string QB Kyle Orton (who later lost his starting position on the Broncos to Tim Tebow, for cripes sake), should account for some type of recognition. It was a good, solid team.
Bears fans, I was learning, are used to heartache. The Bears have consistently drafted great college quarterbacks who poop their pants in pro games. (Even as the NFL became an aerial league, the Bears’ passing record was held by Sid Luckman, who played in the 1940s, until Jay Cutler broke it in 2015, which tells you something about perennial disappointment.) But it never feels bitter. There’s hope right next to the eye rolling and jaw clenching. Maybe this will be the year. Okay, maybe this will be the year. For teams, and cities, as old as the Bears, the fan base is at the acceptance phase of the grief process. I’ve learned over my 15 years of fandom that the life of a football team is long and that there’s always the next game, the next draft, the next season.
My kids are finally starting to get into football. Their favorite teams are the Ravens and the Bengals, because those teams happened to be winning the day they decided to have a favorite team. Their friends like the Patriots, the Cowboys, the Colts and, sometimes, the Bears. It’s like these Chicago kids take the Bears for granted the same way I used to take Disney for granted, a place—an experience—that they exist alongside of, that helped form the very identity of their hometown, but that has little to do with them. That, and they’re kids, and they want their team to be good. The Bears were 3 and 14 in 2022. That’s tough for a kid. But for me, as a writer, I’m still in it for the human element. Our current QB, Justin Fields, has epilepsy. He got a 29 on his ACT. He uses yoga breathing on the field. I’m rooting for the Bears, but I’m also rooting for him.
The Bears initially wanted to build a stadium in Arlington Heights, a suburb northwest of downtown Chicago, but the plans fell through, and they moved into Soldier Field full-time in 1971. Fifty years later, they’ve acquired an old racetrack they intend to develop into a stadium. The Arlington Heights Bears? It’s funny, because lots of things have been renamed in Chicago. The Sears Tower is now, they tell us, the Willis Tower. The White Sox played in Comiskey (acceptable), then the “Cell” (we made it work) and now Guaranteed Rate Field (nope, never). Chicago has a hard time letting things go. Or maybe, since I’m a Chicagoan now, and a Bears fan, I should say that we don’t have a hard time letting go; we do a good job of holding on.
LINDSAY HUNTER is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her most recent novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection and an NPR Great Read. Her third novel, Hot Springs Drive, is forthcoming from Roxane Gay Books in November 2023.
What a great story / essay. More a story than an essay. And the ending was great! Frank Bruni has a place at the close of his columns for "great sentences". That last thought should be there!