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Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, by Rich Cohen
Free PDF Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, by Rich Cohen
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The gripping account of a once-in-a-lifetime football team and their lone championship season
For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever―a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city.
It was not just that the Monsters of the Midway won, but how they did it. On offense, there was high-stepping running back Walter Payton and Punky QB Jim McMahon, who had a knack for pissing off Coach Mike Ditka as he made his way to the end zone. On defense, there was the 46: a revolutionary, quarterback-concussing scheme cooked up by Buddy Ryan and ruthlessly implemented by Hall of Famers such as Dan "Danimal" Hampton and "Samurai" Mike Singletary. On the sidelines, in the locker rooms, and in bars, there was the never-ending soap opera: the coach and the quarterback bickering on TV, Ditka and Ryan nearly coming to blows in the Orange Bowl, the players recording the "Super Bowl Shuffle" video the morning after the season's only loss.
Cohen tracked down the coaches and players from this iconic team and asked them everything he has always wanted to know: What's it like to win? What's it like to lose? Do you really hate the guys on the other side? Were you ever scared? What do you think as you lie broken on the field? How do you go on after you have lived your dream but life has not ended?
The result is Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, a portrait not merely of a team but of a city and a game: its history, its future, its fallen men, its immortal heroes. But mostly it's about being a fan―about loving too much. This is a book about America at its most nonsensical, delirious, and joyful.
- Sales Rank: #161878 in Books
- Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2013-10-29
- Released on: 2013-10-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.33" h x 1.27" w x 6.46" l, 1.24 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football is a touching portrait of what is arguably one of the best--and most colorful--football teams ever. But Rich Cohen, better known as an essayist and editor than a sports writer, brings together an oral history of the Bears (featuring many well-known football figures, including Coach Mike Ditka), the evolution of the game and the league, and glimpses of his own childhood growing up in Chicago into a seamless narrative. Monsters is one of those rare books that transcends its topic without surrendering its enthusiasm for it. Cohen's perspective is both cogent and ambivalent. For example, he describes the quaterback as "a man in pain." He writes, "Via his suffering, we witness our own suffering at a safe remove. We eat chips and drink beer as he's lacerated, stepped on, stomped, taunted, concussed." Monsters is the rare sports book you can recommend to a non-fan as well as the biggest die hard. Really, you could recommend it to anyone who would enjoy a beautifully written, deeply human story. --Kevin Nguyen
From Booklist
Just when no more words could be added to the legacy of one of the great NFL teams of all time—the 1985 Chicago Bears—here’s another title to reanimate the likes of Walter Payton, Jim McMahon, Mike Singletary, Mike Ditka, Buddy Ryan, and the other players and coaches who made that team so dominant. Cohen (The Fish That Ate the Whale, 2012) does a good job drawing a line from the founding of the team (and the NFL!) by George Halas more than 100 years ago, to the innovations Papa Bear employed to win eight NFL championships, to the hiring of the volatile Ditka to restore a culture of winning to the Bears. The historical context enriches the book, as do Cohen’s explanation of the team’s groundbreaking “46” defense, his lively interviews with principals, and his analyses of what went right with the team, and, in subsequent years, what went wrong. The author too often gets in his own way—“In 1983, I made out with Christine Connor on the grass behind North School” (!)—but not enough to keep this engaging account out of the hands of eager football fans. --Alan Moores
Review
“Every year brings a Super Bowl, World Series, NBA, and Stanley Cup champion. All are duly noted and celebrated. But a memorable few have greater and more lasting resonance, a standing that excellence alone cannot explain. The 1985 Chicago Bears were such a team, a mélange of talents and outsize personalities that captivated and embodied a city. Rich Cohen experienced it as an obsessed seventeen-year-old. Almost three decades on, he remains obsessed--entertainingly and insightfully so, but obsessed nonetheless. His combination of reporting and remembrance is by turns evocative, revealing, quirky, and funny as hell--or at least as funny as Gary Fencik doing the Super Bowl Shuffle.” ―Bob Costas
“For anyone from Chicago, or anyone with any sense, the '85 Bears are the best team there ever was, and Rich Cohen has written the book we've always wanted. It's got all the people you want to hear from: Ditka, McMahon, Singletary, Wilson, Fencik, and, thank God, the incomparable and too-often-forgotten Doug Plank. This book--full of soul and searching, and also knock-you-down funny--is not just a great sports book, not just a great Chicago book, but a great book, period.” ―Dave Eggers, who grew up two miles from the Bears practice facility
“Rich Cohen's Monsters is the best book on professional football I know--the best because the most truthful.” ―Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal
“A riveting account of one of football's most iconic teams, the 1985 Chicago Bears, features frank interviews with the players and coaches.” ―People Magazine
“As much as it is about the '85 Bears, Monsters is an emotional education of football and ‘the Stone Age pleasure of watching large men battle to the point of exhaustion.' At one point, Cohen attributes Halas for the development of football's emphasis on the passing game: ‘It was Halas, as much as anyone, who invented the modern NFL offense and lifted the game from the ground into the air.' You can't help but think that Cohen's doing the same thing here for sports narratives.” ―Kevin Nguyen, Grantland
“Entire forests have given their lives to the pursuit of the truth about Mongo, the Fridge, Danimal and other larger-than-life characters on Da Coach's rambunctious squad. The search ends with Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, out this week . . . Author Rich Cohen was a 17-year-old New Trier High School senior as the Bears were laying waste to the NFL in 1985 . . . his quest to understand the attraction 28 years later makes for a story that reflects Chicago--rough, tough and defiant to a man, the '85 Bears are the embodiment of this city's self-image . . . It is Cohen's skillful compilation and shrewd interpretation of the total package that make the book work. He combines intelligence and insight with a reporter's eye for detail and a novelist's writing chops . . . What Cohen's book does better than its predecessors is transform its subjects from cartoon characters--think Mongo McMichael's boozy gentlemen's club commercials--into real people with talents, flaws, loves, hates, fears, pleasures, anxieties, joys .?.?. human beings, just like the rest of us, only bigger, faster, stronger, tougher, braver, etc.” ―Dan McGrath, The Chicago Sun-Times
“Rich Cohen writes the best stuff--people, scenes, sentences, drunks, big men, fine women, jokes, impressions, secrets--in America.” ―David Lipsky, author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
“The Chicago Bears are one of the most fascinating franchises and compelling stories in football. From Mr. Halas to Mr. Ditka, from the Fridge to McMahon, it's been one of the wild rides of the NFL. Rich Cohen has captured the spirit of a team and an era, its heart and mind, its great triumphs. It's a wonderful story filled with characters with character. It doesn't get any better.” ―Joe Theismann, Super Bowl–winning quarterback, Washington Redskins
“Monsters is a remarkable book, beautifully written, but that's beside the point. You think you're going to read a football book but you wind up reading about America, about who we are--you and me--and even why. And Rich Cohen has accomplished this feat through portraits of some of the greatest characters ever to have charged onto a football field and then left it.” ―Ira Berkow, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“Rich Cohen wrote it his own bleeping way and the result is a monster of a book. I'm a Packers guy, but I respect the Bears, our oldest rivals, and loved this book.” ―David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered
“The triumphant and tragic saga of the 1985 Chicago Bears and the aftermath of their historic championship season is a subject worthy of epic poetry. In Rich Cohen, the Monsters of the Midway have found their bard. Joyous yet mournful, inspirational yet irreverent, celebratory yet unsparing, Cohen's Monsters is an Aeneid for football lovers, blowin' our minds just like we knew it would.” ―Adam Langer, author of Crossing California, The Thieves of Manhattan, and The Salinger Contract
“A fan's engaging yet ultimately melancholy love letter to his beloved team and his hometown. 'Pick your team carefully, because your team is your destiny.' Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone contributor Cohen's father's solemn advice can be easily understood by sports fans. However, other readers will enjoy this entertaining, if profane, history of the 1985 NFL champion Chicago Bears . . . Cohen's telling of the Bears' founding and its tradition of nastiness is by turns devastating, regarding the irreparable harm done to players' bodies and minds, and moving, as when he explains that Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton was 'Chicago as Chicago wanted to be: a fighter . . . who's been knocked down but always gets back up.' Cohen thankfully avoids sentimentality and doesn't bog readers down in lengthy game reports or analyses. The author is at his best in the interviews with 32 retired players and executives who offer their impressions of the Bears' famed '46' defense, 'the most devastating force in football,' and its characters, including the Hit Man, Mongo, the Black & Blues Brothers and, most famously, the Fridge. Ideal for Chicagoans, both casual and die-hard sports fans and anyone who wonders, 'What happens when you have a dream and that dream comes true?'” ―Kirkus
“I just finished a book [Monsters] I thought was pretty close to perfect. Which simply means Rich Cohen picked a subject that matters to me and wrote exactly the book I wanted to read about it . . . Cohen writes one strong, creative sentence after another . . . Because the author understands football, he asks the former Bears intelligent questions and they open up to him. His explanation of Buddy Ryan's fabled 46 defense beats anything I'd read before.” ―Michael Miner, The Chicago Reader
“Whether you're a Bears fan or not, [Monsters] will entertain you a great deal. Cohen is an interesting writer, and the '85 Bears were a very interesting team. Sports fans will really enjoy it, but even those who don't much care about the NFL will similarly find it unputdownable.” ―John Tamny, Forbes
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
"It was a collection of oddballs and characters."
By Jill Meyer
As I read Rich Cohen's book about the 1985 Chicago Bears, I looked for various comments or phrases to use as the title of my review of the book. After jotting down quite a few, I settled on one made by Cris Collinsworth, wide receiver for the Bengals in the 1980's. He played against the Bears in several games during his career and was well aware of the talent and the- uh - idiosyncracies displayed by most of the Bears' players and management. And the team's rabid fans, too; mostly Chicagoans who lived with broken promises from their sports teams through the years. We looked at the Bear teams of the 1980's with an almost pathetic yearning for...championship. And in the Superbowl of 1986, played in New Orleans, the team, the fans, and the city received that trophy.
I lived in Chicago in those years and was a long-suffering fan. So was author Rich Cohen, who has written many fine works of non-fiction. Some readers of this book might mind his inserting himself, family, and friends into his book, but for me, it just felt right. Because Cohen uses a bit of his own history to explain the agonies of the Bears fans and supporters, and writes an excellent book on just how the Bears reached the Super Bowl in that single year and how they, then, lost their way.
And by putting that wonderful year in the context of the city and the history of football, he lends the book a perspective missing from most books on sports.
Pro-football grew out of college football in the 1920's. Most players left the game after leaving college but some visionaries like George Halas saw the potential for pro-leagues. The first pro teams tended to be put on by companies, eager to put their names and products out into the media. Hence, the "Decatur Staleys", a team from Decatur, Illinois that later evolved into the Chicago Bears. (The Staley company made food starch - don't ask, but somehow the owners thought that having a pro football team might be a good sales tool.) George Halas took the Bears and made one of the league's premier teams. Halas was a football genius with a particular talent for getting - and, in general - keeping good players in his 50 or so years as the team's owner and manager. His team had championship seasons, but, basically, since the mid 1960's the team had been in the doldrums. Cohen does a good job of defining George Halas - helped along with Mike Ditka's comments about his legendary cheapness. But Halas wasn't only cheap with Ditka; he was certainly careful-with-the-coin for later players and team employees.
But most of Cohen's book deals with that marvelous 1985 season. Cohen doesn't mention the fact that the team lost three out its four preseason games, giving the fans little to look forward to in the on-going season. But as the games were played and the "46 defense" won with the help of the Jim McMahon-led offense, the players and everyone else began to think, "okay, maybe this IS the year". Only a loss in the final regular season game against the Dolphins marred the winning record. And maybe that loss helped center the team as it moved into the playoffs, and then Super Bowl XX.
Rich Cohen's book is a wonderfully readable book about men - George Halas, Mike Ditka, Buddy Ryan - as leaders and about men - Jim McMahon, Steve McMichael, among others - as those who carried out the plays called by those leaders. Or who didn't carry them out, as often was the case with the "Punky QB", Jim McMahon. One of the most touching anecdotes concerned Walter Payton and his deep distress about not being able to score in the Super Bowl. Both Ditka and McMahon say they had no idea during the game itself how important it was to Walter to be given that opportunity. It was only afterward, after seeing the running back sobbing in the locker room, that they realised what it meant to him.
This is a book for Chicagoans of a certain age, football fans, and anyone who just loves reading about sports.
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
real deal NFL
By MAXIMILLIAN MUHAMMAD
the real deal NFL. this was back when the NFL was hit as hard as you wanted to hit and no shame in the game. that Bears team from 85 is the single best Defensive team that i have ever seen. that one year run was scary. they were carting off Quarterbacks like it was no tommorow. you can't imagine that today. and what a cast of Character including there head coach Mike Ditka and a Defensive coach in Buddy RYan whose two sons have made a name for themselves in the modern NFL. Walter Payton one of the Greatest Running backs and Players ever. Jim Mcmahon was a trip out Quarterback. William the fridge Perry was something else. RIchard Dent and Mike SIngleterry who is one of the only Linebackers that i have ever seen who hit guys with his eyes wide open. and who can forget the "Super Bowl Shuffle"?? the only thing a bit amazing is that they didn't win another ring, however for One year they were unlike any other Pro Football team and they made statements every sunday.
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A great book period
By Gene Taft
A great book about the NFL, past and present, but more than just "another sports book." Beyond the great sports stories, MONSTERS is also a wonderful coming of age memoir that reminds us all what it's like to be young and stupid, caring about the wrong things, but being utterly helpless to stop caring. If you've ever been a "fan"atic about anything, you'll enjoy this book and if you're not careful you might even learn a thing or two about the game of football. At the very least you'll probably have the Super Bowl Shuffle song stuck in your head for a few days. What are you waiting for, buy the book already!
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