Ron Rivera has yet to have a paper airplane thrown at his head, but he feels it is coming. Rivera is one of the NFL's more respected defensive coordinators—the man did win a Super Bowl ring with the 1985 Bears—yet he knows that, in Halas Hall, no one is safe from Brian Urlacher and his teammates.
Meeting rooms, especially, can be treacherous.
A coach will think everything is going smoothly, the endless chatter and the boasting and hooting and hollering having finally come to an end, and then THUMP. The coach doesn't need to turn from the whiteboard to know that someone's playbook has been pushed off his desk and onto the floor, courtesy of the teammate sitting next to him. Then THUMP. There goes another one.
To many people older than 12, this little joke would lose its allure the third or fourth or 47th time. But many people are not the Chicago Bears defense, and if you are looking for stuffy maturity or quiet contemplation or the kind of detached professionalism that has seemed to choke the life out of modern sports, move on.
Football is a game, remember? And besides, Urlacher knows a secret about a bunch of guys having fun together: It's the only way you win.
IT'S NOT like this in most sports. The Yankees snatched a handful of titles in the late 1990s by treating each other like business partners, venture capitalists spending their summers profiting from emerging home run markets. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal won three NBA titles while at times barely speaking to each other. Then again, the NBA is a league for which the expression "12 players, 12 cabs back to the hotel" was invented.
But football is different. No football player can succeed without the help of those around him. Joe Montana would never have been the stuff of legend without Jerry Rice; Emmitt Smith doesn't get to the end zone without Daryl Johnston.
This truth is even more apparent on defense. As Urlacher puts it, "It's 11 guys, and if someone doesn't do his job, it screws the team. If one guy gets out of his gap, we're screwed." More politely, you have to be able to trust the guy next to you. And the more you like him, the easier that is.
"When I first got here, we didn't do anything together," says Urlacher, in his seventh season with the team. "The attitude was like, we work together all day, who wants to see each other more than that? But now that's changed. We're together all the time, at practice, outside of practice. And if we're not messing around, something is wrong."
The shift began nearly three years ago, with the arrival of Lovie Smith. The head coach made the Bears D younger—the average age of the starting lineup is just 26.33 years, fourth youngest in the NFL—and faster. That means everyone can finally keep up with Urlacher. Only 28 himself, Urlacher is an outrageous talent, the crown prince in a Bears middle linebacking dynasty that includes Mike Singletary and Dick Butkus, and he more than looks the part. He is a 6'4", 258-pound tree stump of a human being, the kind of specimen who, if he weren't playing football, might be off in Iceland lifting cars in the World's Strongest Man contest.
Urlacher's brute size, combined with his remarkable 4.5 40 speed, simply changes the way quarterbacks need to play. The middle of the field is no longer an option—not to throw toward, not to scramble in, not to even look at. Film of Chicago's win over the Saints last November provides Zapruderlike evidence of this phenomenon. Go frame by frame through the second quarter, and watch a hapless Aaron Brooks physically recoil in the pocket after a play-action fake. Realizing Urlacher is in the way of his intended play downfield, Brooks is suddenly a bungle of arms and legs and nerves, looking to dump the ball to someone, anyone. He picks his tight end—who happens to be blanketed by outside linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer, who makes the interception.
All 11 guys, each trusting the other to do his job. Class dismissed.
FIVE MEMBERS of the Bears defense were selected for the Pro Bowl this past February: Urlacher, the increasingly dominant linebacker Lance Briggs, tackle Tommie Harris, strong safety Mike Brown and cornerback Nathan Vasher.
It has escaped no one's attention in Chicago that the last time five Bears defenders were chosen was after the 1985 season, or that for the first time since then, the team also has an aerial attack that frightens opponents as much as its defense. Playing the part of sunglasses-wearing Jim McMahon is baby-faced Midwesterner Rex Grossman. His sure arm and—so far this season—ability to stay healthy have made Chicago an all-around threat. Grossman is someone the defense can rely on to actually do something with the ball if it forces a turnover. And he has his own plans to help the D. "What we hope to do is score some points so the defense doesn't think it has to be perfect anymore," Grossman says. "Then those guys can get more aggressive."
More aggressive? The Bears D is giving up just 7.2 points per game. With Harris (five sacks) slicing through the middle of the offensive line, and Alex Brown (three sacks) speed-rushing around it, the Bears' 18 sacks is among the best in the NFL. And while it's not the bring-the-house 46 D, the mentality of this team is remarkably similar to that of the last Bears squad to rule the NFL. Chicago's version of the Cover 2 is all about the attack, a read-and-react pack of bodies that simply smothers opponents into submission. Rivera, a linebacker on that '85 team, describes his group as "bullying." Urlacher calls his own unit "relentless."
"We're very aggressive," Alex Brown says.
"We want to get to the quarterback, and everything is a competition with us. We're not just competing against the guys blocking us, we're also competing against each other to see who can get there first."
Rivera likes the comparisons between his current charges and the '85 group. Certainly his experiences give him a deep understanding of his players' playbook-on-the-floor antics. When Rivera was in shoulder pads, every practice felt like an episode of Circus of the Stars . Back then, it was the "Super Bowl Shuffle" and the nicknaming of one Mr. William Perry after a certain kitchen appliance. It was practice-field
follies, like the snowy December afternoon when Rivera brought an armful of Presto Logs, threw them in a trash can and lit 'em up, so the team would have something to gather around between drills.
Now, with Urlacher's group, the clowning around is less flamboyant but just as rambunctious. "Brian's as big a kid as anyone I've seen, and the rest of them are right in line," Rivera says. "That doesn't mean they don't take a workmanlike attitude when it's time to buckle down. But when they're in the locker room, they have fun, they tease each other, they're all over each other. And those are the teams that win."
If that's the case, the collection of sports equipment the players have stashed around Halas Hall should make the Bears a shoo-in for the Lombardi Trophy. There are badminton rackets, a ball for dodgeball and the yellow plastic bat Urlacher keeps in his locker for spirited games of Wiffle Ball. (So far, no one has reported any injuries from these endeavors, although some of the inanimate objects in the locker room have not been so fortunate.)
And when no one is feeling Wiffle Ballish, a couple dozen players gather in a circle in the middle of the locker room and head a soccer ball to each other, seeing how many times they can pass it without the ball touching the ground. For a long time, the record was 32. Apparently, that's changed. "It's 34 now," Urlacher says, his tone giving the number as much import as any sack statistic. "Write that down, 34. We don't mess around."
IF URLACHER is the instigator in much of this, it is not by accident. No one buys into his "the-defense-that-plays-together-wins-together" philosophy more than he does. That means off the field, and even out of season, he aims to foster as much of a Three Musketeers—or in this case, 25 Musketeers—atmosphere as possible.
When Urlacher held a birthday party for his 6-year-old daughter at a Chicago Chuck E. Cheese's late last year, half the team showed. And of course, as the little kids sat in their seats and ate cake and ice cream, the really big kids were grouped around the Pop-A-Shot and Skee-Ball stations, furiously comparing how many reward tickets they'd gotten the machines to spit out.
Things aren't that different in Urlacher's sprawling home, about five miles from the Bears' complex. Less Town & Country and more Pee-wee's Playhouse , the divorced Urlacher's house is where teammates often engage in spirited games of Ping-Pong, billiards and air hockey. In the woods out back, Urlacher has a full paintball setup, complete with camouflage gear.
But most notorious are the poker games that take place a few times each month, which often turn into drawn-out affairs. Explains Brown: "Brian doesn't let everyone leave until he's taken all their money." Safety Chris Harris is more blunt: "Brian is the most competitive person on earth."
Nowhere is this more evident than on the football field. Urlacher is one of the few Bears who hasn't watched film of the team's playoff loss to Carolina last season. He's seen some isolated plays selected by coaches, but has never popped in the tape himself because he finds it so gutwrenching. And he's sworn that this season, the team will take care of its unfinished business. "I want to win it all," Urlacher says. "It's what everything we do is about—the work and the fun stuff. It's about getting the ring. It's about winning."
As Urlacher speaks, he is in the process of putting several hundred dollars into Harris' gleeful palm. The two are at a bowling alley in suburban Chicago with a dozen other members of the D. Bowling was Urlacher's idea, but it is not going the way he planned. First Brown, and now Harris, have come up with better scores than his, and as the day wears on, his booming laugh and jack-o'-lantern smile become scarce.
By the time the afternoon is over, Urlacher is down to nearly monosyllabic sentences. He grunts a good-bye to a few players, leaving Harris to cackle over the day's winnings. Still, it may be Urlacher who has the last laugh. As Harris and Brown are bowling a few frames just for fun, the lights on the lanes suddenly click off. Harris swears it's Urlacher who, on his way out, must have told the manager to shut them down. "Yeah, we're going to have to get him back for that," Brown says, with a smile that must still show up in the nightmares of some substitute teacher he had in high school. "Just wait. It's on."
Indeed it is. Let the playbooks fall where they may.