Word: chicago
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America does not need the Chicago Bears to tell it that iceboxes are irresistible. For some reason probably larger and possibly even more surprising than William Perry, the country just needs the Chicago Bears. One pro football team or another wins most of its games every year, but this season more than last, more than many winters past, the actual football playing has seemed an adjunct to the celebration. Though they have their appealing characters, including the game's regal running back, Walter Payton, the Bears are far from the most comely players in the National Football League. In fact...
...Chicago, of course. That always clangs a national cowbell. At recurring Cub and White Sox calamities (DePaul's dependable basketball disasters are fairly localized pains), the city's slumped shoulders extend over a remarkably broad piece of the nation. But some things are not meant to be shared and, until now, the Bears have embodied most of them. No outsider is as wary of freezing conditions as a Chicagoan is proprietary of frostbite. Any Sunbelt slur is returned with a blast of icy superiority. "Bear weather," they call it. A Midwesterner's notion of comfort is plainly more profound than...
...that Canton, Ohio, auto showroom where the American Professional Football Association and the Decatur Staleys were concocted in 1920. George Halas did most of the talking. The A.P.F.A. soon became the N.F.L., and the Decatur franchise, originally a sales tool for a starch manufacturer named Staley, shifted to Chicago in the custody of the amazing Halas. It might be an exaggeration to say that the entire fabric of sport was sewn in this singular man, but it is a fact that Halas shared one field with Jim Thorpe and yielded another to Babe Ruth. He was a most valuable player...
...Payton has endured these eleven seasons, physically and spiritually, still so near to the top of his game, is more than a wonder. He logged a record nine straight 100-yd. running games this season and led the team in receptions. After Chicago thrashed the Los Angeles Rams, 24-0, to take the National Conference championship, one Bear after another stopped by Payton's locker just to touch him. "Eleven years of climbing that mountain," he sighed, speaking not altogether figuratively. As the boy once ran the hot sandbanks by the Pearl River close to his home in Columbia, Miss...
...other Bears think he handles himself like a defensive player, a high compliment in Chicago, for this is eternally a defensive team. Ditka's shutout department is run independently by a straight-talking old ramrod named Buddy Ryan, an Oklahoman partial to cowboy boots and farm hats that say HORIZON SEEDS. In an era when most coaches feel obliged to soothe the players' psyches, Ryan is a link to the past. He took one wide look at "the Refrigerator" last summer and declared the Clemson first rounder to be "a wasted draft choice." But this was not an unusual introduction...