Some of the '85 Bears look fit enough to suit up again. Others are hurting and battling for disability benefits.
By Melissa Isaacson
Tribune staff reporter
January 27, 2007, 9:25 PM CST
The snow had just begun to flutter over Soldier Field when Wilber Marshall scooped up a fumble—forced by Richard Dent's sack—and galloped toward the end zone for the exclamation mark on a 24-0 Bears triumph over the Los Angeles Rams in the 1985 NFC championship game.
It is a scene frozen in the minds and hearts of many Bears fans, a picture of a gifted team in its prime, the portrait of an exceptionally conditioned athlete in all his glory.
Marshall, then a 23-year-old, 6-foot-1-inch, 228-pound linebacker, may not have been the most valuable Bears player that Super Bowl season, but he was a striking physical specimen of unquestioned ability. To say time has been unkind to that body is telling only part of the story, but it is the logical start.
Ask Marshall how old he feels today and the 44-year-old does not hesitate.
"A hundred," he says.
Retired in 1995 after playing on two Super Bowl winners and playing 12 NFL seasons with the Bears, Washington Redskins, Houston Oilers, Arizona Cardinals and New York Jets, Marshall lives in Virginia, on permanent disability from the NFL.
He has had both knees and a shoulder replaced, has a degenerative disc in his neck, nerve impairments in both arms and chronic pain from ankles broken four times. He will need knee-replacement surgery again someday as well as surgery on both hips and shoulders. And that's just for starters.
"Besides that," Marshall says quietly, "is the stress that goes along with it because there's nothing you can do and the NFL doesn't take care of its players."
Marshall is like many of his contemporaries waging battles with the NFL and the players union over disability benefits. He was a highly paid player of his generation, leaving the Bears after the '87 season for a five-year, $6 million offer to play for Washington. (The Bears declined to match it but received the Redskins' first-round draft picks in 1988 and '89 as compensation.) Now Marshall says the biggest luxury money affords him is the ability to pay for legal expenses.
Marshall, an intensely private man who declined to be photographed for this story, is very careful about what he puts in his body, he says. The pain is "bad" but would be worse if not for "a medicine case any druggie would love." He walks with a limp and weighs 270 pounds, in large part, he says, because his injuries make it hard to work out.
"If I even tried, they'd say you're trying to do this exercise, so you're not disabled," he says.
He did not attend the 20th reunion of the Bears' Super Bowl season two years ago, he says, because of a financial dispute with the team, since settled. If he had been in the team picture that day, he would have been standing among a group of middle-aged men who, generally speaking, look as healthy and robust as Bears fans would like to remember them.
"I think I can still give you one good rush," Hall of Fame finalist Dent says today.
Some in great shape
Quarterback Jim McMahon, who has been studying martial arts for the last several years, walks the golf course with ease and has said he is in the best shape of his life at 47. Offensive linemen like Tom Thayer and Jay Hilgenberg have slimmed down dramatically from their playing weights, looking more like pro volleyball players than ex-linemen.
Walter Payton died of liver disease at 45 in '99 and Todd Bell of a heart attack at age 43 in '05. But Payton's close friend and fellow running back Matt Suhey says Payton was still physically fit and only "a couple of pounds" overweight before he became ill. Bell, a former safety who missed the Super Bowl season over a contract holdout, looked like he still could deliver a blow across the middle before his sudden death.
Suhey shrugs off "a few aches and pains" and says he only needs to work out a little more. Otis Wilson and Gary Fencik still look as if they just stepped out of GQ. So does Shaun Gayle, as does Dan Hampton if he's standing still. Often, looks deceive.
Hampton, as fiercely proud as he was inordinately tough, admits he was initially hesitant to be interviewed.
"I didn't want us painted as a bunch of guys in wheelchairs," he says.
Simply put, he knew the risks, he says.
"Much like an 18-year-old coal miner who knows the black lung is there and that it's just a matter of time how much he puts up with and how much he walks away with, the game of football is fraught with injuries," Hampton says. "It is designed to basically beat the other player down. You know that going in. To say I expected to be in better shape is ludicrous. This is the card I've been dealt."
That card includes 14 surgeries on both knees to "clean out cartilage and sheer bones." He has bone chips in his wrists, elbows and shoulders. He has fingers that are gnarled badly from his playing days—one from a dislocation and later two infections, which he played through, shrugging off necessary surgery.
"Dan's fingers are absolutely mangled," former defensive linemate Steve McMichael says. "You ever see him on TV? He shouldn't talk with his hands."
McMichael, 49, the once-unshakable tackle who played 191 consecutive games, has so many lingering physical issues it's almost hard for him to remember them all.
He says his neck is the worst, a problem between his fourth and fifth vertebrae that eventually will require spinal fusion. Both knees need "cleaning out" and almost certainly eventual replacement. Both of his big toes "veer outward" from torn ligaments.
Like Hampton's, McMichael's hands are bad.
"They call them gamekeeper's thumbs (the thumbs are pushed out sideways, away from the index fingers, tearing ligaments), caused by pushing your hands off blockers," McMichael says. "Both ligaments down by my thumbs just go. It kills me to shake hands. But everyone has to shake Mongo's hand—and hard—so I just grit my teeth in public. I'm still proud of how I can handle the pain."
Painkillers?
"The stories about Dan and me drinking are legendary," McMichael says. "What did people think that was about? But to become a great athlete, you have to become regimented and you can even do that in drinking."
Big-bang theory
The cumulative clobbering that NFL players take over their typically brief football careers is almost unimaginable. Researchers estimate that collisions in the sport involve forces up to 100 times the pull of gravity.
"A 100-g impact is analogous to a car crashing into a brick wall at 25 m.p.h., and the test dummies impacting the windshield with 100 g's of force," said Kevin Guskiewicz, research director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina. "Imagine getting hit like that maybe four or five times a week."
Guskiewicz's study of more than 2,800 football retirees found 42 percent between the ages of 45 and 64 had arthritis, compared with 29 percent nationally. More alarming, one-third of NFL retirees younger than 44 already had arthritis.
Yet many players remain in great shape. Six of 10 former NFL players said they still work out for about an hour four times a week—many times more than the national average. The worst off tend to be former linemen. About half of the defensive linemen Guskiewicz studies have arthritis, compared with just 31 percent of former defensive backs.
Gayle, a former safety, broke both legs, fractured his neck and had seven surgeries over the course of his career, including spinal fusion. He has a steel rod from one knee to his ankle that will require further surgery and has been told he most likely will need a shoulder and hip replacement.
For the shoulder injury, Gayle was granted "line-of-duty" benefits but then had them rescinded, and he has a slightly different stance than Hampton when it comes to knowing what was at risk.
"Anyone who aspires to play professional football, they don't really consider, I don't think, the outcome of where your body will end up," he said. "You don't think of it to extremes. When you're in high school or college, you may think about injury, but you don't think injury will end your career or possibly change life to the point where you have to reconsider what you're doing."
Part of the extremes, says Gayle, 44, is the fight ex-players like he and Marshall still are waging against the union and the NFL.
The line-of-duty disability benefits include the stipulation that "they can call you at any time to give you a physical and see if your condition has improved," Gayle says. "And they do that at the first opportunity."
Sent to an "independent doctor appointed by the NFL office," Gayle says he was put off immediately during his evaluation when he noticed the doctor had a folder that listed his disability payments. Though Gayle had a different doctor tell him his shoulder had gotten worse and that he needed it replaced, the NFL-appointed physician said it was "improved and they cut off my benefits."
"This is the union I've paid dues to happily for years," Gayle says, "and then when I need them, they wouldn't even return my calls."
The Wall Street Journal reported in a story in December of '05 that only 90 of the more than 7,000 former pro players covered by the NFL disability plan receive football disability benefits.
McMichael was told at 40 that, despite his neck injury, he did not qualify for benefits because of his radio job.
"Any guy that's up for disability in my mind is someone who can't do physical labor anymore," he says. "That's the job description of football, and if you can't do that, they owe you disability."
Taking union to task
Keith Van Horne feels just as strongly about what he describes as the gross mismanagement of the players' union.
At 49, the former offensive tackle describes his current condition when he says: "Most of my shoulders are gone. They were operated on twice each while I was playing, but both rotator cuffs and labrums are torn and I can use surgery on both of them. My sixth and seventh vertebrae in my neck are laying on top of each other, there's nothing between them, so I might have to get some [spinal] fusion. My back and compression fractures, that stuff is going to kick in later."
Van Horne, a partner in the California Restaurant Group, played 13 years in the NFL and at 55 is set to receive less than $3,000 per month with no medical benefits. Though a tenured NFL assistant coach receives health insurance for life, NFL players are cut off a year after they stop playing.
"Upshaw is the guy who pleaded with us to go out on strike twice," Van Horne says. "I played with torn labrums and cracked sockets. Now you have a torn labrum, you're on IR. We put our career on the line because this was something we were passionate about, and now that we're done, where's the reciprocal payback?"
League spokesman Greg Aiello told the San Francisco Chronicle retired players receive approximately $60 million a year in benefits from the retirement plan and there have been improvements over the years. The attorney for the players' union did not return calls Friday.
Van Horne says what really concerns him is, "You might be doing this story a little early. Once we get guys into their 50s, you're going to see some really serious stuff."
Hilgenberg says that after his second year in the league, he quit playing in the NFL alumni golf tournament "just because it was scary seeing how many of the guys were handicapped and stuff."
McMichael tells a story of "how karma comes back to you" as he recalls the days when former Bears defensive end Ed O'Bradovich, a member of the '63 NFL championship team, used to come watch the '85 team practice.
"His neck was so stiff," McMichael says, "we'd walk up behind him just to see him turn around. He'd have to turn his whole head. And we'd laugh, that's how mean we are. Now, someone comes behind me and says, 'Hey, Mongo,' and I have to turn my whole body all the way around."
But what characterizes the '85 team, just as it did then, is a widespread sense of bravado. Where it once served to push them onto the playing field when they often had no business being there, it now describes an attitude toward the pain and lingering injury.
Asked how he is feeling now, for example, Hilgenberg, 47—who had a heart attack in 1994—says in all seriousness, "I'm fine. I have limited motion in my right elbow, I broke my hand and have a finger that's messed up, a [recurring] pinched nerve in my neck and I have half a collarbone. But I feel like I won the game. I go out and play golf every day."
Dent is equally pragmatic.
"Father Time is still undefeated," he says, "and it's something we have to deal with."
The only physical "issue" outside of a knee injury that Dent describes as ongoing is a toe injury he suffered on an interception return for a touchdown that, ironically, was called back because of a penalty.
"Just as I crossed the goal line, I was shoved and my big toe popped out," Dent recalls. "I had to numb that thing for eight weeks, then I come to realize the play didn't count. As of today, I'm still dealing with that pain.
"Otherwise I've been blessed waking up," he says, "because aches and pains don't really exist."
Just lucky?
As for how he escaped the same physical fate as fellow end Hampton and McMichael, Dent said he's not sure.
"I take my hat off to those guys and what they had to work through and why they had to work through it," he says. "Some people have pain and some people are injured and they were on the cusp of both."
Dent, like others, didn't practice because of the toe in the latter years of his career. He also worked out with a trainer, he says, who focused on circulation.
"The more you can keep your body circulated, the fewer injuries you have," he says.
Fencik, 52, who will need an artificial knee eventually, says, "People over 50, that's what happens. I had an ankle reconstructed and have never had any problems. Knock on wood, but I don't have any back problems. My biggest issue is tennis elbow. But look at guys like Thayer and [Jim] Covert. You have to work out. This isn't a free lunch."
Fencik credits then-trainer Fred Caito, and he and Hilgenberg and others praise former strength coach Clyde Emrich with having the rare foresight to not overtrain players. Emrich, still on the Bears' staff, says he was all about weightlifting and not bodybuilding, that he encouraged players to listen to their bodies and only do as much in the weight room as they felt comfortable with.
Improved medical techniques, smarter training regimens that limit hitting during regular-season practice sessions, better nutrition and athletes who are more knowledgeable about their bodies in general theoretically should reduce the risk of debilitating injuries in the future.
But broach the subject with today's Bears and it becomes immediately clear that the mind-set has not changed all that much.
"I don't think about it," defensive end Alex Brown, 27, says of how he will feel in 20 years. "I probably should, but I don't. Maybe from a money standpoint, probably. You don't want to be broke. You want to make sure you save your money and do the things you need to do.
"But as far as health, yeah, I want to walk in 20 years. I don't want my heart to stop. But I don't do anything. I work out hard, I play hard, and that's it."
Ruben Brown, 34, laughs at the subject of arthritis.
"I got it now. I'm not worried about that," he says. "If I was, I wouldn't play football. Those are the sacrifices we have to make to play. I love the game, and I'll be able to handle it."
Brown says the topic may be a generalization because "I know a lot of old guys who are doing great. … It depends on the guy and how you took care of yourself."
Hilgenberg remembers feeling the same way.
"You start thinking you're old when you hit 30, 32," he says, laughing. "It's tough to even imagine 50. What's funny about it is it comes in the blink of an eye."
Marshall, the father of two girls, 15 and 17, says he hopes his battles with the league and union will help future players. His case currently is before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"I'll keep fighting until the end because I have the funds to fight," he says. "The next time someone goes to court, I hope they can pull up 'Marshall v. the NFL.'"
In the meantime, he says, "I still try to do something. I can't shut down. I still have to live. I have businesses that I can't be physically involved in, but I can put my mind to work."
Worth the cost?
Was winning a Super Bowl worth all this? Walk through the Bears' locker room and players will tell you a victory over the Colts next Sunday will be worth almost anything.
"Everybody wants that ring, it's why you play," Marshall says. "But at the same time to diminish your health when it's over? I don't know."
Hampton and McMichael do know.
"You better believe that made it all worth it," McMichael says. "Winning that damn game made everything worth it."
"Yeah," Hampton says, "we're not running 6Ks and I can't chase my little guy around, but I do what I gotta do. We're never going to be the way we were, but again, we knew it going in. Payton, Suhey, [Mark] Bortz, Hilgenberg, the 30-player core that was the Chicago Bears, that won more games in five years than any team in history, we played by a code. We sucked it up. Twenty years later we're all tickled to death this bunch is going and we don't need anyone to say, 'Oh, those poor guys,' about us.
"I know people who swing a hammer all day and fall off a house. Those guys didn't necessarily make that decision to do that. I hate to say my injuries are self-inflicted, but it was the price I was willing to pay, and I'm glad I paid it."
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
