Rough tough Chicago

Borrowing an old song lyric, Chicago's my kind of town. Hard working, down and dirty, and blue collar. No place for sissies.

This is the city of Al Capone, Bugs Moran, Elliot Ness, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the stockyards, and Cicero Street to this day isn't a place for the feint of heart. There's a lot of history that goes along with Chicago.

What does this have to do with sports?

It's also the home of Da Bears. Like them or not, in typical Chicago style, they have their own history.

Consider: George Halas (Papa Bear) was one of the founding fathers of what is now the NFL, which just happens to be the King Kong is the room of all things sports these days, at least in this country.

The Bears don't play at some domed stadium named after a bank, credit card, or phone company -- that would be too wimpy. They play in the elements, sometimes brutal, at Soldier Field. Soldiers -- discipline, combat, heroism, valor, never leave a man behind, purple hearts, forward march -- and all that stuff. It just seems to fit.

They've featured incredible talent at times, like Gale Sayers and Walter Payton, but mostly they're known for being tough. Careers and reputations aside, just the names of Butka, Ditka, Dent, and Urlacher, amongst others, sound like guys that would probably rather pound a couple beers, and maybe heads, rather than sip some girlie drink through a straw with a mini-umbrella sticking out of it, and fret over political correctness. The Monsters of the Midway.

Of course, there's another team called the Cubs that live in the same neighborhood, but after all, cubs are only baby bears, we tend to think of them as playful and cute, and don't expect too much out of them. But I digress. 

Sadly, for the above reasons, Da Bears have absolutely zero chance of winning the Super Bowl. Why? Because they've gone against their entire heritage. Given such a team and town, with all that history, there's no way that happens with a head coach named Lovie. This is sooooo wrong.

He might very well know the game, but I have one question I'd really like to ask him. "Even if you somehow changed your gender and race, how did you get off Gilligan's Island anyway?"

The Cleveland Browns might not win anything either, but at least they manned up and got rid of a guy named Romeo a while back. Wasn't the original Romeo a player in a sad tragedy that's been remembered for countless years? Well OK. Maybe that kind of fits for Cleveland, as in "wherefore art thy, championship?" -- but it didn't make it right.