Bears have always been about vicious defense

MIAMI – Teams keep score in different ways.

The Chicago Bears will not always beat you.

But they will always beat you up.

Few stories illustrate that better than the tale former linebacker Doug Buffone told on the eve of the Super Bowl.

“We’d just lost a close game to Detroit one year and I was really steamed. I’m throwing pieces of my uniform around the locker room and suddenly Abe,” Buffone said, referring to former coach Abe Gibron,” shows up next to my stool and says, ‘What are you so mad about?’

“I said, ‘Abe, we lost the damn game.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, but we knocked 15 Lions out of the game.’ “

This is what Colts quarterback Peyton Manning has to look forward to Sunday, a tradition that current middle linebacker Brian Urlacher has tried to live up to from the day he arrived in a tough town seven seasons ago.

It begins with the franchise’s gruff founder, George Halas, and runs through guys named Nagurski, Atkins, O’Bradovich, George, Butkus, Ditka, Payton, Hampton and Singletary, and found its perfect expression in a 1985 squad that lost only one game, won a Super Bowl the following January and left dozens of chalk outlines in its wake.

“They did everything,” Urlacher said. “They took it away, sacked the quarterback, intercepted passes – they were dominant. There have been games where we were dominant this year, but they were dominant all season.”

The 1985 team had a number of outsized personalities and the sheer intimidation they brought to the table every week.

One look at middle linebacker Mike Singletary’s wild eyes across the line of scrimmage hinted at the fury that was about to be unleashed. Those lucky enough to avoid Singletary often wound up in the path of his outside tandem, Otis Wilson and Wilber Marshall.

“He was kind of like a viper,” coach Mike Ditka said, referring to Marshall earlier this week. “He had great leverage. I saw him hit Joe Ferguson in Detroit once. I thought he killed him.”

While it’s easy to see how Chicago became home and hearth to so many vicious defenders over the years – rarely risking high draft picks on golden-armed quarterbacks – why is a matter of some speculation.

Former Miami Dolphins running back Larry Csonka, mentioned several times by his contemporaries on the Bears as the toughest guy they played against, thinks the barnstorming tours the early Bears teams embarked on set the tone for their toughness in later years.

“When the game started, they drew a line in the dirt somewhere, went at it, and may the best man win,” he said. “As often as the Bears won back then, it became not just their trademark, but their philosophy.”

Buffone subscribed to the same theory.

“We were so bad,” Buffone said, “that sometimes in the defensive huddle, we’d have a play called ‘destroy,’ the point being we’d pick out a receiver on the other team and drill him to take out our frustration. Back then, you could hit a guy anywhere on the field so long as the ball wasn’t in the air. Once I flattened Frank Gifford something like 40 yards from the line of scrimmage. It might have been a record.”

Csonka disagreed with the last part.

“I remember playing against Butkus in the old Orange Bowl and Bob Griese, our quarterback, was so scared of Butkus that he ran out of bounds and kept on running until he made it to the cinder track that used to ring the field.

“Butkus chased him every step of the way,” Csonka added, “and flattened him, anyway.”