They’re right to worry. They’re just worried about the wrong thing.
There is a virus in the Bears’ locker room all right, just as the veterans fear. It’s not easily or immediately detectable like your typical clubhouse cancers are, but it is every bit as insidious and ultimately more threatening to the foundation of a team.
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It’s pretty simple, really. It’s what happens when you’re 1-5 after 6-10 after 4-12 after 4-12 and you need something to grasp onto, some reason to think it has to get better and some way to survive until it does.
It begins, perhaps, as pluck or determination or any number of noble traits. Maybe it follows the despair that comes from allowing a doomed coaching staff or a misguided team president to go on for too long. How can you not be optimistic with change? With a first-time head coach who is honest and unwavering and doesn’t panic when the plan goes off course?
It’s different this time, you tell yourself. And when the losses still mount and the questions keep coming, you hunker down and you try to answer them. Sometimes, talking rationally or humorously about something you can’t decipher can be therapeutic. Besides, you’ve been through this before and it’s not worth it to brood or get angry.
Maybe you have a new contract now, a wife, a new baby. You have to have a life. You have to go home at night and be content with that life or what’s the use? After years of losing, you had better learn to deal with it or make sure you have enough dough left over for therapy.
This isn’t college, you remind yourself. It’s the NFL, with all that that implies. It is a business, you are a professional, and so you come to work each morning and try to do that job, and when you don’t do it particularly well, you pack up your briefcase the next morning and try again.
But you look around at the kids in the room and you wonder. “You sit back,” says James Williams, “and you wonder, what if we’re 1-6 or 1-7, do the young guys fall apart, crumble, [will they] not be effective anymore?”
You try to teach them that they must keep an even keel. “When you lose a lot,” Todd Perry echoes, “if you’re not careful, you can lose the young guys.”
The implication is that the rookies, many of them accustomed to winning on the college level, can get too high from winning and too low from losing, that 1-5 can cast them adrift in a sea of self-doubt and frustration. That they will forget they are professionals now. You don’t realize in your eagerness to teach them, that they should be teaching you.
“Our No. 1 goal at Nebraska every year was to win the national championship,” says Bears rookie starting safety Mike Brown. “To lose one game was devastating. Here, it still hurts, but it’s different.”
Here, it is simply what it means to play in the NFL, to play in Chicago.
“It’s a long season,” says Tony Parrish explaining the subtle shift in objective. “Not only are you playing to do something for your team and the organization, but you also want to be able to show your teammates that no matter what, you’re going to be there for them.”
If it’s a lesson in how to make losing work for you, it gets across. “I’m the type of guy who watches others and tries to learn,” says Brown. “With five losses, you can see the guys are frustrated, that it’s getting old. But you live to fight another day.”
And don’t the Bears know it. There are but six current players–Williams, Perry, Jim Flanigan, Barry Minter, Sean Harris and Shane Matthews–who have worn a Bears uniform in a winning season. They have had five years to get used to losing.
Chances are they’re not pleased about it. Flanigan wears a permanent scowl around Halas Hall, and Williams and Perry are only smiling these days because for the first time in years, their bodies are not racked with pain.
They deal with losing for there is no other alternative anymore. Consider that since the ’95 season, only once in 70 weeks of the football season–when they started out last year at 3-2–have the Bears enjoyed a week above .500.
They have lost 13 of their last 17 games, which makes for a lot of long walks back to the locker room and a lot of tired explanations afterward. A lot of time to learn how to deal with losing.
“Everything is a habit,” lamented tackle Mike Wells this week as he too worried about the young players, “and just like learning how to win, you can learn how to lose.”
And learn how to live with it pretty comfortably as well.