On Top Of The Pack

When he was 10 months old, Mike McCaskey saw his first Chicago Bears game. When he was eight, he was a Bears ball boy. When he was 19 and a split end at Yale, he practiced against the Bears' secondary in training camp. When he was 20, he sat on the bench at Wrigley Field and watched his mother's father, George Halas, coach the Bears to a 14-10 win over the New York Giants for the 1963 NFL Championship.

Now, at 40, McCaskey is president and chief executive officer of the club, and the Bears, after Sunday's bruising 9-7 defeat of their NFL Central Division rivals, the Green Bay Packers, are 3-0. Papa Bear Halas, who founded the Bears and, some would say, the NFL itself, back in 1920, died a year ago at 88, and the ball was passed to the oldest of his 11 grandchildren. A former associate professor at Harvard's graduate school of management, McCaskey knows business theory cold. But it's the blood that moves him, and there was plenty of that, if few points, on Sunday.

"If this were just a business, we'd sell it tomorrow," says McCaskey, "we" being himself and the other McCaskeys who help run a team that hasn't won a playoff game in 20 years. "But I'm steward of a legacy my grandfather left. I want to bring back the feeling I had in 1963. I want to honor his memory."

You'd think that honoring a man like the flinty Halas would be a tough job. But Papa Bear used to come to the McCaskeys' house just to play Wiffle Ball with Mike and his brothers and sisters. And what did the kids call Halas as he'd round first, legging out another blast over the Pfitzer juniper bushes?

"He was always 'Grandpa,' " says Mike softly.

The Bears' win over the Packers in Green Bay was another kind of game, a primeval struggle the old guy would've appreciated. The Bears dominated the Packers—the score is misleading—running 72 plays to Green Bay's 45, and out-gained them 345 yards to 154. Moreover, 47 of Chicago's plays were runs, a lot of them boneshakers by fullback Matt Suhey and the ageless man-child Walter Payton.

More to the point, there was enough clockcleaning and unsportsmanlike conduct to assure everyone that even though the Bears and Packers have now met 128 times in regular-season play—more than any other two teams in NFL history—they just aren't going to be friends, ever.

"It was the way football's supposed to be played," said Payton. Riled-up Packer guard Greg Koch growled, "They're a bull——team and a bull——organization."

Certainly the game wasn't pretty. Packer fans, perhaps thinking that new coach Forrest Gregg, like Bart Starr before him, is another Lombardi immortal who shouldn't have returned, booed lustily. But for the Bears, who hadn't won in Green Bay in five years, there was much to cheer. Clad in new, shiny blue pants—"They looked nice in the sun, didn't they?" said Payton—the team showed a spirit that could only have trickled down from the top, from the front office. "Everybody's signed, everybody's happy, and we know who's responsible for what in management," said free safety Gary Fencik, who was about as cranked for the game as a man could be without getting arrested.

Payton gained 110 yards on 27 carries, picking up 97 on the fading Franco Harris in the Break-the-Jim Brown-Record rushing derby. Payton is now just 34 yards behind Seattle's Harris and 337 in back of Brown, and he could become the NFL's alltime leading rusher so quickly that people will forget Harris was ever in the race. In the last two weeks he's gained an astonishing 289 yards. "If it comes, it comes," says Payton, trying hard not to show how much he wants the record.