I'm with the rest of you as regards giving up football before giving up the Bears, but...that's actually how I took my screen name.
An apostate is someone who gives up their faith, and the faith I gave up was my faith in the Bears.
I was as big a meatball as anyone here. I grew up watching Butkus, and Buffone, and Sayers and even though the teams sucked they still kicked ass as best they could. They weren't good but they were inspiring in that way.
Then came Ditka and eventually the '85 Super Bowl championship team and I was over the moon. The dream was finally real. And then...well, you all know what happened next. The egos taking over. The draft disasters, wasting first round picks taking guys like Stan Thomas and Alonzo Spellman. And then came Wanny.
After a few fumbling years and then his famous 'all the pieces are in place' statement, the Bears were playing the Vikings in the dome in '98 when Dwayne Rudd intercepted a pass and ran it back, taunting the Bears the whole way to the end zone, and the Bears did...nothing.
Not a damn thing. They stood there and watched. The only player making a real effort to stop him was Big Cat Williams. I couldn't believe it, they quit. The entire team just fucking quit. I saw a lot of shit over the years, I saw good teams and bad, but I never saw a Bears team just quit like that. They were dead, passionless, passive, lame.
After that season my attitude was, 'if they don't give a shit why should I?' I watched when it was convenient but never really recaptured the enthusiasm I used to have, not even during the Lovie years. Yeah, they were pretty good, but I knew deep down they'd screw up somehow because, well, they always do.
Maybe someday the Bears will stop shooting themselves in the foot, maybe someday they'll start acting like a real professional franchise again, but until then I'll watch, yeah, as long as they're entertaing and aren't getting blown out by the second quarter like usual, but being a Bears meatball again?
Probably never gonna happen.
