Bear Down Baffa

They say the captain must go down with the ship. 

It’s a familiar story, I’m sure you’ve heard it before.  Mike Brown plays well.  Mike Brown impacts game dramatically.  Mike Brown gets hurt and leaves game.  Bears lose.  Make no mistake about it, folks.  This is very bad news.  It’s the kind of thing that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.  OK, maybe your worst, but only cause it’s really, really bad.

The Bears will miss Mike Brown if he makes what is a likely trip to the Injured Reserve list.  You can’t find a player on a Bear roster going back at least a decade that has made a greater impact on the field per snap that he’s played.  And because of that, I worship Mike Brown like the first man who walked on the moon, Neil Armstrong (he also coached the Bears from ‘78 to ’81, going 30-35 and never quite amassing the acclaim he did as an astronaut).  Mike Brown is the virtual equivalent of a war hero (no offense to those engaged in an actual war right now).

From the moment he arrived in 2000, to ’01 when he returned an INT for a TD in OT two weeks in a row (a feat that had only occurred a dozen times in the history of the game), to today when he intercepted a pass and recovered a fumble on our goal line (getting to the ball quicker than the QB, who had the advantage of placing his hands under the center’s crotch – an arm’s length from the ball – before the play began), you cannot say enough about the kind of player Mike Brown is.  He does everything right, and has physical gifts that are rare.  If this injury ends his career (God forbid, and I don’t even believe in God), he will be the defensive Bo Jackson of his era.  And so it is a sad, sad day in Chicago.  And it is a dark, dark day in the history of Chicago sports.  Please join me in a moment of silence.

But then there’s the other side of me, the part that hates Mike Brown like someone who called my mom a name so bad that I had to look it up on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/, the free encyclopedia).  How can a man be super-human on the field, and betray fans across the globe by getting hurt so consistently?  I mean, this guy makes Rex Grossman look like Robocop.  He’s got as good a chance of getting hurt as a skydiver without a parachute.  I just hope he has AFLAC coverage (http://www.aflac.com/).  But you can’t get mad at a man who straps it up and lays it all on the field for you (on the few occasions he’s healthy on a Sunday when we happen have a game).  It is the nature of the beast that is this gridiron madness we call football.

All kidding aside, I bet there isn’t a person more disappointed by this than Mike Brown, and not because he’s hurt – but because he let his teammates down, and he knows about the gaping hole he’s leaving behind him in the secondary.  I’d write that I was holding out hope that he’ll be OK, but I’d be lying.  And if this is the end of the line for him, let it be said that Mike Brown was meant to play football, Mike Brown was meant to play defense, and Mike Brown was meant to be a Chicago Bear.

As for the actual game, we lost what may have been a preview of Super Bowl 42.  It was a game we were supposed to lose, so at least we accomplished that.  But all three teams in our division won, and that puts us in last place.  So again, not a good day.  We did play phenomenal defense, dominating the entire first half like we had San Diego’s playbook, and they’re arguably the best offense in the league.  We certainly looked better than their highly touted defense, and they were playing against an offense that coughs up the “rock” more than a crack head in a Heimlich Maneuver demonstration (www.americanheart.org/heimlichmanuever).  But despite all we accomplished defensively, they eventually caught up to us.  And then we let them win.  I guess you have to try to focus on the positives.  And in this case, you have to look hard to find them.  At least it wasn’t Rex’s fault.  And hey, nobody died.

© 2007

This entry was posted on Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 1:05 am and is filed under n) 2007 Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.