Butkus was as much a synonym as a star

The definitive NFL linebacker passes on at 80.

A few hours after Dick Butkus died on Thursday, the Chicago Bears played the Washington Commanders.

Tremaine Edmunds was their middle linebacker. He participated in nine tackles. Around him, the Bears sacked Sam Howell five times and hit him 11 times, and they won 40-20, their first win in 346 days.

Overall they played very hard, as if Butkus would somehow escape the casket and slap them upside their heads if they didn’t. He stopped playing 49 years ago. His position, as a hit man in between two other linebackers and behind two linemen, has nearly disappeared, and the defensive standard-bearers like Myles Garrett, Aaron Donald, T.J. Watt and Micah Parsons are either QB stalkers or down linemen or both.

Butkus’ scorched-earth style probably wouldn’t last a quarter and a half in today’s NFL games. He loved to wrap up ballcarriers around the thighs and arms and hurl them to the cold hard ground before they could brace themselves. To Butkus there was no such thing as “unnecessary roughness,” and he wouldn’t have understood why “targeting” is such a crime. Deacon Jones, master of the concussive head slap, called Butkus a “stone cold maniac.” But the way he played made Butkus a brand, not just an eight-time All-Star in the nine seasons his body allowed him to play.

More to the point, he made the Bears a brand, much more than Mike Ditka ever did.

The bro-hugs that the players exchange at the end of today’s games? Butkus didn’t believe in those. They said you were lucky if he spoke to you at the Pro Bowl. Johnny Morris, the receiver, said Butkus scared everyone on his team. Morris’ team was the Bears.

There wasn’t as much passing in those days, so Butkus was forced to demolish running backs and centers. He still had 18 sacks in 1967. Quarterbacks always knew where he was. He enjoyed messing with the young ones. Terry Bradhaw said Butkus “hypnotized me” in their first meeting. “I had the football and I just said, ‘Take it, sir,’’’ Bradshaw said. “And he did. He intercepted me twice. It was like I threw it right to him.”

“He was Moby Dick in a goldfish bowl,” said John Facenda, the thunderous voice of NFL Films.

The first time the Packers ran into Butkus, Vince Lombardi wasn’t terribly impressed by the film. He told Jerry Kramer and Forrest Gregg that the rookie was undisciplined and blockable. Then Butkus took Green Bay’s power sweep and crumpled it. As Paul Hornung recalled, Lombardi watched the film for a while, the next day, and told the team, “I’m sorry, boys, but this Butkus may be something special.”

Butkus was a Bear, so of course he hated the Packers, but he waged holy war against the Lions. Mike Lucci, a Detroit linebacker, said Butkus was a dirty player and that the league should take some sort of action. Maybe that’s because Butkus, at the end of a loss to Detroit, called time outs so he could take three consecutive runs at center Ed Flanigan. After the Lions’ Altie Taylor inexplicably called Butkus overrated and was quoted as such, Butkus ran Taylor out of bounds, picked him up and threw him into the seats.

When Dick LeBeau, the Lions’ captain, won a pregame coin toss, he told the referee the Lions would receive. The official turned to Butkus and asked about his plans, meaning which side of the field he wanted.

“We’re going to kick their ass all over this field,” Butkus replied.

Butkus was in on 1,100 tackles and intercepted 22 passes. He also recovered 25 fumbles. The league didn’t chart forced fumbles back then. He had five picks during his rookie year of 1965, and he had 11 tackles in his first game, against San Francisco. Bill George had been playing middle linebacker, and did it well enough to make the Hall of Fame. As soon as he saw Butkus on the practice field, he said, he knew it was time to retire.

For one thing, Butkus was much bigger than the average “Mike,” going 6-foot-3 and 245. He was always the best player on the field, whether it was Chicago Vocational High, or a Rose Bowl-winning Illinois team. He had four older brothers, all of them bigger than he, and they squeezed into the house in Roseland, the far South Side neighborhood that, sadly, has become a prime murder zone. The brothers worked as movers, carrying hutches and beds and chests of drawers up and down flights of stairs. “You talk about a crap job,” Butkus would say.

He wanted to go to Notre Dame, but the school didn’t recruit married players, and he had Helen, his sweetheart since he was 14 and still his sweetheart on the day he died. She was one of his two relationships. The other one wasn’t as loyal, leaving his knee hopelessly shredded, implanting neck and bad injuries that, later in his life, crept into his other extremities and at one point rendered his hands useless. He had to retire in 1974 and sued the Bears when they refused to pay off the rest of his contract or for his care. He eventually got $600,000, but he didn’t talk to George Halas, the Papa Bear, for five years.

Ironically, the man who disdained almost everything about football except the actual play, and said that the mud of Wrigley Field and its rustic accommodations felt like home to him, wound up living and dying in Malibu. He was a major commercial, movie and TV actor, usually playing the role of Dick Butkus. 

If there was ever a more disruptive defensive football player in the NFL it was probably Lawrence Taylor, who sparked nightmares that old NFC East quarterbacks still experience. The difference was that Taylor didn’t particularly care if he caused injury. Butkus sincerely wanted to.

“I would never go out and hurt anyone deliberately,” Butkus once told a Chicago Tribune columnist, “unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”

He might have had tongue in cheek, Maybe the obituary writer did, too, on Thursay, in saying that Dick Butkus died peacefully.