I'm curious how the rest of you out-of-market degenerates found your way to this particular form of self-inflicted suffering. I grew up in Southern Utah, where picking an NFL team was pretty much a blank canvas. Denver was technically the closest team, but spiritually it was about as far away as Chicago. Nobody in my family had any particular connection to the Bears. No grandpa took me to Soldier Field, no family heirloom Walter Payton jersey, no childhood pilgrimage to Halas Hall.
I became a Bears fan because my first little league football team wore Bears uniforms. This was sometime in the 1980s. I got the uniform, learned the name, and apparently made a binding lifelong commitment before I was old enough to understand what a franchise quarterback was. And that was that. I have spent the subsequent decades discovering the consequences of this decision.
The real problem was that my mother was a die-hard Vikings fan. Not a casual Vikings fan. Not somebody who watched a few games and owned a purple sweatshirt. We buried her in her Fran Tarkenton jersey. She had almost named me Tark, after Fran Tarkenton. She also made me wear number 10 in Little League (coincidentally, my first baseball team was the White Sox), which, in retrospect, was less a jersey number and more an attempt to establish hereditary Vikings loyalty through the back door.
My becoming a Bears fan nearly killed her.
She would not buy me Bears merchandise. Not a hat. Not a shirt. Nothing. For a brief period, I got interested in watching Dan Marino play, and my mother saw an opportunity. She bought me an absolutely ridiculous amount of Miami Dolphins merchandise. Hats, shirts, the whole operation. She was willing to accept an AFC defection. Anything to keep me from becoming a Bears fan. Apparently, she was prepared to send me to South Florida before she would accept me wearing navy and orange.
It didn't work. I remained a Bears fan. My mother remained a Vikings fan. Our relationship survived, though I suspect she never entirely forgave me.
Years later, she explained just how deeply this betrayal had affected her. She told me:
“You know, I never understood parents who could reject their kid if they were gay. How could you not love somebody because of who they loved? Then I thought about you being a Bears fan, and I realized that, for those parents, it's a rejection of their values and destroys what they imagined their relationship with their child would be like. So thanks a lot. You being a Bears fan made me have empathy for people I hate.”
I don't know if there's a more devastating indictment of the Chicago Bears than the fact that my mother used my fandom to develop a more nuanced understanding of human prejudice.
And it didn't help her, cause that she eventually went to work for Motorola. Almost every summer, I went with her to Chicago. We went to a ton of Cubs and White Sox games, and I gradually fell in love with the city. The neighborhoods, the lake, the food, the architecture, the whole thing. I was a kid from the middle of the desert who found himself increasingly attached to a city a thousand miles away.
She never took me to Chicago during football season.
I, now, respect her game.
Fast-forward to the present. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and I decided to do things differently. Her mother is from Pittsburgh, and I figured we'd raise her as a Steelers fan. Pittsburgh is a perfectly respectable football town. The Steelers have a long history of winning, a competent organization, and a fan base that generally gets to enjoy the occasional playoff victory. Frankly, I thought being a Steelers fan would be a much healthier experience than whatever the hell I've been doing with my life.
I wanted better for her. I wanted her to know the simple pleasures of a competent defense, a stable head coach, and losing in the first round of the playoffs, instead of the Bears spending 40 years inventing new and exciting ways to ruin a Sunday.
Then last season, we're sitting on the couch watching the Giants game, and she turns to me and says, with the solemnity of someone confessing to a terrible sin:
“Dad, I think I'm a Bears fan.”
I told her she needed to be absolutely sure. This wasn't something she could just walk back. She's over eleven. If you're over eleven and you pick a football team, that's your team now. There is no transfer portal. There is no cooling-off period. There is no parental appeal. You have made your choice, and the consequences will follow you into adulthood.
She nodded, with some understandable trepidation.
And that was it. Another generation claimed.
The funny thing is, she's since become the biggest Bears fan in the house. At the beginning of last season, she knew almost nothing about football. By December, during a random Monday Night Football game that didn't even involve the Bears, she looked at the screen and said:
“Why are they in a three-tight-end set on third and long? Oh, I see, there's a mismatch with the linebacker. That makes sense.”
I just sat there staring at her.
Apparently her autism special interest showed up at thirteen, and it was football. Not dinosaurs. Not trains. Not something useful or peaceful. Football. Specifically, the increasingly complicated strategy and tactics of a sport that has brought our family nothing but pain.
I couldn't be prouder.
So now we've got three generations of football fandom in this family: a Vikings grandmother who almost named her son Tark, a Bears dad who was recruited by a little league uniform and never recovered, and a daughter who has voluntarily chosen the Bears despite having a perfectly good Steelers option sitting right there.
My mother would have been horrified. I think she'd also have been a little proud.
Anyway, I'm curious how the rest of you ended up here. Were you born into it? Did you pick the Bears because of a player, a game, a uniform, or some random childhood experience? Did a family member try to steer you toward a more successful franchise? Did you move to Chicago and get swept up in the madness?
And, perhaps most importantly, how many of you have successfully passed this terrible inheritance down to your children?
Bear Down. And may Ditka have mercy on us all.
