Glory can be costly
Some of the '85 Bears look fit enough to suit up again. Others are hurting and battling for disability benefits.

By Melissa Isaacson
Tribune staff reporter

January 27, 2007, 9:25 PM CST


The snow had just begun to flutter over Soldier Field when Wilber Marshall scooped up a fumble—forced by Richard Dent's sack—and galloped toward the end zone for the exclamation mark on a 24-0 Bears triumph over the Los Angeles Rams in the 1985 NFC championship game.

It is a scene frozen in the minds and hearts of many Bears fans, a picture of a gifted team in its prime, the portrait of an exceptionally conditioned athlete in all his glory.



Marshall, then a 23-year-old, 6-foot-1-inch, 228-pound linebacker, may not have been the most valuable Bears player that Super Bowl season, but he was a striking physical specimen of unquestioned ability. To say time has been unkind to that body is telling only part of the story, but it is the logical start.

Ask Marshall how old he feels today and the 44-year-old does not hesitate.

"A hundred," he says.

Retired in 1995 after playing on two Super Bowl winners and playing 12 NFL seasons with the Bears, Washington Redskins, Houston Oilers, Arizona Cardinals and New York Jets, Marshall lives in Virginia, on permanent disability from the NFL.

He has had both knees and a shoulder replaced, has a degenerative disc in his neck, nerve impairments in both arms and chronic pain from ankles broken four times. He will need knee-replacement surgery again someday as well as surgery on both hips and shoulders. And that's just for starters.

"Besides that," Marshall says quietly, "is the stress that goes along with it because there's nothing you can do and the NFL doesn't take care of its players."

Marshall is like many of his contemporaries waging battles with the NFL and the players union over disability benefits. He was a highly paid player of his generation, leaving the Bears after the '87 season for a five-year, $6 million offer to play for Washington. (The Bears declined to match it but received the Redskins' first-round draft picks in 1988 and '89 as compensation.) Now Marshall says the biggest luxury money affords him is the ability to pay for legal expenses.

Marshall, an intensely private man who declined to be photographed for this story, is very careful about what he puts in his body, he says. The pain is "bad" but would be worse if not for "a medicine case any druggie would love." He walks with a limp and weighs 270 pounds, in large part, he says, because his injuries make it hard to work out.

"If I even tried, they'd say you're trying to do this exercise, so you're not disabled," he says.

He did not attend the 20th reunion of the Bears' Super Bowl season two years ago, he says, because of a financial dispute with the team, since settled. If he had been in the team picture that day, he would have been standing among a group of middle-aged men who, generally speaking, look as healthy and robust as Bears fans would like to remember them.

"I think I can still give you one good rush," Hall of Fame finalist Dent says today.

Some in great shape

Quarterback Jim McMahon, who has been studying martial arts for the last several years, walks the golf course with ease and has said he is in the best shape of his life at 47. Offensive linemen like Tom Thayer and Jay Hilgenberg have slimmed down dramatically from their playing weights, looking more like pro volleyball players than ex-linemen.

Walter Payton died of liver disease at 45 in '99 and Todd Bell of a heart attack at age 43 in '05. But Payton's close friend and fellow running back Matt Suhey says Payton was still physically fit and only "a couple of pounds" overweight before he became ill. Bell, a former safety who missed the Super Bowl season over a contract holdout, looked like he still could deliver a blow across the middle before his sudden death.

Suhey shrugs off "a few aches and pains" and says he only needs to work out a little more. Otis Wilson and Gary Fencik still look as if they just stepped out of GQ. So does Shaun Gayle, as does Dan Hampton if he's standing still. Often, looks deceive.

Hampton, as fiercely proud as he was inordinately tough, admits he was initially hesitant to be interviewed.

"I didn't want us painted as a bunch of guys in wheelchairs," he says.

Simply put, he knew the risks, he says.


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Copyright © 2007, The Chicago Tribune

Well Duh?!

You spend every weekend getting the shit knocked out of you, how do you think you're going to feel?

The body can only take so much. Football players are not invincible