1985 Bears Coverage: Singletary sticks to his guns

Every day of the 2015 Chicago Bears season, Chicago Sun-Times Sports will revisit its coverage 30 years ago during the 1985 Bears’ run to a Super Bowl title.

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Singletary sticks to his guns

Kevin Lamb

Originally published Aug. 14, 1985

PLATTEVILLE, Wis. – The talk is brave. Hardly a day goes by that coach Mike Ditka doesn’t say the Bears can get along fine without Mike Singletary and the other defensive holdouts, Todd Bell and Al Harris.

“The last time I talked to Bear management, there was doubt that I’d be in a Bear uniform this year,” Singletary said yesterday.

Still, he expects to wear one in Soldier Field when the season opens Sept. 8. No particular reason. He’s just an optimistic kind of guy, he said.

He’s not having second thoughts about his holdout. Singletary can stick his jaw out as far as the Bear bosses. He can get along fine without the Bears, he said, even though that means doing without

football unless the Bears are willing to trade him.

“I would hope at this point they are taking me seriously,” Singletary said. “I guess one of the big issues is their knowing how Mike Singletary wants to be on the field, wants to further his football

career, wants to achieve his goals. They’re asking, `Would he risk giving all that up?’ ”

Well, would he?

“Yes,” said Singletary.

Like a student

He watched the Bears’ exhibition opener Friday night without feeling a desperate urge to meet the team bus back to training camp. He said he had a good time, “watching it like a student, seeing this

mistake being made, saying that shouldn’t have happened, this is what I would have done.”

After the 10-3 loss at St. Louis, it’s worth considering the Bears’ defensive goals. They led the league in most categories last year. Would the Bears risk giving all that up?

Ron Rivera and Cliff Thrift filled in for Singletary. Brian Cabral is ahead of them at middle linebacker but had a shoulder injury. Behind them, Dave Duerson took Bell’s place at strong safety.

Duerson and Rivera had some confusion determining which was the strong side of the offense, Ditka said. “One was calling left and the other was calling right,” he said. “It’s pretty hard for the strong safety to play both sides.”

Ditka also said they weren’t noticing when the Cardinals used two tight ends, “which was hard to understand because they did it almost every time on second down.” He criticized the fill-ins’ response to counter plays.

He praised their enthusiasm. “They made some good plays,” he said.

Ditka seems to be protesting too much when he vouches for Singletary’s and Bell’s stand-ins with the grim determination of someone who keeps repeating it is fun to spend a night at the opera. More likely, though, he is taking precautions to see that other players don’t use anyone’s absence as an excuse.

“He tells us almost daily we’re good enough to win without them,” one Bear player says. “He says he hopes we have them, but if we don’t, we can still win.”

Not indispensable

Singletary has spent enough time in pads and huddles to realize no football player is entirely indispensable. “They’re still going to be successful,” he says.

“But I don’t care who they put in there. It will still be the position Mike Singletary plays. And nobody will play it the way I do.”

He won’t play it just because the days are getting shorter or the leaves are changing colors. This holdout wasn’t something Singletary thought about when he had a few minutes to kill in a checkout line. “A lot of prayer went into it, a lot of conversations between my wife and

me,” he said.

From Singletary’s viewpoint, he isn’t reneging on a contract that has five years to run. It’s the Bears who are reneging on a promise to improve that contract if it didn’t keep pace with the going rate for top NFL linebackers – a promise general manager Jerry Vainisi insists was never made.

To the Bears, Singletary is just another of many NFL players who isn’t honoring his contract. That’s why Singletary’s situation is so much thornier than those of Bell and Harris, whose contracts have

expired. With Bell and Harris, the Bears can negotiate dollars and cents.

“I think I can put myself in his shoes well enough to understand why this is of major importance to Mike,” Bears president Michael McCaskey said. “That doesn’t mean I agree with him.”

McCaskey’s principles won’t allow him to flat-out renegotiate Singletary’s contract, so the challenge is to find a way to improve it without actually renegotiating. He said he would “keep exploring things until we have to close the door and get on with it.”

Singletary, too, has tried to think of a compromise. “There isn’t a whole lot left I can do,” he said.