I wouldn’t ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know, important – like a league game or something.
Dick Butkus
Last, week, in yet another of our endless tributes to Jim Morrison, we paid homage to dead cats and rats. Now, we turn from the dearly departed feline/murine to the expired ursine (dead Bear), offering what props we are able — to the one and only Dick Butkus.
No, he never scored a Billboard 100 single, nor, to the best of my knowledge, even a major label recording deal.
But let’s not mistake ourselves, Butkus was a rocker.
His presence was ubiquitous in my youth. From sideline to sideline. From the backfield into the deep secondary. On bad teams and worse ones. Like the ’69 squad, which featured him at Middle Linebacker and Gale Sayers (rehabbed from a crippling knee injury but still managing to be the only ball carrier to tally 1,000 yards that season) at tailback.
They went 1-13, defeating only the then-woeful Pittsburgh Steelers, who, in consolation, were able to use their well-earned top pick to draft Terry Bradshaw. Butkus made All-Pro that year, as he did five times in his 11-season career. He never, however, reached the playoffs, and, indeed, played on only one winning team – in his rookie year of 1965, his entire career.
Yet he is the consensus choice for greatest Middle Linebacker of all time.
But to understand his singular essence, a bit more context is required. He was the youngest of eight children – the first to be born in a hospital — on Chicago’s rough and tumble west side. Throughout his youth, he was thus compelled to carry the burden of perhaps the most derision-inducing name a boy could have; phonetically: Dick. Butt. Kiss.
But his peers presumably learned early on not to mess with this or any other element of his persona. He starred at Chicago Vocational High School. Played Center/Middle Linebacker for the University of Illinois. Then there was his time with the Bears, which only ended when he could barely walk.
He left football, but it never left him. I remember him as the Bears’ radio announcer. During games (where he always seemed a little oiled up), whenever there was a fumble, he could be heard screaming “ball, ball, BALL”. And one could clearly envision the entire crew needing to restrain him from leaping out of the press box to recover the thing himself.
And now he’s dead. But I envy him, nonetheless. He’ was what we should all aspire to be. But, like so many essential men that have come and gone, we must now find a way to carry on without him. Presumably, this will be easy for most of you, but for me it is an authentic hardship.
Perhaps it’s fitting that he left us when he did; I can only wonder if he didn’t occasionally feel that the modern world had passed him by. Because we live in an entirely anti-Butkus construct, where kicking ass and taking names has fallen away, where there’s always somebody else to blame for the hardship, and even minor annoyance, we are compelled to endure.
Back in his glory days, they’d tape up a busted knee, apply aspirin to a concussion, and send the guy back in. Butkus wouldn’t have had it any other way. Now, the grazing of one helmet against another is a 15-yard penalty; two such transgressions will get you bounced from a game.
We bail out banks that gorge themselves on dubious enterprise, close down entire education systems and economies for sicknesses that we don’t understand. Then, we quadruple the money supply – the economic equivalent of chugging a gallon off cough medicine — as a means of applying a cure for all our ills:
Investors make a bundle, as do homeowners. Consumers binge. We throw up Hail Marys, and the refs, such as they are, award us with ticky tacky pass interference calls. The reckoning awaits, and, for all I know, may be hard upon us. But there are few signs that it is imminent. Friday’s Jobs number was a blowout (even if the quality of the newly created gigs is a bit on the lean side). Q3 GDP estimates suggest a boffo quarter. But we won’t know for nearly another month. In the meanwhile, we’ve got inflation numbers this week, and they are projected to be benign.
But those inclined to fuss and fret have plenty of fodder. Consider, first of all, those pesky oil markets, surging menacingly until early last week, then putting in a V-top that was reminiscent of Fran Tarkington running for his life to escape the clutches of Number 51:
And all of this BEFORE the weekend mess between Israel and Hamas. It all seems beyond tragic, and nobody knows how long it will last. But this much is certain: it will surely add to the confusion among those seeking to monetize by trading in the Oil Patch.
The House Republican Congress managed to bounce the seemingly reasonable fellow who was running the show, their razor-thin majority notwithstanding. This does not bode well for a range of contingencies, including the striking of a non-transitory budget deal, and, beyond this, the prospects for sober governance emanating from either side of the aisle.
Trial balloons are now afloat to put DJT into the Speaker’s Chair, and, prior to the ’22 election, I would’ve found the prospect at any rate amusing. Now, though, it would be a disaster. He don’t own a seat in the House for one thing, and the specter of a workaround involving another obliteration of legislative protocols to meet short-term political objectives gives me the shivers. Plus, he’s not gonna do this INSTEAD of running for Prez; he’ll do both. And is likely to raise such a ruckus as to render the World’s Second Greatest Deliberative Body unrecognizable.
I don’t know how much of a distraction these matters will be in the otherwise data rich content sequence that is now set to begin. There’s the above-mentioned Inflation reports dropping this week. And, of course, it’s earnings season.
Ah, earnings season. What unmixed joys await us there. I don’t have much of a read in terms of outcomes but suspect that the cycle will leave us as confused at its conclusion as it has at its commencement. Investors, as evidenced by their recent indecorous treatment of the Energy Complex, don’t seem to have a clue either.
Meantime, the Bear is dead. Maybe the greatest Bear of them all. Fittingly, on the day he died, his team broke a 14-game losing streak that extended nearly a full calendar year.
So, perhaps, somewhere up there, in that great scrimmage pileup in the sky, he’s smiling.
The markets have arguably been attempting to enter Bear configuration for months, alas, with minimal success.
The Investment Bear isn’t dead — but has perhaps been engaging in what best can be described as extended hibernation.
It wasn’t the way Butkus rolled; hibernation wasn’t his jam. But there’s only one of him. And now he’s gone.
So, somebody else must fasten the chin strap and face down the O-line. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s me.
Maybe it’s all of us.
So, let’s break the huddle and get after it.
It’s what 51 always did.
And what was good enough for him is sufficient for me.
TIMSHEL