So it has come to this: The Bears play in prime time on Sunday, and I’m sorry to be missing even the increasingly cartoonish X-Files. In fact, I’m sorry that the Fox network isn’t playing one of its world’s-most-gruesome-police-chases specials, because it would truly be a dilemma whether to watch that or the Bears, whose season has been one long accident, a train derailing on a bridge and slithering into the water.
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Wannstedt wouldn’t know how to spot talent at a Las Vegas hookers convention, and he lacks the strategic sense and teaching ability to mask the shortage of talent–even if he does affect professorial spectacles now and then on the sidelines. The Bears are worse than ever under his tenure, and the reasons are obvious. They’re now finding out that Steve Stenstrom can’t play quarterback because Wannstedt didn’t try to find out what he could do a year ago, once that season was a washout. He has stuck with fragile old players like Erik Kramer because he hasn’t been able to develop new ones. The players know he has no sense of talent, and so they lack the confidence to make the plays Wannstedt says they need to make to win. The Bears right now are a team no player wants to belong to, because what does it say about one’s ability that only Wannstedt and his staff can appreciate it? There are some players on this team, but they’re hard to see in all the muck. Harris is the proverbial boy with a finger in the dike at cornerback. I’ve always liked linebacker Barry Minter, but in the middle of the Bears’ defense he looks like a cowboy trying to stop a stampede after getting knocked off his horse. It looks as if defensive tackle Jim Flanigan can play, but it’s hard to say how good he is when there’s no one around him to help out; in any case, he’s no Steve McMichael. Top draft pick Curtis Enis is a load at running back, but went down with a knee injury it’ll be tough to make a full recovery from, and tight end Alonzo Mayes is a load too, but the Bears’ quarterbacks can’t get the ball to him. Even Curtis Conway, the Bears’ burner wide receiver, has fallen into a funk this year, and in fact played a large part in making the team’s awful performance worse. After the Bears recovered from losing their first four games to win three of the next four before a week off, they returned to play a miserable game against the Saint Louis Rams in which Conway not only let a touchdown pass go through his arms but also threw an incomplete pass to a wide-open Bobby Engram on an end-around option play that would have gone for a score. The Bears haven’t come close to winning since.
When it suits their purposes, sports owners are fond of saying that sports is an entertainment business, as if this guarantees them the right to a profit. They’re right that sports is entertainment, but I don’t remember anyone from Adam Smith on down saying that TV networks or movie studios or record companies or even symphony orchestras or ballet companies–much less sports teams–are entitled to exist simply because they provide entertainment. The history of entertainment is rife with failed ventures, some of which gave the audience, for some brief time, exactly what it wanted. Actually, the present state of entertainment argues forcibly against sports team owners who insist that costs (usually labor costs) have to be contained for them to survive. In movies, music, and publishing, a big profit almost always requires a big investment, whether it be the $200 million spent on Titanic or the huge contracts extended to groups like the Rolling Stones and R.E.M. or the stupefying advances given big-name no-talents ranging from Marcia Clark and Chris Darden to Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky (no doubt in days to come). It’s no different in baseball and basketball than it is in books: Now more than ever, you’ve got to spend money to make money.
