Overview

Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football is the New York Times bestselling gripping account of a once-in-a-lifetime team and their lone Super Bowl season. For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever--a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city. It was not just that the Monsters of the Midway won, but how they did it. On offense, there was high-stepping running back Walter Payton and Punky QB Jim McMahon, who had a knack for pissing off Coach Mike Ditka as he made his way to the end zone. On defense, there was the 46: a revolutionary, quarterback-concussing scheme cooked up by Buddy Ryan and ruthlessly implemented by Hall of Famers such as Dan ""Danimal"" Hampton and ""Samurai"" Mike Singletary. On the sidelines, in the locker rooms, and in bars, there was the never-ending soap opera: the coach and the quarterback bickering on TV, Ditka and Ryan nearly coming to blows in the Orange Bowl, the players recording the ""Super Bowl Shuffle"" video the morning after the season's only loss. Cohen tracked down the coaches and players from this iconic team and asked them everything he has always wanted to know: What's it like to win? What's it like to lose? Do you really hate the guys on the other side? Were you ever scared? What do you think as you lie broken on the field? How do you go on after you have lived your dream but life has not ended? The result is Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, a portrait not merely of a team but of a city and a game: its history, its future, its fallen men, its immortal heroes. But mostly it's about being a fan--about loving too much. This is a book about America at its most nonsensical, delirious, and joyful.

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9781250056047

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Reviews

The best book on professional football I know. --Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal Terrific...One of the book's great joys is its successful efforts to tie the threads of the past through the story. -- Chicago Tribune A solid oral history...[Cohen] lays bare his pride and compassion for the warriors who brought glory to Chi-Town for one unforgettable moment. -- Entertainment Weekly (A-) This book--full of soul and searching, and also knock-you-down funny--is not just a great sports book, not just a great Chicago book, but a great book, period. --Dave Eggers

Praise for Monsters Every year brings a Super Bowl, World Series, NBA, and Stanley Cup champion. All are duly noted and celebrated. But a memorable few have greater and more lasting resonance, a standing that excellence alone cannot explain. The 1985 Chicago Bears were such a team, a melange of talents and outsize personalities that captivated and embodied a city. Rich Cohen experienced it as an obsessed seventeen-year-old. Almost three decades on, he remains obsessed--entertainingly and insightfully so, but obsessed nonetheless. His combination of reporting and remembrance is by turns evocative, revealing, quirky, and funny as hell--or at least as funny as Gary Fencik doing the Super Bowl Shuffle. --Bob Costas For anyone from Chicago, or anyone with any sense, the '85 Bears are the best team there ever was, and Rich Cohen has written the book we've always wanted. It's got all the people you want to hear from: Ditka, McMahon, Singletary, Wilson, Fencik, and, thank God, the incomparable and too-often-forgotten Doug Plank. This book--full of soul and searching, and also knock-you-down funny--is not just a great sports book, not just a great Chicago book, but a great book, period. --Dave Eggers, who grew up two miles from the Bears practice facility Rich Cohen's Monsters is the best book on professional football I know--the best because the most truthful. --Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal A riveting account of one of football's most iconic teams, the 1985 Chicago Bears, features frank interviews with the players and coaches. -- People Magazine As much as it is about the '85 Bears, Monsters is an emotional education of football and 'the Stone Age pleasure of watching large men battle to the point of exhaustion.' At one point, Cohen attributes Halas for the development of football's emphasis on the passing game: 'It was Halas, as much as anyone, who invented the modern NFL offense and lifted the game from the ground into the air.'

Author Information

Rich Cohen is the New York Times-bestselling author of Tough Jews, Monsters, Sweet and Low, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, The Chicago Cubs, and The Last Pirate of New York, and, with Jerry Weintraub, When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead. He is the cocreator of the HBO series Vinyl, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a writer at large for Air Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's Magazine, among other publications. Cohen has won the Great Lakes Book Award, the Chicago Public Library's 21st Century Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He lives in Connecticut.

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