The Chicago Bears, one of the two remaining charter franchises of the National Football League, have put together an impressive century – nine NFL championships and a league-high 28 players inducted into the NFL’s Hall of Fame. Within that history have been signature moments spanning every era.
NBC Sports Chicago has identified the 100 greatest Bears moments, the “Hallowed Hundred” which are etched in memories throughout the history of the organization that started it all.
Some of those moments have been individual games with defining overall significance. Some have been specific plays within those games. And some of those moments have occurred away from any one game.
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Pivotal games rate edges over individual performances. Fair or not, games since Thanksgiving Day 1934, the date of the first Bears game broadcast nationally, on NBC radio, and since the NFL crashed into national consciousness in 1958 with “The Greatest Game Ever Played” get a touch more weight simply because the Bears have been seen and heard more with the growth of football on the air. Put simply, games that are seen or heard are going to be arguably more memorable than ones only read about in the newspapers of the time.
10. The Thursday Night comeback at Minnesota (Sept. 19, 1985)
Mike Ditka wasn’t going to play Jim McMahon, who’d been unable to practice all week because of a pinched nerve. McMahon kept in Ditka’s ear, and with the Bears down 17-9 in the third quarter, the head coach inserted McMahon, who threw a 70-yard TD to Willie Gault on his first play, a 25-yard score to Dennis McKinnon on his second, and added a second to McKinnon, all in the span of less than seven minutes. The Bears pulled out a 33-24 win over the Vikings en route to a 15-1 regular season mark.
9. Gale Sayers scores 6 TDs in the mud (Dec, 12, 1965)
NFL
The Kansas Comet, who would score a record 22 TDs as a rookie in ’65, ran around and through the San Francisco 49ers for four rushing TDs covering 113 total yards, one receiving TD and 89 receiving yards, and an 85-yard punt return for a TD. Perhaps the greatest single performance by a running back in league history.
8. Mike Ditka returns to Chicago as Bears coach (Jan. 19, 1982)
Richard Dent once said Ditka was the reason the Bears won a Super Bowl and the reason they didn’t win three. But Papa Bear hired him to restore the Bears to the personality and greatness that had faded since ’63, and Ditka did every bit of that.
7. The Super Bowl Shuffle (Dec. 1985)
This happened off the field, obviously, but the music recording sold millions, followed by the video that remains a signature moment that helped weave history’s single greatest football team even more into the American culture.
6. Walter Payton is born (1954) and drafted (1975)
A paired entry for the greatest Bear of all time, when he came into the world and when he came to Chicago.
5. The Big Change(s): Decatur Staleys -> Chicago Bears
In 1921, A.E. Staley, founder of the Decatur Staleys, handed the franchise over to George Halas, along with $5,000 to keep Decatur Staleys as the team name for the year. Halas moved the team to Chicago, where the Staleys became the Chicago Bears in January 1922.
4. The ’63 Championship (Dec. 29, 1963)
This might have ranked even higher with Bears matriarch Virginia McCaskey if the win had been over the Packers. But intercepting Y.A. Tittle five times and downing a team with five Hall of Fame players was an epic just short of Nos. 2 and 3.
3. 73-0 (Dec. 8, 1940)
A tossup with Super Bowl XX for the most momentous single game. A team with six Hall of Famers established the standard for dominance in a championship game unmatched before or since, and transferred the “Monsters of the Midway” identity nickname permanently from the University of Chicago to the Bears.
2. Super Bowl XX (Jan. 26, 1986)
This gets a slight nod over the ’40 title game for top one-game honors. Of all the Bears championships, none resonated with the nation, indeed, the world, the way the ’85 Bears’ 46-10 conquest of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX did. When the team traveled to London for a 1986 preseason game, one British commentator remarked, “It was like the Beatles coming to America, in reverse.” The team was a hood ornament in so many ways for the “Bonfire of the Vanities” 1980s, and was a cultural phenomenon as well as a football legend.
1. The Hupmobile meeting (Sept. 17, 1920)
This started it all. George Halas, Jim Thorpe and others founded the American Professional Football Association sitting on running boards around a Hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio. The Hupmobile didn’t make it; the AFPA did, in the form of the National Football League.
If you’ve missed any of our previous installments, check them out below:
100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51 50-41 40-31 30-21 20-11
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