RIP Dick Butkus
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From WSJ. Wish I could just upload the pdf of the article I printed. Some snippets.
Dick Butkus Was a Creature of Old, Tough Chicago
The Hall of Fame Bears linebacker left the city for Hollywood, but the city never left him.
If Dick Butkus hadn’t been born in Chicago, someone would have had to make him up. Actually, someone kind of did: Carl Sandburg, in his definitive poem about the city written 28 years before Butkus’s birth, presciently summed him up: “stormy, husky, brawling,” “fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,” “so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning,” “under the smoke, dust all over his mouth,” “under his ribs the heart of the people.”
It wasn’t so much that Butkus, who died at age 80 on Thursday, was Chicago. It was that he was what Chicago wanted to be—or, more precisely, how Chicago wanted to be seen. The city was already changing from Sandburg’s description of it as the hog butcher for the world when Butkus first put on a Bears uniform in 1965. The old Union Stock Yards would be closed for good within a decade.
Yet as smokestack Chicago modernized, Butkus, as if to remind it of what it had been, played middle linebacker with such ferocity that his name became synonymous with coiled fearsomeness. It was no coincidence that when Sylvester Stallone wrote “Rocky,” the fighter’s bull mastiff was named after the Bears’ relentless star. Butkus came to represent a throwback to when the town first gained its reputation for take-no-prisoners toughness. It’s a good thing Al Capone was already dead by the time Butkus, out of Chicago Vocational High School and the University of Illinois, joined the Bears, because even Scarface would have been intimidated by the glowering sight of No. 51.
The funny thing is that off the football field Butkus was a very nice man: whimsically sardonic, self-aware, quite at peace with the idea that others looked at him and in their secret hearts saw what, if caught in a tight spot, they wished they could be. In public he wasn’t boisterous or bellicose—who did he need to impress with hard-guy posturing? He was Dick Butkus. He didn’t go out of his way to promote his more amiable side. To do so would be bad for business.
His business was being Butkus, and that didn’t change when he moved to California and became an actor. That second career worked out just fine, because while acting involves pretending, Butkus’s essential quality was that he never displayed an iota of pretentiousness. People, even those who had never met him, somehow felt that in their bones.
He left Chicago but the city never left him. What was it that Nelson Algren wrote about the town? “Once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Butkus lives.
Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”
Dick Butkus Was a Creature of Old, Tough Chicago
The Hall of Fame Bears linebacker left the city for Hollywood, but the city never left him.
If Dick Butkus hadn’t been born in Chicago, someone would have had to make him up. Actually, someone kind of did: Carl Sandburg, in his definitive poem about the city written 28 years before Butkus’s birth, presciently summed him up: “stormy, husky, brawling,” “fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,” “so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning,” “under the smoke, dust all over his mouth,” “under his ribs the heart of the people.”
It wasn’t so much that Butkus, who died at age 80 on Thursday, was Chicago. It was that he was what Chicago wanted to be—or, more precisely, how Chicago wanted to be seen. The city was already changing from Sandburg’s description of it as the hog butcher for the world when Butkus first put on a Bears uniform in 1965. The old Union Stock Yards would be closed for good within a decade.
Yet as smokestack Chicago modernized, Butkus, as if to remind it of what it had been, played middle linebacker with such ferocity that his name became synonymous with coiled fearsomeness. It was no coincidence that when Sylvester Stallone wrote “Rocky,” the fighter’s bull mastiff was named after the Bears’ relentless star. Butkus came to represent a throwback to when the town first gained its reputation for take-no-prisoners toughness. It’s a good thing Al Capone was already dead by the time Butkus, out of Chicago Vocational High School and the University of Illinois, joined the Bears, because even Scarface would have been intimidated by the glowering sight of No. 51.
The funny thing is that off the football field Butkus was a very nice man: whimsically sardonic, self-aware, quite at peace with the idea that others looked at him and in their secret hearts saw what, if caught in a tight spot, they wished they could be. In public he wasn’t boisterous or bellicose—who did he need to impress with hard-guy posturing? He was Dick Butkus. He didn’t go out of his way to promote his more amiable side. To do so would be bad for business.
His business was being Butkus, and that didn’t change when he moved to California and became an actor. That second career worked out just fine, because while acting involves pretending, Butkus’s essential quality was that he never displayed an iota of pretentiousness. People, even those who had never met him, somehow felt that in their bones.
He left Chicago but the city never left him. What was it that Nelson Algren wrote about the town? “Once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Butkus lives.
Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”
