The Dancing Bears

That first morning at training camp was worse than Parris Island. We got no water, no salt pills, no breaks. Red Emerson stood up in the tower and yelled at us through the bullhorn like we was slaves building pyramids: "You fat bastards, nobody's in shape. I want another mile in full gear right now"--stuff like that.

You think I wasn't tired? I'd had a pony keg of beer the night before, for one thing, and I'd spent off season lying around the farm putting funny things up my nose and into my lungs. That, plus an extra 50 pounds I didn't need, made wind sprints feel like marathons, I'm here to tell you. Besides, I'd had a big fight with DeeAnn just before I drove up from Paris, Illinois, to Lakeshore College. She was on my case, and I didn't care for it. "I'm only dating you, lady," I told her. "You think just because you're a nurse you know everything. But what I do to my body is my business. I'll play myself into shape, like I always have, thank you very much."

DeeAnn just sat there and listened to my lungs wheeze. "You always do have to defeat yourself, don't you, Dewey?" she said to me. "If the rest of the Bears are treating themselves the way you are, you boys will never make the Super Bowl."

"We'll make it," I said. "Red Emerson's a hell of a coach. He'll get us there, mark my words." Well, we almost got there, but not with Red Emerson. That shows how much I knew.

" 'Bye, (continued on page 104)Dancing Bears(continued from page 98) Dewey," DeeAnn said. She patted me on my beer belly and put on her white nurse's cap and walked out the door. "Good luck."

" 'Bye," I waved at her after she'd gone.

Was I sad about us breaking up? Not really. In those days, I thought any woman who didn't want me showed extremely poor judgment. I was the great Dewey Pinnell. The fans called me Gluey Dewey. I loved to hang all over quarterbacks after I sacked them. Yours truly, God's gift to women and the N.F.L., starting left line-backer for the Chicago Bears, number 53 in your program, cocaptain of the defense, 6'2" tall and 230 pounds by midseason, two Pro Bowl nominations, able to bench press almost twice my weight and to crank off a 4.7 40 when I had to, 11 years in the game before I hung up my jock and came back here to farm. "Me?" I laughed to myself as I heard DeeAnn drive down the road that night. "Why should I worry about a skinny little E.R. nurse from Paris when I got beauty queens and Bunnies and Honey Bears running after me in the Windy City? I've played myself into shape every year since fourth grade, damn it."

But that first morning of practice almost killed me. There were guys passing out, throwing up, quitting. We all knew Red's job was on the line, of course. The Bears started every year with good hype and a lot of hope, but the Super Bowl always seemed beyond us, and Mr. Beau-pray wanted a Super Bowl ring the way a junkie wants dope. So Red was out to get to the Super Bowl or have us die trying, and it was Merciless City that first morning, as I said.

I ate what I could at lunch, but two-a-days always did spook me, and what I wanted most was to sleep. It's funny that to this day, I remember the dream I had that noon: I was back in Paris, and DeeAnn was straddled over me with her hair down in my face, twisting like an eel and moaning my name.

That's what I was dreaming when Marshall Chambers sneaked up behind me and poured a pitcher of ice water onto my crotch. Lord, that hurt. One second I was bucking like a bronco under Dee-Ann's thin hips, and the next second I had a refrigerated groin. I chased Marshall out the door on that one, I can tell you.

Marshall and me was real tight. He was a fine quarterback who could throw the football 70 yards on a line off his hind leg; and when he was hot, he could pick a defense apart the way a kid scatters an anthill. We'd been with the Bears through thick and thin, Marshall and me.

I tackled him in the hall and sat on him like he was a whoopee cushion until he begged for mercy. Then I picked him up and dusted him off and poured him a glass of Gatorade. "You broke up my dream, Marshall," I said.

"Dewey, how can you sleep when your future's at stake?" he asked. "Don't you know what just happened? Red Emerson got fired this noon."

"They fired him on the first day of training camp?" I asked. "What's the sense in that? Give the guy a chance."

"I don't know," Marshall said. "Mr. Beaupray called down and told him he was out. Him and his staff. Said he'd had five years to prove himself and now it was goodbye."

"Who's the new coach?"

"I don't know," Marshall said. "Mr. Beaupray said he'd found somebody new, somebody perfect for the job."

"I'm going to miss Red," I said. "He was mean, but you knew where you stood with him." I meant it, too.

"The word is we practice as usual this afternoon," Marshall said. "Sweats only. Calisthenics. No contact."

"I don't mind," I said. "I can take an easy afternoon when I get one."

"New coach comes in tomorrow," Marshall said.

"Wonderful, wonderful," I laughed. "I can hardly wait."

Lakeshore College made a good place for a training camp. It was right by Lake Michigan, and on a clear day, you could see Chicago to the south. I liked to pause at the top of the steps before I went down to the practice field and look at the lake, the clouds, the sky. I'd think about how big the world is and how small we are, even us guys that are supposed to be such tanks, and it put things in perspective. Football don't mean much to a cloud. You can bring in all the PR people in the world and hype it like Gang Busters, but the fact is that football is about as important to the universe as a grain of sand.

I liked to think about things like that before I went down to get my brains scrambled. It set things right, somehow.

I confess I wasn't ready for what I saw that afternoon, though. As I looked down at the field from the top of the steps, I thought maybe I was in the wrong place. It was maximum weird. It was like somebody was getting ready for a rock concert. There was loud-speakers up and down the side lines. And you should've seen the middle of the field. There was a whole bunch of banisters running smack down the middle of the turf from goal line to goal line right between the hash marks.

"What the fuck, over," Marshall said.

"What is this shit?" I asked.

We got down to the field and the whole team stood there, blinking in the hot sun, scuffling their cleats and making those sounds guys make when they have no idea what's going on.

"Break out the footballs, Sam," Marshall yelled to the equipment manager. "Let's get something started."

"No footballs, Marshall," Sam squeaked.

"The hell you say," Marshall said. He went over and dumped open a gunny sack of balls and picked one up.

"No footballs, Marshall!" Sam yelled in that high voice.

Marshall was about to throw me a pass when there was a whistle.

It was the meanest between-your-teeth-tuck-your-fingers-in-your-mouth whistle I'd ever heard in my life. Marshall's arm froze and I stopped jogging, and I'm here to tell you that none of us was ready for what we saw.

She was tall. She wasn't young and she wasn't old. She had on a blue jump suit, and there was a red ribbon that wrapped her head tight. Her hair looked like a shining helmet. I thought she was kind of pretty, but she also looked tough.

"No footballs, Mr. Chambers," she said.

"Say what, baby?" Marshall asked.

"We're not going to use footballs this afternoon, Mr. Chambers," she said.

"Is that a fact?" Marshall asked. He was doing his Rush Street walk. He was strutting like a rooster, flipping the ball from hand to hand. "Says who?"

"Says me," she smiled. Well, it was kind of a smile.

"And who are you, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Mr. Beaupray hired me to get you in shape, sir."

"Hey, I'm in shape, baby," Marshall grinned. "I'm in shape for whatever you want to do."

"Would you put the football down, please? We have a lot of work to do this afternoon."

Marshall was standing right next to her. He had his face in her face. I'd seen him do this routine a hundred times. "We sure do have work to do, hon. Where would you like to do it?" Usually, when he came out with that line, they either melted or walked away. This time, it was a little different.

It happened so fast we didn't really see it, but suddenly, the football was up in the air. The lady had kicked it right out of Marshall's hands. And to make it worse, (continued on page 152)Dancing Bears(continued from page 104) he tried to grab her, but she flipped him over her shoulder, like a sack of grain, and he came down flat on his back.

It was as quiet as church for a second. Marshall moaned on the deck. We was waiting for the TV replay, I guess, because we didn't believe what we'd seen. Then I laughed, and everybody but Marshall laughed. Finally, he laughed. The lady didn't laugh. Marshall got up real slow, like an old man getting out of bed.

"Good shot," he said. "Where'd you learn that one?"

"Line up at the dance barre, please, gentlemen." She pointed at the banister on the field. "You will use that to steady yourselves as we go through the basic positions. Move it, gentlemen; we don't have all day. Sam? Music, please."

"Would you tell me what the fuck is going on?" Tubby whispered to me.

"She knows judo, man," Marshall chuckled.

"Get me a coach. Just get me a coach," Buster whined.

We heard some music. Soft, summer music. There was a lot of violins and things, which made us nervous. If it had been country or rock or punk, that would've been OK, but this was fruit music.

"Swan Lake," Geoff Ringer said.

"First position, gentlemen," the lady called.

We stared at her. "What she say?" Buster asked.

"First position, gentlemen. Heels together, feet turned out to make a single straight line. Like this." She stood like she wanted us to.

"I've had two knee operations," I said. "I'm not getting into that." Everybody started grumbling.

The music stopped. The lady walked up and down in front of us.

"Gentlemen, I have been hired by Mr. Beaupray to condition your bodies and your minds for movement. Notice I did not say football. I said movement. Since football involves movement, I am sure you understand that by conditioning yourselves for dance, you will also condition yourselves for football." She stooped down and plucked a blade of grass and chewed on it while she talked.

"Gentlemen, we are here to build the foundation for the Chicago Bears football team. It takes years for a dancer to turn his body into an instrument that can express true grace. Years. We have only a few months. But in that time, I will do my best to mold your bodies into some sort of shape." She stopped for a minute. "I promise you this: If you will work with me, if you will do what I say, if you will follow my conditioning rules--and that includes rules for off the field as well as on--I will help you grow from a pedestrian and unimaginative football team into a troupe that is a reflection of the finest things on this earth."

"Say, lady, when do we get our real coach?" Marshall asked.

"Mr. Chambers, you will get your real coach when Mr. Beaupray decides, I suppose."

"OK," Marshall laughed.

"I will now show you the five fundamental positions as taught to all ballet students, gentlemen. We will do some warm-ups, some stretches, and then a little improvisation. First position, comme ça, do it along with me, please, gentlemen, and hold on to the barre if you must."

What can I tell you about that afternoon? She had us turning out our legs, stretching our hamstrings, pointing our toes, twinkling our feet. I hated fourth position effacé and I thought my knees would pop in fifth position. The entrechat, the tour en l'air, the rond de jambe--we did them all, and damned if she didn't talk us into some simple pas de deux. If you had come over the ridge and seen that football field while we was practicing, you'd've thought you was at a fat farm for idiots. There was guys lifting each other and prancing around and doing toe-work, and after a while we sort of got into it.

Marshall Chambers was probably the best dancer we had. He took to it like a duck to water. He did a great changement de pieds.

She had us do a final drill to close up the day. "Gentlemen," she said, "I want the entire team, one at a time, to move down the field single file. The music will be Tchaikovsky. I want to see you stretch yourselves, express yourselves, improvise. Just move as the music moves you. We'll start with you, Mr. Drombowski, and then the rest can follow. An interval of ten yards, please."

Well, it was a sight, all right. I still laugh when I think of it. There we was, supposedly tough as nails, the meanest and the greatest, the guys who everybody had made a fuss over since we was big enough to play pony ball, the studs who the cheerleaders loved to hug, the speed takers and beer drinkers and coke snorters, and what we looked like as we tried to dance to that music was something else. Lord, we was awkward.

We stumbled and jumped and tripped and fell and faked it, but the guys thought they was dancing up a storm. Junior Kirk started leaping all over the place like a castrated ape, bouncing into the dance barre and us and the lady, stinking up the field with his clumsiness, but believe it or not, she didn't care. She encouraged him. She ran right alongside him. "That's right, let yourself go, touch the sky, reach for it, use your body, feel it, every muscle, listen to your rhythms, let your body talk for once, don't worry, don't worry, you look fine!" Junior collapsed after about 60 yards of that shit, but he looked happy.

When the lady called us over to the bench for a final talk, she gave us a look that was laser:

"You may fancy that you are in good physical condition. Let me assure you that you are not. You may assume you understand movement. You know little of it. Flexibility? As we saw from the exercises I asked you to do, most of you could not touch the hem of Flexibility's garment. Endurance, timing, strength, perception, coordination? You show me few of those qualities. As of today, that changes. Life is a dance. Let us learn to dance." She paused. "Any questions?"

We was too tired to ask anything. We dragged ourselves off to the showers and dinner. Later that night, there was a lot of talk about the afternoon, but there was more talk about who the new coach would be. We had a betting pool on it.

•

"At ease, men, at ease," Mr. Beaupray smiled the next morning. He wore his usual suit and vest even in the hot weather. He was a tall man who looked like he combed his hair with money. He had steel-rimmed glasses and slicked-down hair and blue eyes and gray-blond eyebrows.

"Coldest fish in the ocean," Marshall whispered to me.

"And the richest," I whispered back.

"Men, I'm a man of few words, and as you know, I leave the coaching to the coaches. I'm proud to introduce your new coach this morning. Open the door, Sam," Mr. Beaupray said. Sam opened the door. In she walked, all gussied up in a suit, carrying a briefcase. Her nibs. The judo lady. The ballet bouncer. "Gentlemen, the new head coach of the Chicago Bears--Maria Dancing Bear."

I didn't know what to do. Neither did the rest of the team. Mr. Beaupray was clapping, and Sam was sort of clapping with him, but we was paralyzed. It was embarrassing. Mr. Beaupray made it worse by raising his hands before he spoke, as if there was something to silence.

"Coach Dancing Bear, it's an honor to welcome you aboard the Chicago Bears football team. I've watched you perform, read your fine book about dance, I've even worked out at your health spa in Arizona, and I am here to tell these men that you've changed my life, changed my perception of what constitutes exercise, diet, sportsmanship--even manhood. It is fitting that you already are our namesake. A Dancing Bear to coach the Chicago Bears." Mr. Beaupray applauded again, and we did, too, in sort of a half-assed way.

"Thank you," Maria Dancing Bear said. "Gentlemen, I'll see you on the practice field in half an hour. No pads. Any questions?"

Marshall jumped up, even though I was trying to hold him down. "Yeah, I got a question. What I want to know is, uh, what kind of offense will you put in?"

"It'll be primarily the same, Mr. Chambers, but you won't be allowed to scramble until you equalize your body," she said.

"Say what?"

"It became clear to me yesterday afternoon that you are overdeveloped on your right side and quite weak on your left. Therefore, as the films show, you're scrambling to your right ninety-three percent of the time, which gives the defense too much of an advantage. I expect you to work from the pocket until we get your body in shape, sir."

"Uh-huh," Marshall said, like he was shell-shocked.

"We're going to run the receivers a little deeper, split the zone, wear the defense out. We're going to move better than the other team and be in better shape than the other team."

"Uh-huh."

"You have a fine throwing arm, Mr. Chambers, but you're quite constricted in your neck and shoulders, and it takes you too long to see all your receivers. You're turning your entire body just to look from left to right. We'll be doing some exercises to improve that condition. Your stride has lost a foot in the past two years, if my measurements from the films are correct. You need a lot of stretching at the dance barre before you'll be allowed to do any more contact work. I don't think you throw to your tight ends enough; but then I don't think your tight ends are limber enough to get open when they should. It's not the choice of formation that matters, if you follow me. It's the grace with which that formation is executed."

"Uh-huh."

Marshall sat down very slowly, like he had just seen his own funeral.

"Any other questions?" Mr. Beaupray laughed. "No? Again, welcome aboard, Coach Dancing Bear." He shook her hand and left the locker room. Sam followed. Then Coach Dancing Bear.

"Coach Dancing Bear?" Marshall whooped when the doors closed.

"I can't do it!" Buster Slade yelled.

"A woman?" Tubby Reardon hit his locker. "A goddamn woman! I never let a woman tell me a goddamn thing all my life."

"How's she going to know the first thing?" Buster asked.

"Come on, boys," Marshall said, "we could do worse. Let's go out there and point our pretty little toes."

Tubby and Buster stayed inside for the morning. I guess it was a protest on their part, but Coach Dancing Bear didn't even ask about them. She just got down to the nitty-gritty.

I'll tell you something: I'd trade 16 of Red Emerson's practices to one of Coach Dancing Bear's. That's the truth. Red could make us sweat and bleed, but Maria Dancing Bear damned near made us die. I never knew how maximum hard it is to dance right. But by the end of the summer, I was in better shape than I ever was before. I could just feel it. I was slimmer but stronger, and I'd adjusted to Coach Dancing Bear's new diet: corn on corn on corn, grains and fruits and nuts and herb teas and whole-wheat bread and nibbles but no gorging. "Losing weight is like losing poison for a healthy person," Coach Dancing Bear preached at us.

•

Pre-season went OK. We was rusty. She was just getting the hang of it. We got a lot of delay-of-game penalties and shit like that. We warmed up to Swan Lake before the games, and that got a lot of laughs, but we didn't care. We got to dance with the Honey Bears in the warm-ups. Most of them had taken a lot of ballet. They was good dancers, and they helped us. It's a hell of a lot more fun to warm up with a beautiful woman than to have some asshole teammate breathing snuff on you and hitting your shoulder pads.

When the season started for real, we was running the same plays as usual, nothing fancy, but we was running them better. I was hitting crisper, cleaner, faster. The defense could move like smoke in the wind. And the offense was like a perpetual-motion machine. They scored and scored. Marshall was throwing long and short, in and out, bullets and balloons.

We could run most of the other teams into the ground. We didn't have many injuries and we didn't need time outs to catch our breath. So what if the fans thought we looked like fruitcakes when we warmed up? So what if they wanted the Honey Bears out of their leotards and back in their skimpy suits? And who gave a damn that a long, tall American Indian princess was coaching us? We got the job done, didn't we?

We won our first five games. The fans in Soldier Field started to cheer us more than they booed us. That was a first. The city of Chicago began to take us for real. But we knew the acid test was just ahead. We had to beat the Dallas Cowboys to prove ourselves, and we hadn't done that for a very long time.

Now, I work on the belief that Dallas does not have football players on its team. It has replicants dressed up like football players. They run on microchips. They eat silicon for breakfast. They get produced in a secret factory near the King Ranch and they get shipped into Dallas by truck. There's a big warehouse somewhere in that city with trunkfuls of replicants waiting to get wound up and sent out to play football for the Cowboys. Just thinking about playing Dallas put me in the middle of a dark place, I can tell you. I was even thinking about eating a lot of junk food and tanking up on beer and going back to free weights and bulk. I looked at the Dallas films and I wanted to tell Coach Dancing Bear that we was going to get waltzed right out of the stadium if we didn't go back to our old ways in a hurry.

When I get depressed, I tend not to notice things, and I guess I was thinking too much about the Dallas game. That's why I didn't see the headphones in my helmet when I put it on for Monday's practice. Then Sam came up to me. "Dewey," he said, "you want to hook up, please?"

"Say what, Sam?"

"Hook up, Dewey." He handed me a cable running from the back of my pants. He fed it up under my shoulder pads and connected it to the back of my helmet.

Lord, it was gorgeous. The music poured over me. I just stood there for a minute. Sam was grinning at me. Then I took my helmet off. Sure enough, there was a set of headphones inside. And the cable led down to a cassette player that had been built into my hip pads. Sam showed me how to turn it on and off by flipping the switch.

"Goddamn, Sam," I said, "this is far out. Are all the Bears wearing these here things today?"

"You bet, Dewey."

Well, that was the week that was, if you know what I mean. Coach Dancing Bear had gone and put headphones into our helmets and cassette players into our pants, and we got choreographed more than we got coached, let me tell you. We learned to synchronize the tapes, to run plays to music, to trap and block and tackle and run and catch to Bizet and Bach and Mozart and all them fellows. It was like we had cranked the game up to another level. We ran sweeps to Strauss, off-tackle plunges to Prokofiev, pass plays to Brahms. Kickoffs were by Bartók, because Milos Nagy, our Hungarian kicker, liked him best, but I'm here to tell you that Bartók is not easy to play to. I was on the suicide squad a few times, and Bartók messed me up with all his funny rhythms. We got a lot of offside penalties to Bartók. We worked with Copland and Stravinsky and Webern and, every once in a while, if we was way ahead, Debussy.

There were some problems, of course. On the day we first played the Cowboys and they realized what we was up to, they got their lawyers to call the commissioner of the N.F.L. and argue we was breaking the rules with our headsets. What rules? Every jogger in the world wears headphones these days. Why not football players? We weren't in radio communication with each other or nothing. The commissioner didn't bite. He let us play like we'd been practicing.

Technically, we smoothed out the kinks and didn't have too much trouble. If a cassette got busted in a collision, it was easy to replace. Same with the headphones. Once in a while, a tape would jam or speed up; but, hell, you could spot the person with that problem: He'd be out of sync.

What we had, good buddies, was a team that was coordinated down to the last eighth note. And that's why we beat the Cowboys the first time. We were precise, if you know what I mean.

•

After we beat the Cowboys 21--17, we went on to beat the Vikings, the Cardinals, the Giants, the 49ers, the Lions, the Eagles and the Packers and the Vikings again. We got into the play-offs for the Super Bowl, Super Bowl XX. And, yes, we found ourselves playing the Dallas Cowboys in the semifinals, and this time, it was in their stadium.

We flew down to the heart of Texas. I thought we had it made. I said as much when I talked to Howard Cosell on the day of the game. "We beat them once and we can do it again," I said. Howard allowed as how that was a perspicacious contention that he hoped would manifest itself in the turbulence we were about to witness. "What are you talking about, Howard?" I asked him, but they had to break for a commercial and I never did get an answer.

Then again, I forgot all about Howard Cosell right about that moment, because the Cowboys came onto the field for their first warm-ups, and I thought I was going to die. I swear my heart stopped. Because they didn't have no supercool coaches leading them. No, sir. And they didn't have no mascot, nobody dressed up like a cowboy, no cheerleader or oil baron. What they did have was the stadium loud-speakers blaring the music from Jerome Robbins' ballet The Four Seasons. And standing there behind the goal post, poised and pretty, almost naked in a grape-colored tunic, was somebody we all recognized by then: Mikhail Baryshnikov.

"Oh, shit," I said. "Them copycats done stole our idea."

Yes, sir, we might have done our warm-ups to Swan Lake, but Baryshnikov led the Cowboys out into Texas Stadium to do a much more complicated and tough piece of work. I never saw anything like it before, and I knew then that us Chicago Bears was going to have a long afternoon. The Cowboys was fighting fire with fire.

I have the warm-up on video tape. I run it back once in a while when it's the middle of winter and I'm snowed in here and there's nothing to do but remember. Baryshnikov was dressed as Bacchus, and the Cowboys did a frenzied orgy kind of thing with the cheerleaders while he made moves that took the guts of a stunt man and the grace of a god. He did leaps and turns and grand pirouettes until I got dizzy, grand pirouettes with his knee bent at every angle and with sautés on his working leg. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a pirouette, just hold it à la seconde, then go on spinning like a top. And the Cowboys was not doing a bad job of following him with the same goddamn moves. Tony Dorsett looked like Baryshnikov's shadow sometimes, I'll tell you.

Us Bears just stood and watched. Most of us was thinking about the Super Bowl ring we would never wear. It was just like them Cowboys to outdo and outspend us.

After warm-ups, we went back into the locker room to pout, but damned if Coach Dancing Bear wasn't smiling the biggest smile I ever saw. "Wasn't Baryshnikov terrific?" she grinned.

"Yeah," we all kind of grumbled.

"We've changed the game of football, gentlemen."

Credit to Marshall. He's the one who called her on her happiness. "So what, Coach?" Marshall stood up. "We're going to lose, probably. They got the best dancer in the world coaching them, all due respect. They got the bodies, they got the skills. They took our idea, and they'll run with it."

"Marshall, let me ask you a question: So what?"

Of course, Marshall didn't know what to do with that one, so he just sort of blinked and looked around for help. "Ma'am?" he asked.

"You say we'll probably lose this game. So what?"

"So we don't get to the Super Bowl. So we don't get the bread and the glory. You think I'm in this for the fun of it, Coach?"

"I think that's the only reason to be anywhere, Marshall." Coach Dancing Bear stared at him for a long time. It was real quiet. "I think you men saw this game of football grow to be fun again. Am I right? Well, why should that stop now? Because you're going to lose, perhaps? The score will take care of itself. You're going to be so interested in the movement of the game that you're not going to know the score." She paused. "Now get your bones out there and give us a game!"

Some people say it was the best game of football they ever saw, because both teams was in such good shape and had such coordination. And it wasn't a mean game. It is impossible to be really mean when you're surrounded by beautiful music and when you respect the human body. And the way Coach Dancing Bear had taught us, we did respect the other fellow, no matter the team he was on. There was no late hits, no spikes, no blind-side blocks, no head slaps. The game flowed like a dance, which is what it was.

I admired the way the players moved and the cheerleaders danced and the referees floated through us, and damned if I didn't start to admire the movement in the crowd--the way a mother would tuck a baby on her hip while she walked up the stadium steps, the way a father would hug a son after a good play, the way the disabled vet by the oxygen tanks could wheel himself in pirouettes of his own making.

I grew a century in understanding in those few hours, and what I'll never forget is that I felt OK even while losing. I can honestly say that it was the game that mattered, not the score.

After we lost and we was all shaking hands and things, I suddenly realized that I was through with football, that I'd had it as good as it would ever get.

"I'm hanging it up," I told Coach Dancing Bear in the locker room.

"I may do that, too, Dewey," she smiled.

"I'm going back to the farm and fit into the dance," I said.

"Sounds good to me," she said.

"Every damn N.F.L. team will have a ballet coach next year," I said.

"Probably."

"They'll be doing TV commercials for credit cards and beer. Geoff will write a book about the season and go on tour with it. Marshall will cut an album. Do I need that? I just had the best afternoon of my life, Coach, and I don't need to ruin it."

This was after all the press interviews and confusion, but it was still noisy in the locker room. The guys wasn't hanging their heads. What the hell; we'd played like champions, and to ourselves, we was champions. The game was something we'd be proud to tell our kids about.

I hung around after my shower, after the locker room thinned out and nobody was left but Sam. I'd shaken hands with everybody and we'd all lied about how we'd keep in touch, about how we'd have a reunion of the Bears team that almost went to the Super Bowl. " 'Bye," I said to my gear. I confess I did take my helmet with me. I packed my ditty bag and walked out the door and came back here to Paris.

My dad and I farm 750 acres under contract. We raise corn and soybeans. DeeAnn, my wife now, has kept her job at the hospital, so we're staying alive.

Every once in a while, when nobody's looking, I climb to the top of the old by the horse barn. I just hang there, listening to the wind, surveying the countryside. Sometimes I put on my old Bears helmet and crank up the cassette and listen to Mozart or Bach or Beethoven.

Life is a dance? You bet your booties it is.

"I was the great Dewey Pinnell. The fans called me Gluey Dewey. I loved to hang all over quarterbacks."

"She had us turning out our legs, stretching our hamstrings, pointing our toes."