The Packers, the Bears a hit list and Jim McMahon’s career

The Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears have long had a brutal rivalry. In 1986, though, things took a heinous turn at Soldier Field.

Charles Martin took his white towel and scribbled five numbers on it. A hit list.

On Nov. 23, 1986, the Chicago Bears welcomed their longstanding rival, the Green Bay Packers, into the Windy City. The Bears were defending champions and favorites to repeat, sitting at 9-2 with an easy schedule ahead. The Packers were an annual afterthought, residing in the NFC Central basement at 2-9.

The Bears, a 14-point favorite, should have easily handled the Packers easily. It should have been a forgettable game by the time the sun rose on Monday. Instead, it remains one of the touchstone moments of the NFL’s longest rivalry, due to one of the league’s ugliest and most bizarre incidents.

In the second quarter of an eventual 12-10 Chicago win, Bears quarterback Jim McMahon dropped back to pass. After releasing, he and Martin stood together in the backfield for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, the Packers defensive end picked McMahon off the ground with both arms around his torso and slammed him into the Astroturf with his right shoulder and head leading the way.

The hit list. McMahon’s No. 9 was first on the towel.

After the play, McMahon and Martin went back to their respective sidelines. One returned with a promising career forever altered, the other to high-fives from teammates.

The other four players on Martin’s laundry — running backs Dennis Gentry (No. 29) and Walter Payton (No. 34), center Jay Hilgenberg (No. 63) and receiver Willie Gault (No. 83) — escaped without being cheap-shotted. Martin had been ejected for his hit on McMahon but the damage was already done.

”It was a very serious act,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle said the week after Martin’s hit, per the New York Times. ”In other aggressive acts against quarterbacks, the quarterback at least still had the ball or the ball was in play. That wasn’t the case this time.”

Martin was suspended two games by Rozelle, the harshest penalty in NFL history to that point for an on-field act.

Famed official Jerry Markbreit was working that game. Markbreit worked four Super Bowls during his 23 NFL seasons, and yet in an ESPN article from 2012, said the Bears-Packers game of ’86 was the most important of his career. For Markbreit, it was an unforgettable afternoon, one which he believes saw the first ejection in league history.

From his vantage point, the play demanded immediate and unprecedented punishment.

“After the play, I took a hold of Martin’s arm and said, ‘Ninety-four, you’re out of game,” Markbreit told ESPN. “I’m ejecting you.’ And he pulled away and said, ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’ I looked at him and, tongue-in-cheek, I said, ‘If you don’t come with me, I’m going to let the Bears kill you.’ He said, ‘Let’s go.’

McMahon suffered a torn rotator cuff, ending his 1986 season early. Almost 25 years later, the man known for his “ROZELLE” headband and devil-may-care style still thinks about Martin’s disgraceful hit. Mostly because he can’t stop feeling the ramifications, ones that go far beyond a simple surgery.

“That was the start of all the problems with my head,” McMahon told Golf Sub Par. “When he slammed me, the first thing that hit the ground was the top of my head. It compressed my C1 and C2 (vertebrae). It actually twisted them and got them in opposite directions. I was having trouble with my spinal fluid flowing properly.”

McMahon returned in 1987 but only played two more injury-marred seasons in Chicago — 15 starts over that span — before being traded to the San Diego Chargers for a conditional pick which turned into a second-rounder. He started 11 games for his new team before being released a year later, when the Chargers couldn’t find a single interested party.

McMahon eventually played on four more teams over seven seasons, largely as a backup, before retiring. His final game in uniform? Super Bowl XXXI, winning a second title … this time with the Packers.

To this day, the questions linger. What if McMahon had been healthy for the remainder of the ’86 season? Would the Bears have beaten the powerful New York Giants, who also finished 14-2 that year, and become back-to-back champs?

In ’87, would McMahon had stayed healthier? Chicago went 11-4 and earned the No. 2 seed, but fell at home in the Divisional round to Washington, helmed by Doug Flutie, in the postseason.

The following year, the Bears were 12-4 and top-seeded, but lost in the NFC Championship Game to the San Francisco 49ers. McMahon was benched in the fourth quarter and never played another down in Chicago.

Perhaps things could have been different for McMahon and the Bears. Maybe they win three titles in four years, or even snag a few consecutively in ’85 and ’86 to become more than a one-hit wonder. Instead, the reality is Martin piledriving McMahon into the cold Soldier Field turf, changing both his life, his career and Chicago fortunes forever.

As for Martin, tragedy awaited. After finishing his career with the Houston Oilers and Atlanta Falcons over the next two seasons, he retired but succumb to kidney failure in 2005 at the age of 46.

In the 20 years after Martin’s famous hit on McMahon, he didn’t apologize. The man with the nickname “Too Mean” was maybe so, or maybe somewhat misunderstood with the tinge of his worst moment forever haunting him.

“I can tell you Charles was kind of surprised at the reaction of everybody to that hit,” Dacia Hurter, a close friend of Martin’s, told the Chicago Tribune in 2005 in the immediate aftermath of his passing. “He brought that white towel over with him, but it wasn’t like he was bragging or planned on hurting anybody. You had to know Charles. He was gentle, childlike. He would not have known what he did.”

Ultimately, it’s Martin and McMahon, forever linked by one of the dirtiest plays in league history. One man died with his football reputation in tatters. The other lives on, but almost certainly with what-ifs permanently attached.

“Every time I saw [McMahon] after that, in Philadelphia or Green Bay, he’d come out and get ready for the first snap and when he saw me, he’d stop and say, ‘Hey Jerry, how are you? Good to see you,’ Markbreit remembered.

“But for all intents and purposes, that play ended his career. He was never the same after that.”