How badass do you have to be to not only willingly go by Dick Butkus, but be so damn hard that you straight up own it and wear it like armor. His name sounded like Dick Butt Kiss! We all laughed at it the first time we heard it in middle school, and then we all looked at him and stopped laughing. Dick Butkus. Butkus passed away in 2023 and I wasn’t able to make a comic about it then, so I’m doing it now. I’m just glad he didn’t live to see the Bears 2024 season. At least he was spared one more year of head coach Matt Eberflus, unlike the rest of us.
Dick Butkus is a legend. He played in the 70’s but was the size of linebackers now. He was basically the prototypical mean middle linebacker who hated you. Butkus absolutely hated you. He wasn’t just a hard hitter. Some QB’s actually claim that Butkus would bite them in the pile. I’m not sure how one bites another player when you have a facemask on. One of the things that becomes difficult over such a long period of time is telling apart the myth from the man. Stories about Butkus make him out to be some sort of rabid animal on the field. I don’t think you can deny the man played hard though.
Dick got named the #10 best NFL player of all time back when NFL Network was making those nonstop top-ten shows. As Howard Mudd says in the video, Dick Butkus was so good that he got named NFL Defensive Player of the year in a season in which the Bears won a single game. Dick Butkus was well before my time, so it can be hard to really appreciate what a guy was besides the legends. 5x first team All-Pro, 3 more times as second team. 8 Pro-bowls. 2 different all-decade teams (60’s and 70’s). He probably owned the record for forced fumbles before it was officially recorded. Since the Bears have only won a single Super Bowl and are mostly known as a team with all it’s best history in the past it can be hard to remember that Butkus did all of this on a garbage Bears team. He was there well after the early century glory years and he was gone well before the all-mighty 80’s Bears. He was a golden goose sitting on top of the city dump.
Out of every legend Chicago has ever had, I’m not sure any player has just felt more Chicago. At the very least, the most Chicago Bear. He looks exactly like the famous Bears fans from the SNL skit. Mike Ditka isn’t the prototypical Bear, it’s Butkus. If you did not know who Butkus was and saw a picture of him, you’d probably naturally come to the conclusion he played for Chicago. He was born in Chicago. He played college ball and pro ball in Chicago. The man was Chicago. I can only assume the organization would feed Butkus the bodies of all QBs who failed them over the years just to keep him happy. Unless we have footage to the contrary, I can only imagine Dick Butkus never did the Super Bowl shuffle. Someone probably asked him to do it once, and Dick probably just looked at him and said “no”, and nobody ever asked him again.
So I know this was two years late, but RIP Dick Butkus.
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Now that we are in the offseason desert, it’s time to bust out the throwback comics again. Let me know what old-school subjects you might want to see a Lateral for. After reading Tuesday’s news, I might have to tackle Jim Marshall for Friday.
