Will Mike Singletary's 49ers destroy our childhoods this Thursday?
Samurai Mike, doing his samurai thing.
In the parlance of histrionic nerds on the Internet, our childhood is destroyed when something that made us happy as kids bums us out as grown-ups. Examples include when George Lucas made Darth Vader a precocious little boy whose control of The Force was due to a high concentration of something called midi-chlorians in his blood, or when Michael Bay turned all of our favorite Transformers into creepy racist stereotypes.
Even though it's pretty melodramatic to insist that one's childhood has been retroactively ruined by a crappy revisitation of an old favorite as an adult, the concept does make a certain amount of sense. I loved these things when I was a kid, after all, and I want my nostalgia to be validated by a treatment of them that could provide that same sense of childlike wonder. When the end result kind of sucks, then those childhood memories get mixed up with the current suckiness, and I'm left feeling violated.
All of which makes the Bears match-up with the San Francisco 49ers on Thursday night a dangerous game to watch. Any Bears fan whose first-ever favorite song was "The Super Bowl Shuffle," or who thrilled at the sight of the last Bear to wear #50 clobbering an opposing quarterback up until the 1992 season, probably has a pretty strong attachment to Mike Singletary. He was, after all, Samurai Mike, and he stopped 'em cold as part of the defense, big and bold. While Bears fans cling to the memory of Singletary and the glorious '85 Bears team like our toy-collecting brethren clutching an original, mint-in-box Optimus Prime, the man himself has moved on, now enjoying a high-profile stint as the head coach of the 49ers.
It's not hyperbole to say that the Bears season may well be over with a loss in San Francisco. A 4-5 record entering the second half of the season, with the Vikings pulling away at 7-1 before a home game against the Lions on Sunday, would render winning the division pretty much impossible unless Brett Favre and Adrian Peterson are both hobbled by a case of sudden-onset whooping cough. Similarly, there are a solid handful of second- and third-place teams in the conference with winning records, so the chances of rebounding to a wild card playoff berth are pretty slim. At this point in the season, every game is a must-win, but because the first of that must-win stretch comes against Singletary, the question becomes: Will a loss to the 49ers on Thursday mean that Singletary has ruined our childhoods like George Lucas did?
On the list of terrible ways to end your last relevant game of the season, losing to the man who was an integral part of the franchise's greatest decade is pretty high up there. Still, let's consider this question by the same criteria we might use when evaluating Star Wars, Transformers, or G.I. Joe for childhood destruction.
A loss to Singletary's team would be pretty heartbreaking, for sure, but it'd be so much worse if a player like 49ers rookie Michael Crabtree—the Hayden Christensen-as-Anakin of the NFL whose petulant, 71-day holdout was among the longest in NFL history—had a breakout game as it occurred. Crabtree, whose holdout only ended thanks to the timely intervention of, um, MC Hammer, pretty fairly represents the self-centered, world-owes-me-something mindset that can make today's NFL players such a bummer for fans. That's pretty antithetical to the game the way it was played back when Samurai Mike stalked the field, and making Crabtree a major player in this affair would make a loss about as hard to watch as The Phantom Menace.
To call the Bears' past three games a rollercoaster is to demean the good men and women of Gurnee who made Great America the site of some of our favorite memories. (Bonus question for next week: Do jerks at the amusement park retroactively ruin our childhoods, too?) They haven't been thrilling, just uninspired and disappointing. Even the less-painful early games of the season, where we actually did things like, oh, win at the end, still had some pretty inconsistent elements. For the 49ers game to fail the Michael Bay Test, all that really needs to happen is for all of the shit that the Bears have done poorly all season long—allow multiple sacks on Cutler, consistent two-yard runs between the leaden tackles, at-will downfield completions by opposing quarterbacks—to happen at the same time. If we can see a Matt Forte fumble returned for a touchdown, Alex Smith put up 400 yards passing, and Jay Cutler carried off the field in a body bag, it'll indicate the insidious hand of Michael Bay as much as a bloated, shaky, quick-cut action sequence.
The Accelerator Suit Test: Do we just not care anymore?
It reaches a point in any fandom where, after countless disappointments, it's hard to work up the proper amount of passion for a true letdown. Sure, G.I. Joe sucked, but people who went in expecting anything else are victims of their own expectations, not Stephen Sommers' hackwork. Similarly, if the Bears stride onto the field as apathetically on Thursday night as they did in the recent defeats to the Bengals and the Cardinals, and the passion that Singletary continues to display inspires his team to a great performance, then the joke's really on the fans who expected anything else. A bad stretch in the season is one thing, but if even the players don't look like the want to be there, you might as well spend three hours watching Revenge Of The Fallen instead.
If we want to come out of this game with our warm memories of a time when the Bears inspired pride in their fans, instead of—at best—cautious hope, then a win on Thursday night is a must. We're not just playing for what's left of the 2009 season; we're playing to save the 1985 season, too.
