Dick Butkus
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.
Since it was the Giants 100th season last year (sorry), I would love to see comics on your reaction to the Giants Super Bowl runs, particularly 2011, since that year tends to be overshadowed by the more obvious upset with 18-1.
I knew of Butkis as an actor in the 80s long before I knew he was a player, let alone a legendary one.
Yeah, he’ll always be Klawicki from My Two Dads to me.
I hope you’ll now do a tribute to former Viking, HOFer and member of the legendary Purple People Eaters, Jim Marshall, who passed away yesterday at age 87. He played in 282 consecutive games, a record he held for decades and by modern standards would have been high on the all-time sacks list at 130.5. And he was a thoroughly nice individual off the field too. Sad loss.
And his most famous moment was that one time he ran the wrong way (in a game that was still somehow a win!)
Because despite the wrong-way run he was also the one who sealed the win as well
John Brenkus, Sports Science guy, passed away recently.
Anyone else remember when Suh destroyed him on the show?
Jim Marshall comic idea (kinda dark comedy, but I know you’d do it in a funny way): God comes for Jim Marshall. Norm van Brocklin is yelling from Heaven for Marshall to run away from the light, but Marshall runs towards it. Yep, all that for a Wrong Way Run joke. Not sure if it’s too soon for that one.
Some more lighthearted comic ideas:
-Always wanted a Bills comeback comic, at the expense of Oilers fans lol
-A comic about the Rosencopter and somehow tie it to Josh Rosen
-An updated legacy comic for “Injured Reserved”, the Cheers bar; basically giving a happy Draw Play legacy for players who had to retire from injuries
-A fictional game between the 2008 Lions and 2017 Browns where nobody wins
-A comic where NFL coaching failures (Matt Patricia, Urban Meyer, Jeff Saturday, Nathaniel Hackett) try coaching at the lowest level possible (lower than Pop Warner?), and still fail.
Was going to suggest a Jay Cutler divorce, but turns out you already did that one!
Mike Ditka is a prototypical Chicago Bears fan. Dick Butkus is a prototypical Chicago Bears player.
Hate to break it to you, but Ditka was a player for the Bears, too.
Butkus played college ball at *Illinois*, which is 125 miles south of Chicago. They made a big statue of him in 2019 outside the football facility.
When I was at UIUC in the 90s, it was pretty much a bit of Chicago that had become disconnected and drifted south. Most everyone was from Chicagoland, and you couldn’t walk five steps without seeing Bulls paraphernalia.
I was there in the 2010s. It was like a 60-40 split for Blackhawks / Blues gear when both teams were very good. I could pick up a Colts radio broadcast out of Terre Haute. Most students were transplants from Chicago, but it is very much *not* Chicago, like how UMass Amherst is not Boston.
Here’s my suggestion:
A legacy version of the three-person bus that is unstoppable but crashes or whatever. I can’t recall the template name (if ever referenced) but I always think of the Killer B’s version for some reason. Maybe there’s a 1990s Bills Super Bowl(s) version or something like that?
Unrelated but for some reason I always mentally combine Dick Butkus and Mike Ditka into one person and this post was confusing for a bit until I realized that.
We are the Bills
We have Jim Kelly at QB
We have Thurman Thomas at RB
We have Bruce Smith on defense
NOTHING CAN STOP US!!!!
NFC Team in the Super Bowl
Bills car blows up
NFC *EAST* team
1990
Darth Tuna & his apprentice Bill Belichick play keep away. Evil magic pushes kick wide right
1991
Joe Gibbs: I can beat you with any QB (and has Thurman Thomas’ helmet hiding behind his back)
1992
Cowboys… just ignore the partying going on. It will eventually catch up but not today
1993
Cowboys, again. And Jimmy & Jerry are straining smiles
Yeah I could get down with a whole summer of Lateral CarCrashComics
Legendary players on sad sack franchises of decades long ago seems like a good theme. Maybe you could do a running gag like the “Injured reserve” Bar for each decade. Highlight the best players on the worst teams from those era’s that many of us have forgotten or never learned about the bar could then update with each decade. Possible bar names could be – Glory days, Sisyphus’s, Leathermen’s, The memory hole, etc.
As a Falcon’s fan I have long hoped that players like Tommy Nobis, Jessie Tuggle, and Mike Kenn among others could have received the attention or success that great players like them deserved.
Lateral Suggestions
Dallas Cowboys “White House”
Google: 115 Dorsett Dr, Irving, TX 75063
How Fox won the NFL package
Eagles tank in 1968, only for it to blow up
USFL 1.0
90s Bengals
How the Buccaneers went from making the NFC Championship game in 1979 to not winning a playoff game until 1997
Jets draft blunders
Bill Belichick spurns the Jets
Packers 1968-91
All the teams that tried for 3peat
73-0
AFL forms
Browns are frozen in carbonite, revived in 1999
Browns dominate the AAFC. Join NFL along with the 49ers & 1st iteration of the Baltimore Colts. League schedules the Eagles – defending NFL champs – to play Browns
Every Raiders conspiracy theory
1952 Dallas Texans
That time when the Rams and Colts traded owners
Oh… just thought of one more
Folks complain how bad RefBall is these days. Tell the tale of 1998… the season that brought replay back to the NFL
Oh, right… the “Is that white thing on Testeverde’s head actually a football?” game.
I would love to see a comic about how Marv Levy threw a hissy fit about the Bengals Hurry Up Offense back in 1988/89
Not exactly a lateral idea, but there’s this saying that if you swapped Hamlet and Othello into each other’s Shakespeare plays, neither play’s central problem would actually come into being (Othello would just avenge his father’s death; Hamlet would think for five minutes and not immediately get suspicious of Desdemona, etc.). Is there something that’s like that, but for coaches or QBs or something? Like, what is the player/coach swap that just might solve a big problem for each of the teams involved?
Laterals idea: The infamous “Rome vs Everett” show. When Jim Rome, the precursor to Skip Bayless and the other loud-mouth ESPN trolls, had QB Jim Everett on, and insisted on calling him “Chris”, comparing him to female tennis star Chris Evert. And nearly got killed when Everett snapped. (For those who think it was all staged, watch Rome’s facial expression as soon as he realizes he pushed too far.)
Lateral idea, the game Lawrence Taylor single handedly won – https://empiresportsmedia.com/new-york-giants/new-york-giants-thanksgiving-flashback-the-time-lt-carried-the-giants-to-a-win/
I like to imagine this comic is set in an elementary school, with Dick Butkus already having a full ‘stache at eleven years old.