Of curses, and QBs. The Bears have one, but still waiting on the other
What the Bears need is a good curse, something to blame, a romantic patsy for lingering incompetence, especially at quarterback. Without fickle fate or cruel karma, failure always will be the Bears' fault and no teller of tales likes something so simple.
There is, of course, the Curse of the Honey Bears, sideline trinkets disbanded after the glory of '85, yet it is hard to disagree with taste, and no direct jinx was ever wished upon the McCaskeys, who did away with the Honey Bears.
More likely the Curse of McCaskey is responsible for perpetual disappointment, and if I can contribute to the happy lore of failure, I will gladly take the naming rights myself, copyrighted and T-shirt available.
But this is nothing like the Billy Goat Curse, accepted as responsible for the long night of Cub gloom, or even the Curse of Shoeless Joe, entirely made up for the ongoing White Sox failures. Both of those are gone now, with 2005 and 2016 as erasers, leaving the Bears the stage alone.
This is quite a responsibility, to be the drum major for Chicago's parade of regrets, sports disappointments as dependable as the seasons, each season with its own special pain, no break in sight.
Each brief moment of relief is seen as a beginning and inevitably turns out to be an intermission. There are the Cubs coldly grasping a new lineup maker from Milwaukee or the White Sox rearranging the furniture in the front office, the Bulls hanging on to pocket lint or the Blackhawks imagining that a teenager can be picked out of a basket full of lumpy laundry.
It is a widely held wish for Chicago to do well in sports, nationally as well as locally. The market, the majesty, the skyline, the lake, all of it counts, all of it fuels the imagination, like Oz or Amsterdam.
And let's be honest here, sports are not holding up their end. Chicago might as well be ... I was going to say Green Bay, but bad example. Let's say Cincinnati; no awe in Cincinnati. Trust me, I've been to Cincinnati. Chicago is still a place of wonder, available for prime time inclusion when the inevitable result is something like Carolina in the evening, maybe the most boring football game ever played, so trivial that the broadcasters spent half the game visiting with one of the Kelce's, the one without Taylor Swift.
In, as outsiders like to call it, the Windy City, winning is not the only thing, it is not anything. See how cleverly I brought this back to the Bears?
Enough evidence is available for a Curse of the Quarterback, as if simply occupying the position instantly taints talent and blunts achievement, except the Bears tend to choose the ordinary and develop him into a disappointment. The proof is there like a list of headstones.
The once and again obscure Tyson Bagent was never going to be a solution to the Bears' Justin Fields dilemma. Ruining quarterbacks is a lingering infection for the Bears, something to do with that undefinable curse.
What the absence of Fields and the display of Bagent has shown is that the Bears have no franchise quarterback, no revelation there.
Bagent was a wonderful, temporary fantasy, a kid from the remote hills of West Virginia allowed to prove that all those talent evaluators with their clipboards and stop watches and tape measures were right all along.
This is not to say that Bagent will not have an NFL career somewhere, hang around here and there and maybe find a place where honest and intelligent mentors might improve him, but that place will not be Soldier Field or whatever Fields may be in the future.
Once again, see how cleverly I brought this around to Fields, the subject of the column? The Bears will go from here with young Justin, having no better idea what to do with him than before, four weeks on the sidelines meaning that the Bears simply did not have to think about him.
And now they do. Before his injury Fields did appear to be something he was always imagined to be and now he gets to start over, grateful to Bagent for having been just ordinary enough to make Fields welcome back. Curses.