Windy City: How Hurricane Katrina Saved Chicago

McQueary: You don’t know how many people acted like it was my fault, in those first few days. That’s crazy, right? The biggest freak weather occurrence in history, because I wrote this silly little editorial? Of course, no one cared about the reality of the situation. I’d asked for it, and it happened, so in everyone’s minds, it was my fault. What none of us knew back then, was… well, I was right.

V.O.: In August 2005, newly minted Chicago Tribune editorial board member Rachel McQueary, formerly a political columnist, published an editorial in which she called for a hurricane to strike Chicago.

McQueary: There was this enormous storm brewing in the Gulf at the time… well, obviously we all remember Hurricane Katrina. And I thought, “Man, come on. What does Tallahassee or New Orleans or Houston need with a hurricane? You know who needs a hurricane? Us.”

V.O.: Overnight on August 29, Hurricane Katrina suddenly and inexplicably disappeared in the Gulf, reappearing just as unexpectedly over Lake Michigan, nearly 1000 miles to the north. The results were sudden and devastating. Standard & Poor’s held an emergency meeting and downgraded the Gold Coast to the Bronze Minus Coast. Meanwhile, fitted with an overhead tarp of enormous proportions, which had many years prior been pressed into equally desperate service as William Perry’s emergency training camp pants, Soldier Field became a shelter for tens of thousands of residents lucky enough to live near Chicago’s famous Museum Campus. Bears officials estimated the ticket sales to be at least twenty million dollars.

Robbie Gould: It was the biggest sellout crowd I’ve ever seen. We must have been at double capacity, at least. I knew that night that Chicago football had found the beginnings of something really special.

V.O.: As Chicago experienced nigh-unimaginable devastation, cities across the Midwest took in thousands of displaced Chicago residents, even as atmospheric scientists scrambled to explain the unprecedented weather phenomenon. Some theorized the event was a result of mass quantum teleportation; others, a sudden shift in the Earth’s magnetic field. No consensus exists to this day.

Chad Johnson: I don’t know what’s so confusing about it. Made perfect sense to me. Plus I got to have a roommate from Chicago. You know they speak Chinese in Chicago? It’s on the moon.

VO: And even as people across the nation opened their doors to Katrina’s evacuees, Chicago football struggled to find a home of its own.

Rex Grossman: Look, I have never, ever slept in so many different beds. Like, I sleep in a lot of beds already, obviously, because that’s how the Sex Cannon works, but when you’re playing your home games in Champaign and Madison and Milwaukee… What I’m saying is I have a standing reservation at the Travelodge Downtown. Always have. And I […]ed more in that room than you and your three closest friends have in all the lives you’ve led and all the lives you’ve yet to lead, throughout the vastness of time and space. But whatever, man. You wanna rush me, you wanna disrupt my rhythm, you wanna make me move around in the pocket, I’m still throwing it deep.

V.O.:  Burdened by their displacement and by the lack of a consistent home crowd, the Bears staggered to a 3-13 record that year as quarterback Rex Grossman threw 46 interceptions, all of them beyond 30 yards.

Rex Grossman: Good Christ we all sucked.

Brian Urlacher: No […]. You think I personally went to the home of every last player on our roster on Christmas Eve that year and beat the […] out of them for nothing?

V.O.: On Christmas Eve 2005, linebacker Brian Urlacher made house calls to the homes of the Bears players, delivering a savage beating to each and every one.

Thomas Jones: Oh, yeah! I remember that! He broke my nose! I called him Santa Clubs for months after that. Because, like, it was Christmas Eve, but he brought beatdowns instead of… okay, so then in training camp he broke my nose again for calling him Santa Clubs.

V.O.: In April, the Bears drafted D’Brickashaw Ferguson second overall, passing over Reggie Bush with the pick only to take speedy returner Devin Hester in the second round. Both decisions proved fortuitous.

Jerry Angelo: We loved D’Brickashaw from the start, and felt he had what it took to be not only a great protector for Rex Grossman, but a human levee if we were ever faced with another storm like Katrina. As for Devin… well, I don’t have to tell you about the effect he had on the game, or the effect he’d have had, with that great clockwise spin move of his, if we’d had to drop him into a hurricane to lower its wind velocities. Both just great multi-purpose players.

V.O.: League commissioner Roger Goodell announced a month later that Soldier Field would reopen that season as the home of the Chicago Bears. As the Bears’ camp begin, a feeling of unbridled optimism swept through the surviving 60% of the city’s population.

Lance Briggs: It was crazy. Here we’d stunk up the joint the whole last year, but suddenly people couldn’t get enough of us. It was almost like a bunch of people who spent most of their waking hours rebuilding or applying to the government for disaster relief or mourning their drowned or crushed or starved relatives needed some kind of distraction. Like, almost like that. A lot of people say it was that but I don’t think so. I think they just knew we’d be awesome.

V.O.: The Bears opened their season by slicing apart an unprepared Green Bay Packers defense, as Rex Grossman threw for 432 yards, six touchdowns, and seven interceptions. In the face of the Bears’ ferocious defense, the Packers managed only three points off Bears turnovers in a 49-6 defeat that set the tone for the rest of both teams’ seasons. Before long, the Bears had catapulted to 8-0, setting up a dramatic showdown between the last undefeated team in the league and the Miami Dolphins, a floundering team nevertheless motivated to defend its legacy and prevent yet another perfect season.

Rex Grossman: Oh, man, we steamrolled those motherf– sorry, I don’t want you to have to edit this, we steamrolled those […]sucking b[…]asses. I must have thrown a dozen touchdown passes.

V.O.: Quarterback Rex Grossman’s three touchdowns and nine interceptions helped the Bears to a narrow 21-18 win over the underdog Dolphins, and for the rest of the regular season, the Bears never looked back. Their dedicated fans, dwindling in number as temperatures dropped and the city struggled to keep basic utilities like heat and light available to residents through its hurricane-ravaged infrastructure, rallied around the Bears’ undefeated run.

Jon Gruden: It’s really impossible to overestimate the effect of the Bears’ undefeated run during that long, cold Chicago winter. The Bears didn’t give Chicago’s homeless population, which increased nearly one hundredfold in the days after the hurricane and remained near those levels for almost two years afterward, warm food or clean water or shelter from the freezing winds blowing in off Lake Michigan, but they did give those people, huddled around the TVs in the display windows of the few local electronics stores that hadn’t long since been looted, presumably by… okay, the accepted word, term, is Polish-Americans, right? Don’t want to get that one wrong again… anyway, gave them a really, really fun football team to watch.

V.O.: The undefeated Bears, emanating an aura of invincibility bolstered rather than lessened by Rex Grossman’s newly record-breaking 48 interceptions, would breeze through their three NFC playoff matchups, winning the games by a combined margin of 138-5. But in the Super Bowl, Grossman met his equal and his opposite: Peyton Manning, a deadly accurate passer who, at his best, won games by not throwing interceptions at all.

Charles Tillman: We weren’t really sure how to defend Peyton Manning. We’d had so much practice tracking aimlessly thrown balls and all of a sudden it was completely irrelevant. We… you know, we defended receivers, or looked like we were defending receivers, but we weren’t really used to trying? So this was a whole new challenge.

Nathan Vasher: I had to match up on Reggie Wayne. What the […]?

Charles Tillman: Ha! Yeah, before that Nate never did anything but stare at the ball and then try to run under it when it went up. He was like one of those frisbee-catching dogs. Fast, though.

V.O.: A shootout for the ages unfolded on the rain-soaked turf of Dolphin stadium. While Chicago’s defense held firm, allowing only six points by halftime, Chicago’s offense surrendered a Super Bowl record 24 first-half points on turnovers. Safety Bob Sanders led both teams in all-purpose yardage and scored two touchdowns. But Grossman’s confidence never dimmed as he threw four touchdown passes in the half to keep the Bears within striking distance.

Grossman: It was pouring out there, man, but whatever. Rain’s no big deal. Like, who the […] cares about the weather. No one in Chicago, that’s for sure. That’s a city that knows rain and wind can’t hurt you.

V.O.: Manning found more success in the second half as he adapted to Chicago’s unorthodox style of defense, picking on cornerback Nathan Vasher on double moves and finding Reggie Wayne six times for nearly two hundred yards. Grossman, however, matched him score for score.

Grossman: I was soaking wet by the fourth quarter. I looked like the ladies watching me felt. Yeah, that’s right.

O.S. (faintly): We’re gonna have to cut that–

V.O.: The deluge of points continued until, with just four seconds remaining, the Bears faced fourth and 8 from their own 30-yard-line. With the game on the line, Grossman unleashed a strike to speedy receiver Bernard Berrian that fans would remember and speak of in hushed and reverent tones for at least a decade to come.

Grossman: Yeah, I threw the […] out of it.

Jim Nantz (game audio): Touchdown! The Bears win! The Bears win the Super Bowl! And what a whirlwind of emotion…

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McQueary: No one liked what I had to say, back in 2005, but I think it’s undeniable without the millions of dollars in damage to property and the thousands of deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Bears wouldn’t have been playing in that game. The people of Chicago were desperate for a championship, standing on the bleachers of their Wrigleyville rooftops, arms outstretched toward the sky in search of rescue, but what they really wanted, and what they really needed, was a Lombardi Trophy. It uplifted the entire remaining habitable portion of the city in a way you can’t understand unless you’re from here.  And, you know, they got that and so much more. They — well, the whole state really — found the political hero they’ve always needed, a man willing to take on the Chicago’s problems. He, as much as the storm itself, has really washed this city clean. Governor Blagojevich is in his fourth term now, and in speaking with him personally, I’ve been assured that there is not any corruption or waste — really, none at all! It’s amazing! But yes, not one bit of corruption or graft or waste in Chicago politics anymore.

He’s going to make a great President someday.

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