Century marks*

(*Also bumps, bruises, scrapes, contusions, etc., etc.)

Which is to say, the Nash-unal FOOT-ball League turns 100 this weekend. With everything good and bad that entails.

The 100th season begins tomorrow in Chicago with the Bears and the Packers, which is only fitting. Bears-Packers, after all, is the oldest and most celebrated rivalry in professional football. In fact, the Blob would argue it's the only real rivalry in pro football, because assorted others -- Steelers-Browns, Cowboys-Washington Football Club, Chiefs-Raiders -- are rivalries but not, like, Army-Navy, Harvard-Yale or Alabama-Auburn are rivalries.

I mean, no one in the NFL regularly kidnaps the opposing team's mascot, like Army and Navy do. Or kills a tree, the way that crazy 'Bama fan did at Auburn a few years back.

And don't even get me started on what the Yales and Harvards do to each other. It ain't pretty, folks.

Ah, but the Bears and the Packers, now there's some real disdain. They've been beating on each other since 1921, which is 98 years to you and me, kids. In fact, they've been beating on each other for so long that the Bears weren't even the Bears in the first meeting. They were still the Decatur Staleys, and they whupped the Packers 20-0 that day.

A combined 22 NFL championships, 65 combined Hall of Famers and untold one-upsmanship have followed. And the putdowns get better with each year.

Bring up Brett Favre, for instance, and Bears fans will bring up All Those Interceptions.

Bring up the '85 Bears, and Packers fans will roll their eyes and say it's been 34 years, how long are you guys gonna dine out on the Super Bowl Shuffle?

Bears Fan will say a typical Green Bay crowd is a buncha cows gnawing on cheese curds.

Packers Fan will reply by holding up a hand crowded with Super Bowl rings, "just to show you guys what one looks like."

Green Bay is smalltown, rural, blue around the collar. Chicago is big city, sophisticated, and also blue around the collar. Which is what makes the dynamic so damned interesting.

The two communities are nothing alike. And yet they are absolutely alike.

Both take their football 100-proof Midwestern: Rough, tumble, bleeding from a dozen encounters with turf frozen harder than the Dan Ryan Expressway. Packer Weather? Why, it's what Bear Weather wants to be when it grows up. The thicker the snow flies, the better both these teams like it.

I was on the Bears end of this rivalry growing up, but I wasn't very good at it. Part of this was a function of the times; in the mid-'60s the Bears were Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus, and Jack Concannon throwing to imaginary receivers in Schaumburg. The Packers, on the other hand, were an entire wing of the Hall of Fame: Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke and Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung and Forrest Gregg, and of course Vince Lombardi.

The Packers won the first two Super Bowls and five NFL titles in the 1960s. The Bears won the right to draft Bobby Douglass and Ralph Kurek. Which is why I rooted for the Bears but also had an emergency backup favorite team, the Baltimore Colts, on account of they had Johnny Unitas and actually won something every so often.

Still, the rivalry was real in those days. One-sided or not.

In his iconic book about those Packers, for instance, Jerry Kramer writes about what a big deal Bear Week was in Green Bay, how everyone got fired up for it and how no one got fired up more than Lombardi. At one point during Bear Week, in fact, someone in the Packers locker room said Lombardi was so fired up he sounded like, you know, George Halas.

Lombardi's response was immediate. And appropriately scornful.

"Halas?" he snapped. "Halas? Hah, hah. Halas. I can whip his ass. You whip the ballplayers and I'll whip him."

Wrote Kramer: "Everyone giggled at that."

But probably not very loud. Oh, no.