Fierceness unbound

 They come now to tell me Dick Butkus is dead, and I tell them to get bent already. Dick Butkus can't be dead. Wouldn't he just wrap up death in a Bear hug and plant it like a turnip?

Or maybe like Bart Starr?

Hit ol' Bart so hard once, one of the tributes noted yesterday, that Starr wound up helmetless in Goofyville, wandering vaguely toward the wrong sideline. Hit a bunch of other Packers and Lions and Vikings like a truckload of bad intentions, too. Didn't so much tackle ballcarriers as swallow them, wrapping those long club-like forearms around them and flinging them disdainfully to God's green earth.

You can say Dick Butkus was the greatest linebacker in NFL history and get yourself in a hell of an argument, because Lawrence Taylor came along later and even Mike Singletary and Brian Urlacher in Chicago, among others. But if you grew up in the '60s in the middle of the country, you know there was never an LB more feared.

Butkus and Gale Sayers were the only reason to watch the Bears in those days, but they were a hell of a show even when the Bears lost, which was often. Sayers gave us ballet,  and then Butkus gave us blunt force trauma. They were artistry unbound and fierceness unbound, the yin and yang of Chicago football in those days.

As with a lot of men who brought pain on the football field, Butkus' warrior mentality contained within it the seeds of his own downfall. All those fierce hits eventually ruined his knees, and by 1974, he was gone from the game. He was just 31 years old.

And now both he and Sayers are gone from the mortal coil, and again those of us of a certain age are compelled to mourn our childhood. And to provide one more piece of evidence of Butkus' deathlessness, or at least the deathlessness of his example.

Because you know what happened last night, hours after Dick Butkus passed?

The Chicago Bears finally won a football game. 

Crushed the Washington Commanders on the road, 40-20, snapping a 14-game losing streak stretching back three weeks shy of a year. Justin Fields had his best game as a Bear, throwing for 282 yards and four touchdowns -- three to DJ Moore, who caught eight balls for 230 yards. And the defense sacked Washington quarterback Sam Howell five times, made six tackles for loss and forced a couple of turnovers.

You might say they were ... fierce.

You might say it was karmic the way it happened, that somewhere in the night Dick Butkus was stalking the Great Beyond an-

Oh, but that's just silly. Just silly.

Isn't it?