Shaun Gayle has seen perception battle reality before, so let us take his word that it will be a better fight than the Bears put up during Saturday’s surrender.
“I was on the sidelines, right here, in 1984,” Gayle was saying. “It was January, we’d just come off a big playoff victory in Washington, and then the 49ers beat us. Pretty bad. By 23-0.”
Gayle paused.
“On the basis of that game,” he went on, “you could have thought to yourself, `How do we ever catch up with the 49ers? How do we ever get that good?’ The gap between us and them seemed so huge then. But you saw what happened the very next year.”
The Bears won a Super Bowl.
“Things can change very quickly,” Gayle concluded. “For their team, for our team.”
Alas, Saturday was that kind of a day at Candlestick. When in doubt about the Bears 10 years later, revert to the Bears of 10 years ago.
Not that the Bears left much doubt Saturday. They were annihilated by the San Francisco 49ers. The final was 44-15 only because Elvis Grbac entered the building in which the Bears never belonged.
It wasn’t that the Bears were out of sync. It was that they were so utterly out of place. They were dressed in uniforms similar to the opposition’s, but any other resemblance was purely coincidental.
“This was by no means our best game of the season,” Gayle said. “And I’m not saying we’d have been successful had we played our best game of the season. We knew to win here we would have to do a lot of exceptional things, and in fact, we were exceptional at nothing in particular.
“But if I can relay any message to the younger players on our team, it’s what I learned here back in that playoff game of 1984. The difference you see as so great between one team and another might not be that at all. Things change, more than ever with free agency.”
Shaun Gayle himself, of course, might have played his final game as a Bear. He was in no hurry whatsoever to remove that jersey after the slaughter. It was dirty, it was soggy, yet it was still comfortable.
“If this had been the last game of the regular season,” Gayle said, “it would have hurt more, really. To be blown out and then go home. As it was, we did a lot of good things this season, accomplished a lot, and what happended today can’t erase what we’ve done.”
Gayle, of all people, was involved in one of Saturday’s ugliest incidents. Steve Young, who started at quarterback for the 49ers, but didn’t need to finish, ambled into the end zone late in the first half. Well after the fact, Gayle dumped Young to the ground, whereupon Young rose to spike the ball tauntingly. Players from both sides gathered, and a hockey game almost broke out.
“It was not intentional on my part,” Gayle said. “A game isn’t important enough to me to be giving cheap shots like that. I had no idea where I was in relation to Young, and I didn’t realize he was in the end zone already.
“If I had, I wouldn’t have gone to hit him. (Alonzo) Spellman had put a pretty lick on Young earlier. Maybe they thought we were trying to rough him up. After things quieted down, I told Steve I didn’t mean it. I told him again after the game. Everything’s cool.”
Not so fast. There is defeat, and there is defeat with honor. The Bears, who won 10 games on grit, did so little here to indicate upward mobility.
“But against a team like San Francisco, it can snowball,” Gayle insisted. “That’s where we have to get to, and it’s not as far as it looks. We need to get some players in here. That’s part of it. But all the players they have might not be back. We are disappointed by what happened today, but we are not worthless. And we are not finished. This team has a lot to look forward to.”
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