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Bears Owner Virginia McCaskey a Road Warrior at Age 97

The Bears matriarch is going to the season opener and plans to be in attendance at Soldier Field this season for games

There's a pandemic and racial unrest is impacting the NFL, yet in the midst of troubled times the 97-year-old matriarch of the Chicago Bears plans to travel for a road game.

Bears chairman of the board George McCaskey on Thursday during a conference call with media said his mother Virginia McCaskey, daughter of team founder George Halas, will be going to Ford Field.

"Well to say that, she's always eager to start the season," George McCaskey said. "But to say that she's especially eager this season is an understatement.

"I talked to her a couple of weeks ago and said, 'So I take it you will do whatever is required of you to attend the games?' And she paused and said 'Yes,' in that tone, I think you (reporters) have heard yourself, leaving no doubt about where she stands."

Bears coach Matt Nagy hadn't thought otherwise.

"That does not surprise me at all," Nagy said. "She is just so resilient. Who she is as a person, hearing that she's going to be there, it gets you really excited. 

"What this team and this organization, this city, these fans and everybody, what everybody means to her as players and coaches, to have her support there at the game is what it's all about."

Going to home games is one thing, but traveling for a road game might seem risky at this point due to the pandemic.

"The Lions are great about welcoming people at Ford Field," George McCaskey said. "There are a lot of people being very gregarious and saying how happy they are that you're there. They're especially happy to see her because they see her year after year.

"We told them we understand that you want to be friendly and welcoming but we want to take every precaution."

Martha Parke Firestone Ford is the principal owner of the Lions and is 94 years old.

"Mrs. Ford and my mom are very good friends," George McCaskey said. "They're not going to be able to have their usual pregame visit, which I'm sure is going to be very disappointing to both of them. It's great to see both of them get back together. But the Lions and the Fords and everybody want to be as cautious as possible."

The plan is for Virginia McCaskey to go to home games, as well.

The pandemic has been taxing on the entire McCaskey family. George said Thursday was the second day since mid-March when Halas Hall shut down that he was in the building. He chose to stay away all of training camp.

"So, I was uncomfortable personally," McCaskey said. "I didn't want to add any complications to the mix here. When we did have training camps, the advice we got was 'fewer and farther,' which, we interpreted as fewer people and farther apart.

"So, as much as I wanted to be here, I thought the best thing for me to do personally and for the team was to stay home."

The great issue facing the Bears and ownership beyond getting through COVID-19 is general manager Ryan Pace's job evaluation since his contract expires after the 2021 season, and McCaskey didn't want to speak much on the subject.

However, he said Pace is being judged on performance.

"First we need to make sure we get in a full season," McCaskey said. "We are taking it on a game-by-game basis. That's part of it. I think more broadly this is a challenge for everybody so part of the evaluation is seeing how he responds in his role as general manager to the challenge.

"I've been very impressed in what I've seen so far and we expect that top level performance to continue through the season."

McCaskey is proud of the way the Bears players have responded to racial unrest, emphasizing it's because they're concerned more with taking action as a group than symbolic personal gestures such as kneeling.

What McCaskey wasn't proud of was the way an ex-Bears player reacted to the shooting and aftermath in Kenosha. Brian Urlacher has been roundly criticized for his comments about the shooting on Instagram, and the team immediately put out a statement disavowing anything Urlacher had said.

"My first thought was maybe his account had been hacked," McCaskey said. "So we've reached out to Brian. I would like to talk to him. We haven't connected yet. Brian is an outstanding individual. He was a great Bear and I've known him for 20 years. We've shared a lot of triumph and some tragedy during that time. I lost my dad, he lost his mom.

"He's been a great teammate and you know one of my favorite things about Brian is we have a program called home team handoff where players can buy tickets to home games and donate them. And Brian seemed to take it as a matter of pride each year to be the player who had the most home team handoff tickets. And because of his generosity thousands of kids who might otherwise have not had the opportunity to attend a Bears home game got the chance. So having known him for 20 years and knowing the type of person he is I'm not going to judge him until I talk to him."

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