Bear Digest

Ben Johnson's rant provided necessary punctuation to end of sad era

Analysis: Prudes who observe the NFL casually and people from Wisconsin were horrified over Ben Johnson's postgame cursing, but need to understand it was required.
Gene Chamberlain|
Ben Johnson keeps his cool in games and blows off steam in the locker room.
Ben Johnson keeps his cool in games and blows off steam in the locker room. | David Banks-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

More than four decades ago, Mike Ditka took over as Bears head coach and said he didn't like the Packers, then showed it by the way he acted toward Forrest Gregg and his Packers team.

The Bears had very few problems with the Packers then. Over the course of the last three decades, the Bears have been nice guys and let the Packers dominate them with barely a wimper.

Every now and then someone like Justin Jones would pop up and call them names but when you can't back it up, there's no point.

So now coach Ben Johnson makes good on his boast from when he was hired and beats Matt LaFleur twice in the season, then charges up his team with profanity in the locker room pointed at Green Bay.

"Oh my. He's now the ogre of the internet," came the whining.

Well then ogre away because someone has needed to do this for decades.

The Bears themselves realize what Johnson's talk was, and that it was just tough locker room talk, but if it's going to cause wailing and shrieking from some who follow the NFL and want to turn it all into a nice, proper afternoon at Wimbledon or ice dancing, then so be it. Here's a hanky.

This is supposed to be about tough things. It's the NFL and not debate club.

“A moment like that, there's so much work and frustration throughout the course of a season and all those things culminate into one moment," center Drew Dalman said. "And so, I think it's good that we all express ourselves and stuff like that and everybody's excited. As far as anything else, I don't place any significance on any of it. It's just a lot of people are excited.”

Linebacker Tremaine Edmunds referred to it almost as a therapeutic moment.

"It was definitely a turned-up moment," Edmunds said. "You could just see the energy in the locker room. Everybody was like, ‘OK, this man has a little swag to himself.’

"We all put a lot into this. To be able to act off your true emotions and your true personality. I think that's what it was for him. I don't know if he has any regrets about it, but I know the fans love it. This rivalry that we've been talking about, it goes so far back. There’s a lot of emotion built up into it. Any time that you win in that fashion, you’ve got to show a little bit of emotion for sure.”

The ones who seem upset were Packers fans and national media or social media wind socks who would have wet themselves if they had seen someone like Ditka looking at them wrong.

“It’s football, it's playoff football," Edmunds said. "These are the times that you  dream of as a kid, playing against your rival, being under the lights, primetime, the whole world watching. Personal is what football is. You’ve got to take everything personal on that football field. I don't care who we’re playing.

“That's how you’ve got to attack the game because at the end of the day, nobody cares about none of these problems we’ve got going on, when it's time to strap up, we’ve got to go out there, we’ve got to do our thing. It was just that type of game and you felt that energy when we walked in that tunnel. Parking my car, I'm like, ‘Okay, it's time.’ Just the energy in the air. You could feel it and that's what you look forward to.”

A lot of the bleating came from people who had no problem listening to Aaron Rodgers cursing about the Bears in the end zone after scoring a 2022 touchdown, and saying he "still owns them."

Payback can be tough.

They’ll get their chance to do something about it in the future. They can be sure of this: Johnson won't come to sit by their football coach at a Marquette game.

If it hurts feelings up north, they just have to live with it quietly for now like the Bears did for decades because it's obvious Johnson isn't going to tolerate defeatist garbage from this franchise anymore.

The end of servitude at the feet of the team from up north required an exclamation point, and just like with everything else he seemed to do in this wild Bears season, Johnson was just the guy to do it.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.