EXTRA: Were Chicago Bears ahead of pack in doing away with Honey Bears?

Reading the reports of the Washington Redskins and the stink the team is in with regards to the way they used their cheerleading dance squad almost makes me wonder if Virginia McCaskey, the daughter of Chicago Bears founder George Halas, was on to something.

Has it really been 32 years since the Honey Bears last danced?

McCaskey was the woman whose action right after her Bears actually managed to win a Super Bowl (remember 1986?) was to abolish the Honey Bears.

THAT WAS THE dance team that existed from the mid-1970s until the end of the 1985 season. The Honey Bears’ last performance literally was in New Orleans at the Superdome while the Bears beat up on New England 46-10.

In doing away with the Honey Bears, she made comments about how she found the whole image of hot pants-clad dancers jiggling their curves about to be inappropriate, and how the Bears would never again have such a dance team so long as she remained a part of the team’s management.

Some three decades later, McCaskey remains with us. At 95, who’s to say what will happen.

Now I know some people act as though the lack of an official dance team to entertain the fans (and appease their libido) is somehow a disgrace. I’ve heard some try to claim that the Bears are cursed because of the demise of the Honey Bears – and that (rather than lack of athletic talent) is the reason the Bears are now 32 years, and counting, without another Super Bowl championship.

BUT COULD VIRGINIA have been on to something in thinking that the old-timers like her father who created professional football would never have saw the need for something like the leerleaders (that’s what they really are) whom many teams feel compelled to have?

If anything, it was just a matter of time before someone got caught up in the Redskins’ circumstances.

For those who haven’t paid attention, the New York Times reported about how the Redskins basically used their dance squad in ways that hardly differ from those exotic dancers who work in those seedy nightclubs.

It seems that during a 2013 trip to Costa Rica, the dancers posed topless during a photo shoot for a calendar, and it seems the team offered certain male fans the perk of being present.

THE LADIES ALSO were required to be escorts at a nightclub – serving as “dates” for certain men. An act that bears some similarity to what professional escorts do – and what can get them in trouble with police who consider it one step up from prostitution.

You’d think that Washington would feel some desire to maintain a low profile, what with all the stink they arouse from the fact that they insist on keeping the team nickname “Redskins.”

Now, they’re the team that pimps out its dancers.

Which can’t help but make one wonder if “da Bears” are spared much grief by being one of the few professional football teams (including such other ‘old school’ teams like the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants) to do without the sideline routines.

  -30-

EXTRA: Weren’t ’14 Chicago Bears merely typical of local sports scene?

It was everybody’s good laugh this week. Virginia McCaskey, the matriarch of the Chicago Bears (and daughter of team founder George Halas) is “pissed off” (or so says team management) at the Bears’ performance this season – which came to an end Sunday with a 5-11 record and no playoff performance.

Now I’m not any kind of a football fan (I’m eagerly counting down the 90-plus days to the beginning of baseball season, plus the month until the Caribbean Series). But it just doesn’t seem like this season’s awfulness was particularly awful.

PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE I’m old enough to remember the years of the 1970s following players such as Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers – seasons in which playoff appearances were rare, that 2014 doesn’t strike me as being unusual. In fact, that decade was just truly awful for all the Chicago ball clubs, regardless of what sport they played.

Watching a youthful Walter Payton become the football equivalent of Ernie Banks and Luke Appling (Hall of Fame baseball players who were surrounded by losing Chicago squads back in the 1950s and 1930s, respectively) was what the Bears were usually about.

Let’s be honest. Michael Jordan was the basketball equivalent in the 1980s. Does anyone remember how bad the Bulls were prior to those two streaks of three 1990s championships in a row?

So to learn that McCaskey is displeased with the Bears? You’d think she’d be used to it by now. Because 1985 and that Super Bowl victory over New England was truly a team oxymoron.

I FIND IT interesting that one-time Bears quarterback and San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh finds the prospect of coaching Michigan in the Big 10 to be more intriguing than being with the Bears.

Take into account her other statement from Monday when the firings of the Bears general manager and coach were announced – that she had been alive for eight of the nine NFL championships won by the Bears during their 95 years of existence (including the season they were based in Decatur, Ill.).

But eight of those championships came prior to the creation of the Super Bowl – which itself will be 49 years old. Making them seem about as relevant as the fact that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series back in ’07 and ’08. And I don’t mean 20--!

So what should we make of McCaskey’s feelings? Perhaps she will succeed in finding competent team management that can bring another championship team to Soldier Field in the near future. At the very least, she gave us a chuckle.

ALTHOUGH I THINK the real outburst will come down from the heavens in the form of Halas’ spirit. He, of course, who once said, “We’ve run out of time outs. Go in there and get hurt.”

Somehow, I feel Bears fans would be in complete agreement these days.

  -30-