From the outset, it was a deal described as a ‘‘sweetheart’’ of one. Too good to be legit, too compromising to ever be official. Plus, it was Indiana. No one goes to Indiana; they just go back to it.
Five years in the making it was. To all (still possibly, yet strongly) come to this. A situation, a conclusion, that began in 2021, when the Bears announced they had purchased the old Arlington International Racecourse space as an alternative for their next home, ‘‘just in case’’ they couldn’t get full or shared stadium ownership of Soldier Field or get the public funding needed to build anew in the city, so that they would no longer be one of the few NFL teams left that didn’t have some form of financial property rights to the stadium they called home.
Now, because of the latest announcement from chairman George McCaskey and president and CEO Kevin Warren, both speaking on behalf of the board of directors, claiming they ‘‘believe a world-class stadium project in Hammond will transform the region, connecting Northwest Indiana to the South Side of Chicago through the Loop and across neighborhoods and suburbs stretching north of the city,’’ the Bears could now be only the fourth team in the NFL that plays its home games in a state that ain’t the one the team touts as the one the franchise both resides in and represents.
The technicality: property-tax certainty. In much the same way something tax-related (evasion) ended Al Capone’s Chicago reign, so has it apparently ended the Bears’ Chicago run. With Arlington Heights, via Illinois state legislators, not being able to guarantee Bears ownership an immovable fixed number on what the taxes on a new stadium on the more than 300 acres of land they had (apparently) prematurely purchased would be, that small, unforeseen, some will say minor incentive has become the primary and indisputable reason, after 106 years, the Bears are giving the city and state the peace sign.
Along with the middle finger.
The blame game on this, if it goes through, is going to begin immediately and last until the Bears return to Chicago in 40 to 50 years, once the new-stadium smell in Hammond wears off for good. The state of Illinois is going to have blame tossed on it like confetti, and the McCaskey family is going to share a bulk of that same blame. Gov. Pritzker is going to have this stain on his political and presidential résumé. Mayor Brandon Johnson and Warren are going to inherit the blame as the two black men in the middle of this that allowed it to happen on their watch. Arlington Heights and the ‘‘Village of Good Neighbors’’ are going to be labeled Chicago’s treasonous, insubordinate neighbors.
But maybe it’s for the best. We’ll see. Because at this point, after all the ‘‘proposed deal’’ has taken us through, all of the attention it has grabbed, the heartache it has caused, all of the time of our lives it has consumed, it’s probably better to finally have this whole thing behind us and over with, as our care for where the Bears played evaporated with every new story and every turn the story took that came to light.
It had gotten to the point of exhaustion. The nonstop of a taxpayer-subsidized stadium, the weekly ‘‘advance in plans’’ b.s. that we were continually fed as updates, the games-inside-games that everyone involved seemed to be playing, masking them as ‘‘negotiations.’’ The entire process had reached the point of where they played no longer meant anything to us. As long as the name attached to them remained ‘‘Chicago,’’ where they balled meant nothing. And if we never hear the words ‘‘megaprojects’’ and ‘‘PILOT’’ (bills) again in our lives, we’d be good. Because where the Bears called home and where their home actually is will always to us be two different things once they decided to leave. And the latter will always and forever ‘‘son’’ the former in that instance.
The one thing, as I’ve said many times in these pages, that no organization in any sport wants is for its fan base to believe their team is taking them for granted. The Bears, with these months and months of gaslighting, were very close to crossing that fine line — invisible to them, it seemed — of making us all feel that we, the fans, were the least of their concerns when it came to the next place they were going to call home.
That index finger we’ve been holding up in reference to the Bears’ current state and new future came with a sense of Chicago-connected pride signaling out to the world — as public representatives of the team and organization — that we are one and No. 1 and don’t plan on going anywhere soon.
Too bad the finger being held back up to us by the Bears is the longer one next to the index.