Column: The Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl XX victory — 35 years ago today — may be their last championship, but their fans set the template on how to celebrate

While the Tampa Bay Buccaneers may be the first team officially to play a Super Bowl in their home city, historians note Chicago also hosted Super Bowl XX when the Bears played the New England Patriots 35 years ago.

The game was played in New Orleans, of course, but that didn’t stop the mass migration south of Bears fans to watch the inevitable trouncing of the Patriots on Jan. 26, 1986, occupying the French Quarter like they owned it.

If you were there, you know the entire week leading into the Super Bowl was a Chicago-centric event, sort of like cramming Taste of Chicago into the Quarter. It turned out to be the greatest party ever, culminating with the postgame celebration of the start of the Bears dynasty.

That dynasty never happened, as we’re reminded on this day every year, but it can’t erase the fact Bears fans set the template for how to do a Super Bowl.

You’re welcome, America.

I was fortunate enough to experience it as a fan before becoming a sports writer at the Tribune. After the Bears beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game, the team held a lottery for season ticket holders for the right to purchase Super Bowl tickets.

My dad, who has been a season ticket holder dating to the Dick Butkus era, won two upper-deck seats at $75 apiece. He already had been to Super Bowl IV in New Orleans and preferred watching on TV, so I gladly bought them from him and invited a friend.

Since it was too late to book a hotel, I got permission from an editor at the Tribune for my friend and me to crash on couches at a house in the Quarter — with a hot tub — that the paper had rented for feature writers, photographers and our brilliant cartoonist, Jeff MacNelly. We hit the bars as soon as we arrived Friday afternoon and quickly realized Bourbon Street was so crammed with Bears fans, it resembled Rush Street.

Every band in every bar played “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” and the ones without a band played the actual version by the Bears. Several bars advertised themselves as “Bears Headquarters,” and some nicknamed the French Quarter the Bears Quarter. Everyone walked around yelling, “Woof, woof,” and we all spent an inordinate amount of time looking for Jim McMahon, who reportedly had been out and about all week, to buy him a drink.

Many of the two dozen or so Tribsters covering the Super Bowl met one night at Eddie’s, a Creole restaurant owned by the father of one our colleagues, reporter Dean Baquet, who’s now the executive editor of the New York Times. I don’t remember how much Tribune Co. paid for the dinner, but the money eventually would’ve been spent on the purchase of the Los Angeles Times, so it was money well wasted.

Afterward we retreated to Pat O’Brien’s, the Old Absinthe House and other French Quarter institutions, some of which had drink specials named after coach Mike Ditka, William “Refrigerator” Perry and other Bears celebrities.

The Patriots were nonfactors in the party. They were making their first Super Bowl appearance as well, but Tony Eason was the quarterback and Tom Brady was only 8 years old, so their fans weren’t nearly as obnoxious as they were from 2001 to 2019. Most of the ones we encountered were happy just to be there and fully expected the slaughter that awaited their team.

As a Bears fan, I took every precaution necessary to ensure a win, including a trip to Reverend Zombie’s House of Voodoo, where I purchased a doll made in the image of Patriots wide receiver Irving Fryar. I also attended Sunday morning mass at St. Louis Cathedral, where Bears fans and Patriots fans were asked to sit in separate sections. Surprisingly, they did not play “The Super Bowl Shuffle” and no one “woofed” during communion.

My friend and I then made the 1 1/4 u00bd-mile walk to the Superdome and took several escalators to the upper deck. We were so high, the Fridge looked a mini fridge. But we were at the Super Bowl, so who cared?

After a brief scare on Walter Payton’s fumble, the Bears took control of the game and never looked back. The halftime show featured “Up With People,” a G-rated act so vanilla, it could have played at an AARP convention. Part of the halftime choreography consisted of fans lining up on the field to spell out “USA” and “NFL,” a not-so-subtle message that football and patriotism go hand in hand.

We were supposed to hold up placards that had been placed under every seat for some big message of unity to show on the NBC broadcast. But this was the Ronald Reagan era and my friend and I were generally down with people like “Up with People,” so we departed for the concourse to drink with our fellow Bears fans, who already were in the bag with a 20-point lead and a full schedule of day drinking under their belts.

The rest of the game is a haze. The only thing we wanted to see by the fourth quarter was a Payton touchdown. Unfortunately Ditka didn’t understand the significance of that moment to Bears fans, and Payton didn’t get one. Hopefully the words “Didn’t Let Walter Payton Score a Super Bowl Touchdown” will be engraved on Ditka’s tombstone.

After the game we staggered back to the Old Absinthe House, which, not surprisingly, already was packed with Bears fans who either left the game early or didn’t bother going at all. Many had flown to New Orleans without tickets just for the party. No one went home unhappy or unquenched.

The party in the French Quarter lasted all night, and the bars didn’t empty until the last Bears fans were kicked out, some literally. The gates for flights to Chicago resembled a zombie movie the next morning as bleary-eyed Bears fans with hangovers and no sleep headed home. Some were woofing as the flight attendant gave instructions on what to do in case of a crash.

We got home in time to watch the Bears parade in the freezing cold, another party that stands the test of time.

Thirty-five years later, my only remaining souvenirs from Super Bowl XX are a ticket stub, my Irving Fryar doll and a T-shirt MacNelly made for Tribsters who had spent hours together partying in a hot tub.

Jan. 26 has never been declared an official city holiday, but hopefully that oversight will be rectified one day. If Casimir Pulaski can be celebrated with his own day in Chicago, surely the Bears’ one and only Super Bowl win also deserves to be feted.

Who knows if we’ll ever see another?