Chicago is still full of Grabowskis, but only one roots for the Bears and the Packers

June 17, 2024

Jim Grabowski grew up a butcher’s son on the northwest side of Chicago and now he lives in the suburbs in a house with columns out front and a golf course in the back.

He is, in short, a Grabowski made good.

While there are plenty of Grabowskis who went from blue to white collar in the greater Chicago area over the last half-century, Jim is the only one to ever play in the NFL.

So that makes him the original Football Grabowski in a city where his last name has become synonymous with the Bears and a stereotype of their fans.

This despite the fact that, well, Grabowski is really more of a Green Bay Packer.

Jim Grabowski, the old fullback who turns 75 this month, won’t be there in person to watch his two former teams, the Bears and the Packers, open the 100th season of NFL football. He prefers his 85-inch TV and leather couch and the solitude to pay attention. But he’ll be there in spirit with tens of thousands of Grabowskis and probably a few Smiths who love a competitive game between the NFL’s old rivals.

Bears coach Mike Ditka used the name “Grabowski” to describe his team more than 30 years ago in the run-up to the Super Bowl and it’s become a part of the local argot, a way to describe the kind of Chicagoan who lives and dies with every Bears game. But this Grabowski, a lifelong Chicagoan who won two Super Bowls with the Packers in the 1960s, is understandably conflicted when it comes to the Packers rivalry.

“I‘m thrilled about the Bears season last year,” he said. “But when they play each other, I just hope it’s a good game. I like nothing better than when it gets down to the wire in the last two minutes and someone wins. It’s hard for me to ever root against the Packers. And my roots here go back many, many, many years, so I’m also a Bears fan. And that seems strange to a lot of people. ‘How could you root for both of them?’ What can I say? I do.”

In the great room of his longtime home in the suburb of Inverness, with vaulted ceilings and natural light flowing in, there’s a veritable museum of Grabowski’s sporting life, from his days as a Heisman finalist at Illinois to his NFL career.

On one shelf, Grabowski keeps a Bears helmet and Packers helmet pointed at each other. Most of the pictures and artifacts, of course, are from his Packers days.

Below them sits a picture of a young Grabowski greeting his college teammate Dick Butkus after yet another Packers victory over the Bears.

A picture of Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski shaking hands after a game. The two played together at Illinois. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

According to research, the photo was taken after the Packers beat the Bears 17-13 on Nov. 26, 1967. But in a conversation, Grabowski thought it might have been after Green Bay beat the Bears 28-27 on Dec. 15, 1968. That game is still fresh in his mind.

“I think I was a lucky guy,” he said. “I got to play for a legend and got to be in a couple championships. A lot of guys don’t to get that. Butkus played nine years and never got close to one. Well, he got close to the playoffs, but we beat him when we were down and out.”

It was the last game of the 1968 season. Grabowski caught a pass from Don Horn and turned it into a 67-yard touchdown in the second quarter. One year removed from a Super Bowl, the Packers weren’t a playoff team, but they could still handle their neighbor to the south.

The Bears finished 7-7 that season, second to the Vikings (whom they had swept) in the Central Division. The Vikings went to the playoffs and the Bears stayed home, a common occurrence at the time.

“(Butkus) was really pissed after that,” Grabowski said with a chuckle.

The Packers, who won the first two Super Bowls in Grabowski’s first two seasons in the NFL, were on the downswing by that point under new coach Phil Bengtson, but it didn’t matter. In the seven games Grabowski — who was also the first pick of the AFL draft for the Miami Dolphins — played for the Packers against his hometown Bears, he only lost once.

“We had their number,” he said. “Frankly, at that time they weren’t very good.”

But with players like Butkus and Doug Buffone, not to mention Gale Sayers on the other side of the ball, the Bears didn’t make it easy.

“We did not have to look on the schedule on Tuesday morning to know this was Bears week,” Grabowski said. “It was always a battle with those guys. They always played hard. It was always a tough game. I can’t remember any of them were a runway.”

During Vince Lombardi’s last season as the Green Bay coach when the Packers won the Super Bowl for the second-straight year after winning “The Ice Bowl,” Grabowski rushed 32 times for a career-high 111 yards and a touchdown in a 13-10 win on Sept. 24, 1967.

Fullback Jim Grabowski won two rings with the Packers as Green Bay won Super Bowl I and II in his first two years in the NFL. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

After five years in Green Bay, the Packers released him and his bum knee, the product of a torn ligament in 1967 that never truly healed. Grabowski, a star at Taft High School and the University of Illinois, finished his career with the Bears as a “one-legged running back” in 1971. He went to training camp in 1972 but they cut him and he retired to a life of business in Chicago, with a side gig calling football games at his alma mater.

On Jan. 6, 1986, Ditka, at the height of football and rhetorical powers, suddenly made the Grabowski name famous again. Before the NFC Championship against the Los Angeles Rams, Ditka said, “There are teams that are fair-haired, and those that aren’t so fair-haired. Some teams are named Smith, some Grabowski. We’re Grabowskis.”

There was no Twitter back then, but word traveled fast. That quote, as Ditka intended, was gold.

“At first, I thought, ‘Oh my god,’” Grabowski told me. “I knew Mike well and I thought, ‘What the heck?’ The only problem I had is with all the stuff going on with the Bears at the time, being the stars of the media, the only sad part is I never got a commercial out of it. But I was thrilled, sure.”

What did Grabowski tell Ditka when he saw him?

“I must’ve said, ‘Thanks I’m back in the news,’” he said with a laugh. “But I know what he meant. This is a blue-collar town and that’s a name that kind of resonates with blue collar. He was right. It is a blue-collar town or it used to be.”

Ditka was a maestro of the press at the time and he knew exactly what he was doing.

“That was the workingman, that’s what I was referring to,” he told me recently. “We weren’t the Smiths or the Whites, we were the Grabowskis, which was a Polish name and I came from that type of (area). That’s what I grew up in. You put the hard hat on, you put the old clothes on and you work. And that’s what we were, we were a team that got together and we worked. That’s where it came from.

“But the Grabowski name, that’s what I came up with. Hey, it served us well.”

Former Packers and Bears player Jim Grabowski holds up a newspaper cartoon showing the fictional bar Grabowski’s. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

While regional accents have faded and the city’s demographics have shifted, “Grabowski” is still a word used to describe the idea of the white, ethnic, lunch-pail worker, a relic of Chicago’s past, and one that leaves out, well, a major chunk of a famously segregated city. (Ditka could’ve also said, “We’re a team of Wilsons,” but that doesn’t have the same flourish.)

In the sports world, “Grabowski” has also become a way to describe the stereotypical meathead Chicago fan, the kind who says, “Da Coach” unironically and thinks Brian Urlacher should have gotten more sacks. The kind of fan who calls into The Score and makes Dan Bernstein sign and wish he got that PhD in semiotics.

(While Ditka’s accent is 100 percent Yinzer, Jim Grabowski does not actually talk like a Grabowski.)

Stories about the Grabowski name were prevalent during the run-up to the Super Bowl as the Bears ruled the city.

In his great room, Grabowski has a framed cartoon from the Tribune of a fictional Grabowski’s bar that ran that winter.

“And for a lot of years, you know if I said my name, they may not have remembered I played, but they remembered it was referred to with the Bears,” Grabowski said.

Grabowski is long retired now, but he moves around well, even if he probably needs his knee replacement replaced. His golf game is slipping, but he and his wife Kathleen still travel, having just returned from an Alaskan cruise.

When Andrew Luck retired, Grabowski felt a great deal of empathy. When he tore a knee ligament in 1967, missing the Ice Bowl, the medical knowledge wasn’t around to fix it. So he played through a bum leg and his performance suffered. Other injuries piled up over the years. The fun was over.

“In some ways, I look back now and you know, I think it was very fortunate I stopped after that many years,” he said. “If I played eight, nine, 10 years, who knows what would’ve happened with CTE and all these other things you read about.”

Grabowski still loves football, but he sees the game with clear eyes.

“It’s a brutal game,” he said. “It’s more brutal now than it ever was. So make your money and stay alive.”

The Grabowski name hasn’t been passed on much in his family, with more daughters than sons coming from him and his siblings. His grandson in Elmhurst is a Bears fan and his grandsons who live in Michigan root for the Packers.

As for him, he follows the Bears more closely, but he feels more of a kinship with the Packers.

“I’m hopeful,” he said of the Bears. “I’d love for them make the Super Bowl. … I hope Green Bay is better than they were last year. I hope it’s a really good game. When I watch them play, I say whoever wins it, I’m OK.”

There aren’t many Grabowskis who feel that way, but there is one.

(Top photo: Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)

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