Chicago — Ask anyone about the last time the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles met in the playoffs, and their memories will probably be foggy.
Real foggy.
The Bears beat the Eagles, 20-12, on Dec. 31, 1988, but the details, well, they're really anybody's guess. Just before halftime that day, a dense fog rolled in off Lake Michigan.
Know the kind of fog that makes drivers flip on their low beams and creep along the roads at 15 mph? The "Fog Bowl" was worse.
"We got great seats at the 16-yard line, and I was fired up to see it, my first NFL game," said Eagles special teams coach John Harbaugh, whose brother Jim played for the Bears in 1988.
"I saw whiteness from the goalpost out. It was the coldest day ever. It was a wet, bone-chilling cold. It was pretty miserable actually."
Visibility was so bad 15 to 20 yards, at most that even the players couldn't tell what was happening. One said he could tell what happened on a play only by listening to the cheers of the crowd.
"The fog was so bad that I was waiting for Boris Karloff to come out of the stands," Bears guard Tom Thayer joked then.
But unless fans at Soldier Field were sitting near the field, they couldn't see the game, either. The P.A. announcer had to get play-by-play from someone on the field with a walkie-talkie. A CBS helicopter that was supposed to provide overhead shots was grounded, and the national TV audience saw only field-level shots.
"The Bears' defense was playing really well and everybody here knows that the Philadelphia defense was pretty good," said current Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who was a 12-year-old Bears fan when the Fog Bowl was played.
"It's going to be the same kind of game again," the Chicago native added. "It'll be a playoff game, but it'll be fun."
And probably a lot clearer. Forecasts for this afternoon's game between the Bears (13-3) and Eagles (12-5) call for mostly cloudy skies, with highs in the 20s. Winds of up to 10 mph are expected.
Now, just because there's no fog doesn't mean the Bears and Eagles are in for an easy day. Far from it. Chicago received its first significant snowfall this week, which means the grass at Soldier Field will probably be on the mushy side.
And once the sun goes down, it'll harden up fast.
"I think we definitely have the advantage playing on this kind of field," Bears offensive tackle James "Big Cat" Williams said. "It's going to be slippery. It's going to be slick. Depending on how cold it gets, it could be hard."
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