More than animosity, respect defines the NFL's oldest and best rivalry.
To grasp this fully, you have to go back to one day in 1956 when it wasn't Bears legend George Halas coaching against the Packers. It was Halas coaxing the people of Green Bay on behalf of the home team considered his nemesis.
With the Packers facing the threat of NFL relocation unless city residents approved a new football stadium, Halas boldly sought to keep his field enemies closer to Chicago. Everybody in Wisconsin knew Halas despised the Packers for two Sundays every football season.
But less publicized was the honorable way Halas treated the Packers organization the other 363 days of the year, best illustrated when the Bears founder showed up to push public funding for what is now Lambeau Field.
"While the NFL and other people were telling Green Bay what needed to be done, George Halas went up there and made an impassioned plea about how important the Packers were to the community," said incoming Bears Chairman George McCaskey.
At that rally in '56, heavily promoted on local radio, Halas preached to locals used to booing his Bears. When voters responded April 3, 1956, by passing the stadium referendum measure to issue bonds that greenlighted more pro football in Green Bay, Halas received a share of the credit.
McCaskey, named for his famous grandfather, chuckled when recalling the irony of a story that still makes him proud.
"I'm biased, of course, but in my view that example gives you some idea of the measure of the man," McCaskey said.
It also reveals the true spirit behind the Bears-Packers series that peaks Sunday at Soldier Field when the two teams meet for the 182nd time in the NFC championship game.
Sure, it can get nasty when the Bears and Packers play.
Halas and Curly Lambeau, the Packers vice president and head coach from 1919 to 1949, set the tone for generations to follow by regularly engaging in intense gamesmanship that nearly crossed the line of sportsmanship. Dozens of players over the years have recalled the way Halas' demeanor would transform from professional to possessed after kickoff, when he was known to heckle Packers tackled near the Bears' sideline.
"I always kind of felt Halas was a friend of the Packers, but when it came down to game day, I know he screamed like heck at them,'' said Art Daley, 94, a former sports writer for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. "It wasn't dirty. But, boy, it was intense."
We've also seen enough replays of cheap shots in the post-Halas era to have a continuous loop running in our memories. The bitterness between Mike Ditka and Forrest Gregg helped produce regrettable incidents such as Charles Martin slamming Jim McMahon in 1986 and Ken Stills clocking Walter Payton out of bounds in 1985. Surely nails-for-breakfast linebackers Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke, among others, had their outbursts too. It happens.
But generally speaking, since the first time these two franchises played almost 90 years ago, most of the vitriol exchanged comes from fans more than players and coaches. These days most of the trash-talking comes from talk-radio callers or tired comparisons of the cities. No, the modern-day Bears-Packers rivalry isn't as edgy as Steelers-Ravens or as petty as Jets-Patriots and thank goodness.
Lovie Smith didn't sound very convincing Monday when he claimed, "We don't like each other." Did he? About the same time Smith was paying lip service to manufactured hostility, Packers coach Mike McCarthy sounded sincere calling his Bears counterpart a fine coach and gentleman. Heck, Sunday's opposing quarterbacks, Jay Cutler and Aaron Rodgers, regularly exchange texts, and things are so chummy this week you imagine one of them ending a message "XOXO.''
Documented and anecdotal history suggests, beneath the game-day edginess, Halas occasionally showed a soft spot for the Packers going back to the NFL's infancy. Read "Papa Bear," by author Jeff Davis, and it's clear Halas always recognized how both teams needed each other to grow their respective franchises and the league.
As noted in the Packers media guide, it was Halas who was instrumental in persuading league partners in 1922 to allow Green Bay and Lambeau back in the fold after the Packers were banned for using college players illegally. Though it's interesting to note that it was Halas who originally discovered that the Packers used the players and the Bears signed one of them, Hunk Anderson, after the hubbub.
Still, a mutual respect developed, and the Packers returned the favor during the Great Depression when hard financial times left Halas scrounging for money to meet payroll expenses.
"He had to borrow money from his mother and his mother-in-law, and to me it speaks to his vision that he was able to keep things going," McCaskey said.
Halas also accepted a $1,500 loan from the Packers in 1932, according to Green Bay Press-Gazette archives. Some football historians believe it was that gesture by the Packers that drove Halas to get so involved in 1956 when the NFL deemed old City Stadium and its 24,000-seat capacity too small.
But perhaps Halas' biggest contribution to his football neighbor 185 miles to the north went beyond supporting stadium projects that kept afloat teams in small markets such as Green Bay. When the Packers needed to hire a coach at the end of the 1958 season, team President Dominic Olejniczak sought Halas' opinion.
"Vince Lombardi's your man,'' Halas told Olejniczak.
Indeed he was. No wonder when Halas died in 1983, Olejniczak was quoted in newspapers as saying, "The Packers could not have had a better friend than George Halas."
And this about the only coach to ever beat Lombardi five times.
"The story I heard was George Halas also was the only coach Vince Lombardi addressed by the title 'Coach,'" McCaskey said. "I think that's the measure of the type of respect they had for each other."
It's also another measure of what makes this respectful rivalry unique.