The Devin Hester: Devin Hester (2006-2013) – Whenever there’s a football player who’s super-fast and/or super-quick, you always hear the phrase “he’s a threat to score any time he touches the ball,” and it’s usually an exaggeration. Sure, Johnny Punt Return is good – hence the name – but if he gets pinned deep and the blocking isn’t there, he’s usually screwed. But for at least two years, Devin Hester really was that guy. Hell, his college nickname was Devin “Anytime” Hester. (Until Bears fans came up with that “Windy City Flyer” nickname that was some straight-up leather helmet nonsense.) Every time there was a kickoff, every time there was a punt, and that one time when there was a really long field goal, you’d lean a little closer to the TV, because the man was unstoppable. A kick return for a touchdown changed from a pleasant surprise to something you expected. Opposing teams started just giving the ball to the Bears with incredibly good field position, because it was a better strategy to punt the ball out of bounds as soon as possible at the 35 yard line than to risk Hester getting his hands on the ball at the 15. Hell, after a while, people started just taking the illegal procedure penalty and kicking out of bounds on kickoffs. It was unrealistic, to the point where your first instinct is to compare it to watching Michael Jordan in his prime, but then you realize that’s an insufficient comparison, and you have to move up to video games. 2006-07 Devin Hester was Tecmo Super Bowl Bo Jackson in real life. That’s it. That’s the only valid comparison to what was happening, like if he had been a less humble man, he would’ve just run to the one yard line, then reversed field and done a full lap around the field before actually scoring, but he didn’t, because he felt sorry for us, and an ill-timed Rex Grossman interception had us down by ten. The opening kickoff of Super Bowl XLI will probably always be my favorite Bears memory, (Look, I watched Super Bowl XX, but I was 5, so I had no idea what was going on beyond “FRIDGE GOOD” or whatever) because for one brief moment, it felt like holy shit, they’re actually going to do this. Of course, the rest of the game could best be described as a wroth Old Testament Jehova saying “lol no,” but at least we had that one play. In the end, nothing gold can stay, so he came back down to human levels eventually, but prime Devin Hester was a phenomenon, like an unbelievable tall tale unfolding in front of our eyes, roping a tornado and carving out the Grand Canyon, and then doing the Deion Sanders Primetime dance into legend. We didn’t watch Devin Hester, we bore witness to him, like Robert Oppenheimer watching the first nuclear bomb test, except Devin’s cool, he never hurt nobody.
The Not Devin Hester: Deonte Thompson (2015-2017) – Welp, Hester was sent away on the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth (Atlanta) in 2014, and for the most part, it’s been real hard times ever since. It’s easy to forget the embarrassment of riches we once had, where not only was Devin Hester not the only Bear to run a punt or a kick in for a TD during his run, but he wasn’t even their only Pro Bowl kick returner over that span. (I see you, Johnny Knox) So, friends, it was really hard to watch that position suddenly descend into the same “uhh, just throw some guy out there” abyss that safety fell into for a while. And “some guy” in this situation was Deonte Thompson, one of the worst kick returners I’ve ever seen. I’ll swear to any god you out in front of me that he never took a kickoff and made it past the 15 yard line. The stats say otherwise, but I call FAKE NEWS on that shit. They could have just stuck an offensive lineman out there to down the ball in the end zone and/or bat it out of bounds or some shit and gotten better results. Holmes was so bad that as soon as Tarik Cohen made his presence known, they cut this dude from the team entirely. Of course, this adds bonus horror as a big “fuck you, John Fox” moment, because Thompson actually is a serviceable wide receiver, which was something the 2017 Bears had none of at the time. So while we were literally bringing guys in off the practice squad and naming them starters the same day, this dude made meaningful contributions in Buffalo. Good for him, I say.
The Devin Horror: Devin Hester: Wide Receiver (2008-2012) – The real bummer of Devin Hester’s kick returning prime was that it lasted exactly as long as his first two seasons. Yeah, he was still good after that and took enough all the way to the end zone to set a career record, but he was no longer transcendent. He returned 20 kicks for touchdowns, but over half of them (12) were from 2006 and 2007 alone. So what happened? The Bears happened. But specifically, they tried to make him a full-time wide receiver. And I get it; if you’ve got a guy with insane skills like that, you try to find new ways to get him the ball, but the lack of imagination there was something else. It would be one thing if they used him in that “secret weapon” kind of role, where they put him in the wildcat formation or ran some double reverses and other crazy shit to freak the defense out, or even did what the Cowboys did with Deion Sanders, and just ran him deep downfield and challenged the opposing cornerback to keep up with him. But instead, they just said “hey, you’re a wide receiver now, line up over there and do whatever we’d have Brandon Lloyd do in the same situation.” They treated him as just a another guy, and that’s what he became. He didn’t have the hands or the route-running skills to be an every-down wide receiver, so he turned out to be a pretty lousy one, while also suffering in the kick return game, dropping from Tecmo Bo to maybe Tecmo Ernest Byner or Tecmo Marion Butts. The Bears somehow ended up with the world’s most perfect Ferrari, and they wore out the suspension while using it to help their buddy haul a load of cinder blocks. Maybe this was why the dude himself actually never wanted to play offense and preferred sticking to defense. Stupid Bears.
The Sentimental Hester: Dennis Gentry (1982-1992) – I never thought about this until just now, but this guy probably existed thirty years before his time. He was a little fast guy who was all-purpose in every sense of the word. In addition to being the Bears’ kick returner for a hundred years, he played both running back and wide receiver, and not just the “occasionally lined up wide” role that Neal Anderson played. He actually usually had “running back/wide receiver” as his position on the trading cards of the day, and as far as I know, he was the only guy like that. He was Tarik Cohen thirty-five years earlier, but stuck in an offense that didn’t believe in throwing the football and literally had a Pro Bowl running back every year he played except ’82 and ’87, minimizing his contributions there. So he was a kick returner, and a pretty damn good one, and had the honor of playing such a role in the original Tecmo Bowl, which is probably more important than any actual on-field achievement. The shame of the modern world is that our sports games get updated yearly, so there can no longer be a sentimental attachment to the digitized version of a dude. Well, there’s that and the millions killed yearly by neoliberalism and the American pursuit of empire, but yearly roster updates are up there. Fuckin’ Madden, man.