Only in The City of Brotherly Love could a term be born and raised that had absolutley nothing to do with the household “Holiday” term it’s known for today, only to be adopted by a couple of the same city’s fan bases for it’s epically cruel and unusual heart-breaking association that came to be on Friday, Black Friday, almost a half-century apart, that saw the Philadelphia Eagles on the receiving end of a very spirited Will Ferrell-sized “Good Afternoon” by the Chicago Bears in embarrassing and shame-shivering fashion down at the Linc. Of course these days it seems like nobody is immune to giving the Birds a kick in the pantaloon, this time to the tune of 24-15.
Shocking but yes, the term Black Friday was born and raised in Philadelphia in the 1950s, and made famous by Philadelphia’s finest and it’s bus drivers of the Philadelphia Transportation Company, which was in place before Septa came along in 1964.
But originally it had nothing to do with Christmas shopping sales.
Local Philly cops used Black Friday to describe the chaotic day after Thanksgiving when massive crowds flooded Center City and suburban shoppers flocked across it’s city limits to get a bead on their holiday shopping. So, technically, it kind of had something to do with Christmas shopping but only as pertained to the external mob scenes, not the internal hustle and bustle of Philly’s Department Store Dinosaur District with the veritable plethora of hot big-name anchors like Wannamakers, Gimbel’s, Strawbridge and Clothier and Lit Brothers (yes, it was actually called “Lit” Brothers). These five powerhouses of retail robustness yielded the big holiday profits back then, a couple of scores before the advent of King of Prussia.
GAME RECAP:
Bears (9-4, 5-2 Away) 24, Eagles 15 (8-4, 4-2 Home)
MVP: Kyle Monangai – 130 yds, 22 car, 1 td, 31 long
Betting Winners: Bears +7, Under 43.5
Money Line: Bears +260
Next Up For Eagles: Monday, December 8, 2025 at Chargers
Time: 8:15 ET
TV: ABC/ESPN
By the early 1960s, Philadelphia newspapers picked up the term, and retailers eventually embraced it to describe the start of the holiday shopping season. The rest of the country adopted the name in the 1980s, but Black Friday was born in Philadelphia.
Revisionist Histrionics
Bet your a*s it was but that’s certainly not the way I remember it.
Philly has lived through a Black Friday turning on it before. Friday, October 7, 1977, Game 3 of the NLCS between the Dodgers and the Phillies at the Vet nearly a half-century ago, when everything felt right in the world until it wasn’t. The series was tied at a game apiece in a best-of-five with Phil’s ace Steve Carlton waiting on deck to take the ball in Game 4, a possible close-out game if the Fightins’ could take the Friday afternoon game in South Philly. It was the day I came to believe that ghosts were real, they were absolutely real.
But to me they didn’t look anything like a Jacob Marley, or a Casper the Friendly or a Mr. Greenway, one of the many perps that the Scooby gang would bust on a weekly basis for perpetrating a fraud. Nope, on that day they appeared to me in the form of Dodger’s pitcher Burt Hooton, losing the plate to four straight walks and forcing in three straight Phillies runs, only for that little piece of Heaven to turn out to be an apparition in it’s own right.
The ghosts that would haunt me for almost the next five decades looked a lot more like Vic Davalillo, dropping a suprise drag bunt, down two runs with two outs in the top of the ninth, that foreshadowed the apocolypse from the moment it rolled down the 3rd base line and stayed fair. They resembled Manny Mota, who followed with a drive that glanced off of Greg Luzinski’s glove and then off the left field wall. Actually they looked like Greg Luzinski too, who should have been replaced by Jerry Martin for defensive purposes before the ninth inning began. These earthly diaphanous figures like Davey Lopes and the ball he hit next that glanced off of Mike Schmidt’s knee that Larry Bowa then one-handed and fired to first, beating Lopes to end the game, but who was called safe by umpire Bruce Froemming, allowing the tying run to score, would eventually haunt me in a recurring etheric frightmare for years and years to come.
To an obsessed eleven year old, who feared losing only slightly less than the round end of his mom’s wooden spoon, these sheer beings looked a heckuva lot like shortstop Bill Russell, who followed by driving in Lopes after the Dodgers second baseman advanced to second on a throwing error by Phillie’s reliever Gene Garber, to score what turned out to be the winning run for L.A., and consumated a 6-5 cataclysmic collapse for Philly, that froze an entire stadium, fan base and organization in time. A sequence so strange, sudden, and surreal, all coming with two outs and nobody on the in 9th inning of a monumentally important swing game, that it felt much less like baseball and much more like a trapdoor opening beneath the city that dropped all of us who witnessed it into the abyss of eternal Red October damnation.
Bruce Froemming’s Judgment Day
I have a serious soft spot when it comes to Christmas but when I hear the term Black Friday I don’t get visions of mama in her kerchief or sugar plums frolicking around up inside my head. I tend to see something more along the lines of a deep, deep shade of resentful and revengeful red. Since that nightmarish afternoon I’ve been left to languish in my own personal PTSD, spending much of my adolescence ruminating about randomly and fatefully running into Bruce Froemming some day.
And apparently I could, should I somehow find myself wandering around the affluent town of Mequon, Wisconsin some day, which is where the retired umpire is apparently living out his days, which just so happens to be a stone’s throw away from the celebrated picturesque town of Cedarburg, an historic hyper-photogenic city known for it’s frozen-in-time Christmas backdrop that Hallmark doesn’t have to dress up much to prep for shooting some of their Holiday movies there. Of couse if Gene Garber was making that throw, the stone could very well wind up in Lake Michigan, not Cedarburg. It is said that the month of December is Cedarburg’s Super Bowl. And how, you ask does is any of that Cedarburg knowledge germaine to my story? Well, it’s not really. I just happen to have friends who live there and was just giving them a not-so-veiled shoutout since the theme here is transparency and all.
Now back to my story see. The one about that fateful afternoon back in 1977 that settled into Philadelphia’s bones like a London fog that would seep into the marrow of it’s British residents in a Dickensian tale of regretful pasts and foreshadowing fates.
Almost a half century later the Ghost of Black Friday Future also reared it’s ghoolish face once again in South Philadelphia on this Black Friday afternoon and three and a half hours later, he was saying very little while saying very much, just pointing to the green headstones idicating what everyone pretty much knows might be coming next.
That all-too triggering feeling of something faint and familiar drifted over Lincoln Financial Field on Friday, a chill that didn’t match the weather. A heaviness that didn’t match the kind of presence you sense before you understand it, the kind Charles Dickens pressed into the fog across the pond, a warning folded quietly into the air, as the Chicago Bears visited the Philadelphia Eagles‘ end zone three times and left Lincoln Financial Field with a 24-15 victory.
It was an eerie sensation of feeling, one you cannot yet know. A whisper from the Ghost of Black Friday Past. The Eagles stepped into the dream-ride but were never able to find their way out of the nightmare.
No Big Birds’ Energy
From the opening snap, they moved without their edge. There was no spark, urgency or tempo. They looked like a team waiting for the day to wake them up instead of taking control of it. Jalen Hurts couldn’t find rhythm. Two turnovers, one louder than the other, drained what little life the building tried to generate. A crowd ready to explode to exororcize the team’s epic melt down in Dallas just five daays ago spent most of the afternoon caught between frustration and disbelief.
Chicago didn’t need fireworks. They just owned the line of scrimmage. The Bears finished with 281 rushing yards, a ground assault that came in steady, unhurried waves. Kyle Monangai ran for 130 yards on 22 carries, while former Eagle D’Andre Swift added 125 yds on 18 carries, both had cracked the century mark with still three minutes left in the third quarter. They didn’t just run well, they ran with confidence, anger, rhythm, and purpose, something the Eagles never found, finishing with just 87 rushing yards, a number that only felt smaller as the minutes passed.
A Tush-Push Nightmare
There was one stretch albeit brief and fragile when the game felt ready to tilt. Saquon Barkley began running and cutting with purpose on a short field given to him by defensive teammate Jalyx Hunt when he picked off Bears quarterback Caleb Williams in the left flat. The line finally leaned forward. The offense breathed for the first time. The crowd stirred, recognizing a flicker of something they’d been waiting all afternoon to feel.
And then the moment that turned the day.
Third and a long one at the Bears’ 12 yard line. The kind of down Philadelphia usually bends to it’s will.
This time the Birds rolled out old faithful, the Tush-Push, their signature play that the Detroit Lions stopped on back to back snaps late in the game two weeks ago, a play that doesn’t appear to be as automatic as it used to be lately. Chicago didn’t hesitate. Nashon Wright shot through the crease, met Hurts at the line, ripped the ball free and caused a fumble that landed with the cold finality of a dropped curtain. One of the biggest plays of the afternoon, delivered by a name no one expected to hear in the moment that mattered most, and just like that the air shifted.
On the very next play, Monangai ripped off a 31-yard run straight up the middle. A run that didn’t need misdirection or trickery. A run that sliced through complacency and poor leverage. A run that told you everything you needed to know about how the rest of the afternoon would unfold.
Monangai capped off the drive a few plays later with a nine yard waltz to the end zone early in the fourth quarter and the Birds never fully recovered after that.
No-Make Jake’s Costly Missed PAT
But the turning points didn’t end there. Jake Elliott, one of the most reliable kickers in the league, missed an extra point after A.J. Brown’s first touchdown, a simple point-after that should have tied the game at 10 early in hte 3rd quarter. Instead, it left the Eagles chasing, forcing their hand in ways that never aligned with the rhythm of the day. When they eventually needed a two-point conversion, after Brown scored his second toucvhdown of the game with just over three minutes left, they didn’t get it. A simple miss early in the third quarter that hung over everything that followed.
Brown was one of the few bright spots. He finished with 10 catches, 132 yards and two touchdowns.
A performance good enough to win on most days.
But not this one.
The Bears doubled the Eagles in first downs, 28 to 14, controlled nearly 40 minutes of possession, and outgained them 425 to 317. At no point did the numbers lie. At no point did it look like Philadelphia was the steadier team. The Bears finished the first half with an imbalanced time of possession of 21 minutes to nine and 16 first downs to just two for the Eagles. Yes, it was that bad. It was so bad it made Ebenezer Scrooge’ s night out with the GOCP feel like a trip to Epcot.
So as the game settled into its final stretch, the same uneasy feeling from before kickoff thickened. The kind that doesn’t announce itself until it does. The kind that settles on your shoulders like something old is returning to check in.
The Eagles never led, never played from a position of strength, never punched back long enough to make Chicago blink.
A Nightmare Before Christmas
And so another Black Friday will go down in the annals of Philly sports lore as an epic sports tragedy, a real life potential Santa Claus rally cloaked in a Dickensian costume that clashed even in the best of kind glory-lights. A nightmare of sorts that will perhaps evoke an array of different emotions than the one spewed from the nightmare of their baseball counterpart’s ghoolish haunting these almost fifty years ago, yet will still carry the same sort of debilitating triggering and reverberating regret as the one that fell apart back in 1977 did. Not because the games matched. Not because the disasters aligned. But because the day carried that same strange shadow the city knows too well. Hint: It rhymes with DeVonta Smith’s nickname, The Slim Reaper.
The Ghost of Black Friday Past came through the fog again this Black Friday with all the weight of a Jacob Marley guilt trip and the drag of the chains he forged in life. If the Birds don’t transform themselves and heed the warnings from their translucent visitor’s soon, they will surely become them too, well before their time has come.
Ghosts of Black Friday Past Haunt Eagles Like a Wasted Burt Hooton Melt Down