SEPTEMBER 2019 | CHICAGO 77
PHOTOGRAPHY: (GALA) CHRIS SWEDA/
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
; (OTHERS) COURTESY OF THE TRUBISKY FAMILY
Other than home games, Trubisky
doesn’t get downtown much. His house is
near the Bears’ Lake Forest training facil-
ity, and so this haircut is part of a rare foray
into the city. Everyone at the barbershop
is respectful of his space, but at one point
Trubisky notices a grinning man outside
pointing his cellphone camera directly at
him through the shop’s window.
Funk asks a friend to go deal with it,
but his buddy demurs. “He’s got cracked,
swollen fingers, bro,” the friend says. “I
don’t trust this guy.”ARLY IMPRESSIONS OF
Trubisky were partly
informed by old tweets from
high school that were dug up
shortly after the 2017 draft,
and they painted a portrait
of a happy-go-lucky jock. On the scale
of problematic social media behavior,
these missives hardly registered as any-
thing beyond goofy, but they were quickly
scrubbed from his account nonetheless
by his agent’s team. It’s a shame, because
some of them were genuinely endearing:
“ate 21 cough drops today #notgood”;
“USA has the sweetest f lag”; “just got
handed a 2011 penny damn these boys
are #Shiny.” The most infamous one: “I
love to kiss tittiess.” It still makes me
chuckle, and I tell him this.
“Oh, hilarious,” he says. “And some
of them weren’t even me.” He explains
that he and his friends were “messing
around with each other’s phones” on a
basketball team trip. “People don’t know
the backstory, and I don’t want the back-
story to get out because that’s the funny
thing about it.”
These days, to keep focused during
the season, Trubisky deletes Twitter
and Instagram from his phone as soon
as training camp begins. But on this day
he spends some of the nearly two-hourride from the barbershop to his house in
Libertyville posting shots from Go Play
Day to his Instagram account. His men-
tions can be a harrowing scene, but that
doesn’t stop him from occasionally read-
ing what people write.
“One person will comment, ‘You’re a
god, you’re the best, you’re amazing.’ The
nex t per son w i l l say, ‘You’re g a rba ge, you
shouldn’t be in the NFL, you’re a piece ofcrap.’ How can you be that high and that
low? All you can do is laugh at it.”
During the season his agent’s team
posts on his accounts for him. “I’m very
specific about what I share,” he says. “I’ll
give people insight but never get too close
because I think that takes away from the
sacredness of what you’re doing on a day-
to-day basis.”
(Continued on page 125)Clockwise from top left: With his dad, Dave, at
age 9 in Mentor, Ohio; with girlfriend Hillary
Gallagher at a Bears charity gala in May; after
a game his junior year of high school (he was
named the top player in the state as a senior).