by Eddie Payton
If you disagree with that, then name me one team in the SEC—or in the South for that matter—in 1972 that wouldn’t have wanted four first-round draft picks and 10 future NFL players on their team. What’s that? Come again? I can’t hear you. The fact is, we looked good to them on paper, but just not in person. We were the wrong color. We were stacked with elite black athletes who’d been overlooked. As I said, not a single one of us was recruited by any of the top-flight white schools, and that’s more than just a shame. It was downright stupid. Without even talking about Walter, a few of the guys we had, like Rickey Young, Don Reese, Robert Brazile, John Tate, and Emanuel Zanders, could’ve been the difference makers for Alabama (10–2) or Auburn (10–1) in their failed quests to win the national championship. Yet those schools didn’t even see those guys standing right there in their own backyards. Either that or they saw them and just looked the other way because they couldn’t get over the color of their skin.
You probably don’t even think of mentioning Jackson State when you talk about the great teams of yesteryear, because being all black, we weren’t part of the history. But let me tell you, our team had so much speed up and down the lineup and so much pure athletic ability that I don’t know of any team anywhere who would’ve been able to match up with us. Not even legendary Alabama would’ve been up to the task. We would’ve done the same thing to them that USC did when they pounded ’em 42–21 in Birmingham in 1970. USC’s Sam Cunningham was historic that night and ran all over ’Bama. The world remembers what Sam the Bam did, and they remember how Bear Bryant reacted by reaching out to black players after that game. But there were lots of unnoticed black kids who could’ve done that. Not to take anything away from Cunningham, but it could’ve easily been any of us Jackson State guys had we played that game. Change came to college football not because Sam Cunningham was Sam Cunningham, but because Sam Cunningham was black. It wasn’t that Sam Cunningham couldn’t be ignored anymore; it was that black kids couldn’t be.
I’ve heard before that after the USC/Alabama game, Bear Bryant said something like, “We got to get some of ours to keep up with some of theirs.” What he meant was, they had to start looking at the black kids. Bear Bryant gets credit, but only for seeing that first. In Sam Cunningham, Bear saw what he was missing out there, so he wanted to start recruiting blacks. Cunningham changed Bear’s mind in the same way Elmo Wright and Warren McVea of the University of Houston convinced Johnny Vaught that Ole Miss needed to take this integration thing a little more seriously, too. They hadn’t before seen anybody that big and athletic and with that kind of speed. Our color kept those white schools from recruiting us for so long, but hey, at least they finally came to their senses. All the white schools started to want us black kids around the end of my college days—but let’s be real here. They didn’t want us because they wanted us. They wanted us because they needed us.
Of course, if I am really being real here, I have to say it wasn’t just white folks who saw some of us black kids as too dark back then. Some black folks did, too. Take, for example, the parents of a black girl Walter took a liking to. During his first year at Jackson State, he found himself this little number that turned into his girlfriend. Walter was completely infatuated with her, and she was infatuated with him. Then the girl’s parents got all up in their business and started fussin’ about Walter dating their daughter. The problem there was that, though the girl’s mother was dark-skinned, the girl’s father was fair-skinned. The two of them coming together produced a daughter who was also fair-skinned. Amazingly, the girl’s mother disapproved of her fair-skinned daughter’s relationship with Walter and ultimately ended it because she was concerned about the skin complexion of her grandkids. Walter was too dark, and they didn’t want to risk having dark-skinned grandbabies. Can you believe that? The mother wasn’t worried about her daughter’s happiness or anything like that. She was worried about the color of her daughter’s potential offspring. I shake my head about that even to this day.
That was all pretty hard for Walter to deal with, as you can imagine. In fact, it crushed him. What made it worse was that the girl went right along with it. Walter bounced back from hits on the field all the time, but that girl’s rejection really leveled the poor guy. He couldn’t get his mind off that girl, and it put him in a real funk. If it had been me, I might’ve just said “good riddance” and moved on to all the other pretty girls out there waiting for me. I mean, I’ve been out of the dating game for so long now that I don’t know if this is still the case, but I don’t remember ever seeing an unattractive black female back then, whether fair-skinned, dark-skinned, or whatever. They were all beautiful. I couldn’t understand why some black people didn’t see it that way.
It’s gotten better over time, I guess, just like the whole “white schools not recruiting black kids” thing got better, but it’s still there in some places. In a state like Louisiana, for example, the biggest racial issue doesn’t exist between blacks and whites. The biggest problem is between light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks. One group says they’re Creole Cajuns, and the other group says they’re black. Each group sees the other group as different. There are still some black people out there who’d prefer their daughter or son marry somebody who is fairer-skinned than they are. Even when I was growing up in Columbia and going to an all-black school, the fair-skinned black males and females were always class president, prom queen, Miss this, Mr. that, etc.
Walter and I were roommates, and we talked a lot about that kind of stuff. We talked about how backward that girl and her parents were, and I tried to push Walter to just move on to other things. Prettier things. Like I said, there were plenty of beautiful black girls out there, and I knew most of them wouldn’t care how dark he was. In an effort to get him to explore a little bit, I showed him “the tree.”
There was this tree right outside our dorm room window. It was a towering old oak tree with lots and lots of big sprawling limbs, and I showed Walter how to slip down it so we could get out and see some girls. Of course, Walter mostly just wanted to go into town and hang out. So, we did that, too. We’d just slip out to go down to the Penguin Restaurant to get a fish sandwich or the hot dog special (which brought me back to what got me to sign with Jackson State in the first place). Anyway, though the food seemed to be the main thing on Walter’s mind, I was usually scanning the place for girls. Actually, one girl in particular. Her name was Mary.
Mary’s daddy had a big Cadillac, and she’d often get to drive it out and would park it in the parking lot adjacent to Jones Hall, the football dormitory. I’d climb down that tree with Walter, but once we were down, Mary was mine and Walter was on his own. You would’ve done the same had you seen Mary. I’d climb down the tree and go down the side of the building where it was dark, and I’d sit there in the car with her. And don’t worry about how Walter was doing out there on his own. The kid was good-looking, and he was doing just fine. He finally found this one new girl he kinda liked (and who didn’t mind his dark skin), and that girl’s roommate had a place in the apartments right behind Jones Hall, right across the tracks. So, when we climbed down that tree, I’d go off to see Mary, and if Walter didn’t head into town for a burger, he’d go around back, go through the fence, jump the track, and go across the street to the apartments where that girl would be waiting for him. Looking forward to going down that tree was often what got us through Coach Hill’s crazy hard practices. Coach would push us to the limit, and Walter and I would talk about how crazy he was, and then we’d start talking about who was going down the tree first that night and what time we were coming back. Those were some damn good times. Then Coach Hill found out about that tree.
Word got to Coach Hill that players had been seen climbing out the window and on down that oak tree. He found out that Room 201 was the room with the window right by that tree, and he knew Walter and I were in that room. Well, Coach put two and two together and came up with 22, which was my
number. That’s right, he blamed me for the whole thing and said I put Walter up to it. So, he wanted to kill me, probably because I was a senior and all, but he didn’t want to piss off Walter. He’d already had to chase Walter down once before, and he wasn’t about to set him off again.
So, what Coach did, besides lay into me a little, was get out the saw and start cutting the bottom limbs off the tree. He figured we wouldn’t have enough to hang onto at the end of our climb. He was wrong. Cutting down those bottom limbs didn’t bother us at all. We discovered that we could hang from the top limb, catch the tree, shimmy down the tree, and use the cut off stumps to get back up to the upper limbs and get back in the room. I suppose the coaches at the white schools weren’t the only ones underestimating our athletic ability.
Coach found out we were still getting up and down that tree about three weeks later, so he had maintenance cut off all of the limbs on the tree. So as not to kill the tree, they left a stump about five inches long where each limb had been and then painted the ends white. It looked an awful lot like steps to us, and that’s what we used them for. Seemed every time they’d cut the limbs, it just got easier to climb up and down.
We started staying out longer and longer and didn’t even really fear Coach Hill when it came to sneaking out down that tree. Coach could have the day, but the night belonged to us. Curfew? Not for the Payton boys. We snuck out every night, even if it wasn’t exactly “sneaking out” anymore.
As you can imagine, Coach was getting frustrated because he knew what we were up to, but he just couldn’t stop us. I think he didn’t like two knuckleheads flaunting it in his face right there for all the other players to see. He called a team meeting and tried to make it seem like he wasn’t going to take it anymore, but didn’t yet know who was doing it. “I know some of y’all are slipping out at night,” Coach said to the team. “If I catch you slipping out, I’ll send you home to your folks.” Walter and I knew better. We knew Coach knew who it was, and we knew he didn’t want to catch us.
We kept going up and down that tree, thinking it would never end. Then Coach Hill finally won out. He didn’t just cut more of the limbs off this time. That crazy man had the entire tree cut down. We were like, Well, I guess that’s it then. No more tree meant no more tree-climbing, so we knew we were finally beat. The stump is still over there today, a very short but amusing monument to the antics of Walter and Eddie Payton. That’s one bad-ass tree stump.
Coach cutting down that tree was probably the first time I realized that all good things come to an end eventually. And just like that tree, Payton & Payton would have to come to an end, too. Funny thing is that sometimes, when something good comes to end, something even better begins. Walter was fixin’ to break out during the rest of his days at Jackson State. But the question is, was it because I left, or was it because a girl named Connie showed up?
7. Throwin’ Out the Old
Have I yet told you that Coach Hill was a hard-ass? Well, he was. Have I mentioned he pushed us football players a bit too far at times? Well, he did. Did you think I would miss Coach Hill’s brutal ways when I left Jackson State? Well, I didn’t. Not in the least. Still, I was hoping that he might miss me, at least a little, on the field. I guess it’s hard to miss someone when someone better comes along. As it turned out, he still had my little brother, and Walter was about to explode. Coach knew Walter was fixin’ to turn into the best player he’d ever seen. The best player to ever put on a Jackson State uniform. The best player the state of Mississippi had ever produced. Coach just had one problem: Walter was distracted. He wasn’t sure how to get his mind off that girl who rejected him. Walter wanted to move on from all that mess, but he just didn’t know how. Lucky for Walter, our hard-ass coach was a softie with the ladies.
Coach Hill didn’t have any problem getting women to like him. Once he was divorced, it was open season. He’d been dating a woman from New Orleans named Betty, and that woman had a niece who Coach thought was a pretty cool girl. Coach had met her a few times on trips to see Betty, and in his eyes, she’d be quite a catch for some lucky young man. Well, one day Coach saw Walter on campus moping around, dwelling on the fact that he’d been kicked to the curb on account of his skin being too dark. He was always wallowing in despair over that situation and would sometimes even go around trying to be in the right place at the right time so he could “run into” that girl on campus. Coach looked at his depressed star running back and he thought about Betty’s niece. Then he put two and two together. The best way to get Walter out of his rejection-induced funk was to introduce him to someone new. Someone with personality. Someone pretty. Someone who had it all. Someone who could make Walter forget all about that other girl. Coach introduced my baby brother to someone named Connie.
It might’ve taken Connie a little while to warm up to the idea of meeting Walter (especially when she first saw a picture of him), but once she did, the two of them really hit it off. Coach Hill knew exactly what he was doing. He had picked a good one for his prized player. Perhaps a perfect one. Connie proved to be an instant Payton funk eraser, and Walter was back to being happy. He now only had eyes for a girl from New Orleans, and he only had two words for that girl who had rejected him: “Who dat?” And you know, I think that other girl turned out to be heartbroken by Walter’s sudden change in direction. But hey, what goes around comes around, right? And Connie was coming around more and more as she and Walter started developing their relationship. She was pulling on his heartstrings, and Coach Hill was pulling some strings of his own. He talked to someone who talked to someone, and they all agreed they wanted to keep Walter happy. It wasn’t long before Connie was enrolled at Jackson State.
With that other girl off his mind and Connie on campus, Walter was out of his depression and back to giving Coach Hill what he had wanted all along: a focused stud running back. And not only was Connie now Walter’s one and only, but with me gone, the football field was all his, too. What wasn’t gone, at least for me, were the great memories of our one year playing football together. Perhaps Coach Hill and Walter didn’t think much about it at the time, but I was picturing plays from the previous year as if I was still on the team. I often thought about how Walter and I, depending on the formation, had the freedom to switch places. The thing is, I’d rather run to the right and then left, and Walter would rather run to the left and then right. There was a play we ran that was designed to originally go right, but if we saw the defense cheating toward that side, our quarterback could read it and change it to a sweep the other way. Since the play would be going left, Walter would want to run it, so we’d sometimes just trade places. Walter would holler, “Switch!” and he’d take the pitch and run it out. The quarterback didn’t even need to know who was going to run the ball or which one of us he was going to pitch it to. It was no worry to him. He just knew it was a sweep and that he’d pitch to the trailing tailback, whether he was 5'7" or 5'10". If it was me, it was me. If it was Walter, it was Walter. Either way, it was gonna be good.
I often found myself thinking about how that Jackson State team with Walter and me was about as cohesive a group as you will ever see in college football. When you take a good look along the offensive line we had, you can’t help but be in awe. I mean, we had guys like Ed Hardy (who was drafted by the 49ers), Emanuel Zanders (who played for the Saints), and Leon Gray (played 11 seasons in the NFL). Another kid on that line was Otis Stricklin, and he was probably even better than Leon, in my opinion. He just wasn’t big enough to get attention and play in the NFL. Still, I think he was better. Or maybe I’m just partial to little guys. I often found myself looking back at it then. It was a year and a time in my life that meant a whole lot to me, and I’ll never stop thinking about that. You know, I think that season meant a whole lot to all the other guys on that team, too, Walter included.
When I left Jackson State, a part of it came with me, and a part of me stayed behind. That part of me, the
spirit of a young and cocky senior back who just knew he could conquer the world, will always be running the fields at Jackson State. What I didn’t leave behind, though, was my shadow. When I was gone, Walter was out of my shadow once again—once and for all, in fact. The Jackson State Tigers were no longer our team. It was now Walter’s team. And for a time there, it looked like he was the team.
With me gone, Walter became the lead running back, the punter, the place kicker, and even threw the halfback pass several times. And everything he did, he did top-notch. While Walter was engaging in what was the opposite of a sophomore slump, I was out there giving the Canadian Football League (CFL) a shot with Ottawa. And calling it a “shot” is just about right. I only lasted three months or so and decided to come back to Jackson State to work on my bachelor’s degree, which I didn’t finish when I ran out of football eligibility. So, there I was, back at school, and I wasn’t going to be on the field. It was very different for me, that’s for sure. I wasn’t casting a shadow anymore, and I even started to notice that Walter’s shadow was creeping its way toward me. Maybe I tried to ignore it, but that didn’t stop it from moving ever closer. During his first year without his big brother, Walter was the second leading scorer. And I’m not just talking Jackson State. And I’m not just talking the SWAC. And I’m not just talking Mississippi. And I’m not just talking the South. I’m talking the whole nation. Walter scored the second-most points in all the land. He also managed the highest single-game scoring total in college football history when he scored 46 points in a single game. Now, just pause for a minute and do what I like to do. Close your eyes and just think about that. Okay, wait, don’t close your eyes. I want you to keep reading. So, just keep your eyes open, stop for a bit here, and think about what an amazing thing Walter did. 46 points. From one man. In one game. And now think about how ironic it is that in the Super Bowl that Walter helped bring to Chicago, the Bears scored 46 points just like Walter did in that one game at Jackson State in 1972. Only Walter didn’t get a single point in that Super Bowl.
