by Eddie Payton
I looked at the clock, realized what time it was, rubbed my eyes, and then said, “Bro, it’s 3:00 in the morning! Who the hell are you talking about?”
“McMahon, man!” Walter said with the excitement of a 12-year-old kid. “Jim McMahon! He got in the game and was out there just having fun, hollering shit at the defense like he ain’t scared at all. He told one guy, ‘I was fucking yo’ mama last night, and she ain’t worth shit!’”
Well, that woke me up. “What? Really? He said that?” I asked, thinking I should’ve come up with that line. “That son of a bitch is going to get killed out there.”
“Man, the guys love him. That stuff fired ’em up. Boy, the dude’s crazy, but he can play! He’s gonna be good.”
Yeah, he was going to be good, but that didn’t mean it was all going to come together for the Bears in 1982. It didn’t matter much that year, I guess, with the season shorted by a strike and all. Walter had only gotten a glimpse of the wonder drug that Jim McMahon would prove to be for the Bears. But during that 1982 season, there were some other kinds of drugs going around.
Missing all those games was stressful for a lot of guys. An eight-week vacation might sound good on the surface, but when it’s not planned, some guys don’t know what to do with themselves. It’s sort of like the lottery. There are some people who just have no business winning it, and they’ll be broke again in a few short years. Well, give some players eight weeks off, and the same sort of thing happens. A lot of guys were doing everything right and working out hard for the first couple of weeks. Everyone wanted to stay in shape because we were told the strike wouldn’t last long. After three weeks, though, a number of players kind of backed off their conditioning because it looked as if the strike could drag on for months. Some guys were doing a little less training and found other things to keep themselves occupied. They made more personal appearances, went home and hung out with family and friends, went to bars, and went to women. And yes, without any testing for weeks, some thought it was safe to do a little drugs. Then a little more. Then all of a sudden, we players had a drug test dropped on us, and a lot of guys were up shit creek without a paddle. Hell, for the Vikings, half the team was about to fail, and that’s probably not an exaggeration. I was part of the clean half, so there were no worries for me.
Being an entrepreneur at heart, though, I saw an opportunity to enter the drug-testing biz and ran with it. It just seemed brilliant to me at the time. Not only would I make a little cash, but I could also help keep my team together. My teammates became my clients, and the men’s restroom became my office. You see, as guys came in to pee in the cup for the drug test, the ones who were guilty of illegal drug use were my targets. And I didn’t even have to know exactly who they were. “Fifty bucks for a cup of clean pee,” I’d bark out to the guys as they came in. Thirty years ago, they didn’t have a monitor to accompany the pee-er during a drug test, so it was easy to fool ’em. I would just take the $50, pee in a cup, and hand it back. It was as simple as that. And thank goodness they didn’t require a completely full cup, either, because with such high demand at the time, the supply was a little hard to provide. “Pass the word to the next guy to bring me more water,” I’d say as one customer would leave with a half-filled cup of my pee. My bladder was empty, but my pockets were full. And so was our roster.
I had some good times up there with the Vikings, but pee wasn’t the only thing I was running out of in those days. My time in the NFL was running out, too. As Walter and the Bears looked to be on the brink of shining bright, my football career was in its twilight stage. I really did enjoy my time in Minnesota. If it weren’t so damn cold up there, I could probably live there even now. I just love the place. I had three good years with the Vikings and am grateful to this day for the opportunity and the honor of playing for them. I didn’t want it to end, but sometimes it doesn’t matter what you want. When it comes to playing in the NFL, at some point, well, you just get old. And you’re usually very young when it happens, if you know what I’m saying. It’s just such a competitive league and such a hard place to play, and younger, faster guys are always coming in. For me, it was getting more and more difficult to avoid the new young headhunters looking to make a name for themselves, coming in there and trying to take my head off every time I’d catch the ball. At some point, it just ain’t worth it, and when three years passed for me in Minnesota, it was time for me to hang it up. I thank God every day for the blessing of having played pro football for a living, and I thank Him even more that I made it out in one piece.
With my cleats hung up for good, it was time for Walter to carry on the Payton name in the NFL by himself. And boy, did he ever carry it. The Bears improved each year as McMahon gained experience and the passing game became a real weapon. It wasn’t just on offense that they started peaking, either. Buddy Ryan’s “46” defense was beginning to dominate opposing offenses, and it became clear to everyone that the ingredients for a championship team were coming together in Chicago. Walter was having his best year yet, just ripping through the league, but it still wasn’t easy for him. Despite the improved play all around him, he was still taking a beating in the league. Walter and I talked after games, and he’d tell me how much he was hurting. Bud Holmes saw it firsthand, as he traveled to most of the Bears games. “No one on a football field gets beat up more than the running back,” Bud said. “Walter got pounded so damn bad, I’d walk him into the training room and sit him down, and his old knees would look like basketballs. They were so swollen that the trainers would have to drain the fluid.”
After a game Walter would sit in the whirlpool and he’d look like somebody had taken a sledge hammer and beaten on his knees. Really, it was that bad there for a while. The NFL is unforgiving, and the training staff would furnish some sort of pills as the only type of mercy he could get. Now, when I say pills, I ain’t talking anything illegal. Walter had no addiction issues of any kind. Let’s just put it this way: he wouldn’t have been one of my pee customers in Minnesota. The only pills Walter ever took were provided by trainers and were available to all NFL players. I know other people have said that Walter had a problem with drugs, and like I said before, I wasn’t with him all the time, but I just don’t believe it. We talked about everything, and I never once heard a single word that made me think he might be into that shit.
Walter played in the league longer than the average NFL player, so he consumed more medication than the average NFL player, too. The long-term effects of painkillers weren’t truly known 30 years ago. And I suspect all those pain pills had something to do with his death. Any time you take any type of medicine, it’s got to go through your liver first. It’s just my belief that all that stuff he was taking for pain while playing in the NFL was detrimental to his liver. He had frequent headaches from getting pounded so much and took lots of meds for that, and they’re saying now that long-term use of anti-inflammatory drugs might be bad for the liver.
At the time, Walter wasn’t thinking about how all of that could affect his health. He wasn’t really thinking about his future. He was thinking about his present, and he wanted to win. Playing through the pain, he finally helped the Bears rule the NFL in 1985, only losing one regular season game, to Miami. They finished with a record of 15–1. Then they breezed through their two playoff games, pitching shutouts in both of them. Walter was still the team’s clear-cut leader and producer during that historic season, finishing with 1,551 yards rushing and another 483 through the air on 49 receptions. My little brother realized his big dream by first realizing a bunch of small ones. Everything he’d done in high school, at Jackson State, and during his first 10 years in the NFL led him to that glorious 1985 season. And he led his team to Super Bowl XX on January 26, 1986, where the Bears hammered the New England Patriots and won by a score of 46–10.
The Patriots’ defensive plan was a carbon copy of everyone else’s. That is, their plan was to stop Walter. Though teams often
failed, the Patriots succeeded, holding my brother to 61 yards on 22 carries and no touchdowns. Perhaps he should’ve gotten a chance to score from the 1-yard line, but that’s all water under the bridge. I give Coach Ditka a pass on that because he gave Walter what he really wanted all along anyway. I mean, my brother wasn’t a stranger to scoring touchdowns. He had more than his fair share of those. But what he didn’t have at the time was a Super Bowl ring, so getting that was the important thing. Walter was all about team and all about winning, so he was all about being happy on that day. The Chicago Bears were world champions!
Despite his subpar individual stats, that Super Bowl was the highlight of Walter’s career. And really, the 1985 season was the beginning of the end of it, too. Walter’s last great season came in 1986, a year after leading one of the best teams in NFL history. In 1986, Walter rushed for 1,333 yards, which was the 10th time in his career he gained over 1,000 yards. The problem was, when you do anything for the 10th time in the NFL, things are probably winding down for you. Walter was really beginning to feel his age at that point. Even his rigid training regimen, which had become famous in its own right, was starting to slow up. The cruel fact was that he was now facing an opponent he couldn’t beat. In his prime, Walter was hard to stop, but time is impossible to stop and never loses a step. It just keeps going. Keeps moving. No matter what you do or how hard you try, you move further away from your youth with each passing day. My brother was one of the best who ever played the game. He started out with so much promise, took the field by storm as a kid, changed things for black colleges everywhere as a young man, and led the Bears to a Super Bowl victory as a grown man. Yet still, after all that, he was slowing down. He was running against time, and time was catching up to him.
One thing that never slowed down through the years was Walter’s obsession with practical jokes. I could write a whole book on his pranks (actually, I kind of feel like I have), and I think it’s only fitting to talk a little more about that now. And speaking of talking, we all know Walter had a high-pitched voice. But what you might not know is that Walter could imitate a woman’s voice so well that he could even fool a woman.
Thomas Sanders was a running back for the Bears behind Walter when they won the Super Bowl. Sanders also returned kicks for Chicago, so you know he’s a good and talented guy. Anyway, on Thanksgiving Day during his rookie season, Walter got on his car phone and called up Sanders’ wife, sounding just like a girl. “Hello,” Walter said when she picked up the phone. “Look, when Thomas comes in, tell him if he’s not going to have Thanksgiving dinner with me, at least he could buy the baby some shoes that are the right size. They just too little. Tell him I don’t appreciate it. I come all the way up here from Texas, bring the baby, and he don’t even buy the right size shoe for that baby.”
About an hour later, Sanders drove up to Walter’s house in a panic. “Man, I gotta see ya,” he said, desperate to talk with someone. “I gotta see ya.”
Walter knew why Sanders was there, of course, but he acted totally innocent. “What is it?” Walter asked, like he was just the most understanding friend in the world.
“Man, some bitch called my house, got the wrong number,” Sanders said. “I know it was the wrong number ’cause she’s talking about a baby, and my wife’s throwing a fit. I mean, she’s packing up to go home right now thinking I got some baby and some woman’s up here to see me for Thanksgiving dinner. Man, I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
Walter couldn’t contain himself and erupted with laughter. Sanders didn’t think it was so funny. Walter finally had to talk to Sanders’ wife to get him off the hook. She didn’t believe him until he re-created the voice for her to prove it was all a joke. If he hadn’t finally done the woman’s voice on the phone for Sanders’ wife, I’m not sure she would’ve ever come back to Chicago. Walter might’ve been the only one who thought that gag was funny, but he sure did laugh his ass off about it.
Walter’s famous for being a running back, but really, he could’ve made a career out of pulling tricks on people. Pranking was a way of life for my brother. Making fools of his friends was as much a part of him as making fools of opposing defenses was. I know I said this once before, but he just loved to get Bud with that high-pitched voice of his. He often dropped by Bud’s office and assumed the secretary’s desk and answered the phone in her place. Sounding like a girl, he’d sit and answer the phone for hours, sometimes saying things the secretary would never say. He just loved messing with people. The phone would ring and Walter’s fun would begin. “Hello, Bud Holmes’ office,” he’d say, listening for a moment. When they asked to set up a meeting with Bud, Walter would said, “Nah, he’s too busy to see you. And he even told me if you call back down here again, not to let you talk to him.” Then he’d just hang up. He’d do that kind of stuff to Bud’s friends all the time…and sometimes, like with Musburger, Bud was in on it.
One of my favorite Bud/Sweetness pranks was played on Bobby Collins, the head football coach at Southern Mississippi. Walter was fishing down at Bud’s lake one day, and Bud hatched an idea. I guess the fish weren’t biting, because Bud said, “Hell, let’s have some fun with Bobby Collins. I’m going to tell Bobby some story about this unknown kid being down here and how he wants to play for Southern. You’ll be the unknown kid.” Walter quickly jumped all in.
“Yeah, yeah, okay, I like it,” Walter responded.
So, Bud called Bobby Collins and said, “Bobby, look, I got this woman I represented once, some family—hell, I’ve known them forever. I think my daddy even used to represent them. Anyway, she’s got a nephew, a grandson or something. I don’t really know the relationship, but whatever it is, the family wants him to go to Southern. He’s a nice kid. She asked me if I can help him, because they can’t afford out-of-state tuition.”
Coach Collins was listening, not yet sure what to think.
“Here’s what I’ll do, Bobby,” Bud continued. “I’ll bring him out there, and if y’all will just kinda be nice and take a look at the kid, I’ll give y’all enough money to hire him on as equipment manager or something. You know, so he can at least get his education.”
Coach Collins was willing to help out, so when Bud and Walter went, Walter disguised himself with a baseball cap and sunglasses. Coach Collins came out and met Bud and the “kid” at the practice field…and it was on.
“What’s your name?” Coach Collins asked.
“My name is Robert Johnson,” Walter blurted out. Robert Johnson was a blues legend, and Walter must’ve had one of his tunes stuck in his head. Maybe “Sweet Home Chicago”? Still, it was an odd name for him choose. I mean, Johnson was such a good musician that folks thought he must have sold his soul in exchange for that guitar-picking talent of his. What’s really strange, though, is that Johnson died a mysterious death before his time. Most think he was poisoned. It’s not the name I would’ve chosen, that’s for sure. Of course, maybe Walter didn’t really choose it. That name might’ve just popped into his head for a reason that even Walter wasn’t aware of at the time.
“Well, we’re glad to have you come here, Robert. Where do you go to school now?” Coach Collins asked.
“Well, I go out there to Monterey Junior College,” Walter—uh, I mean—Robert said.
Coach was curious about the physique of this kid. “Did you play any sports?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” Walter/Robert said. “I played basketball over there, and I played football, too.”
“Oh yeah? What kind of record in football?”
“Oh, we had a good record,” Walter/Robert responded. “We should’ve won the championship. A lot of people want to blame the referee. But I say, if you don’t win, you don’t win. I don’t say nothing about the way the referees call it. I keep my mouth shut about it. We should’ve won the game, though.” Coach Collins was ready to hear more.
“You look pretty fit. How muc
h do you weigh, Robert?”
“Right now I’m weighing 205,” Walter/Robert said. “You know, I get a little bit off that sometimes, but I’m basically 205.”
“Goodness. Well, have you ever been timed in the 40?”
“Oh, yes sir, yes sir.”
“What’d you run?”
Those fish weren’t biting earlier when Bud came up with his plan, but Coach Collins was sure taking the bait now. And Walter was really ready to have fun. “Well, most of the time when I ain’t really running real hard, I run like a 4.4. But when I really, really feel like I need to get it, I run a 4.3 most anytime. Now, one time, I don’t know if it’s true or not, and there was a pretty strong wind, I think, but they gave me a 4.25. But really, I run 4.3, 4.4. Something in there.”
Well, by this time, Whitey Jordan, another Southern Miss coach, had come out and was listening in on the conversation. After all the 4.3/4.4 talk, Jordan and Collins got to looking at each other and started drooling over what they were beginning to believe was a 20-carat (black) diamond in the rough that they’d just discovered.
“Well, what about your grades?”
Walter started laying it on thick. He wanted to make them think they’d done died and gone to heaven. “I majored in math and computer science,” Walter/Robert said. “I got a 3.8 GPA. I should’ve gotten better, but I wasn’t feeling good on that last exam. I should’ve had a 4.0.” The two coaches were now worked up into a full recruiting lather.
“Coach, how about going out there and seeing what this kid can do,” Jordan said. “You mind letting us time you, Robert?”
“Oh nah, I don’t mind. I’ll be glad to go run for you. I likes to run.”
