Walter & Me

by Eddie Payton

  Soon after that promise from Rozelle, Phoenix was taken off the table. Billy Bidwill moved the Cardinals from St. Louis to Phoenix, so Arizona no longer needed a team. Of course, that meant that

  St. Louis became a possible spot for an expansion team. Well, Rozelle soon left his post as commissioner to focus on his fight with cancer, so the thought was that the whole “Walter will be an owner” baton was going to be handed off to Finks. Well, it wasn’t exactly going to be that easy. As Bud explains it, “Jim Finks missed being the commissioner by one vote. Still, everybody knew that Walter was going to get a franchise. Jacksonville and Charlotte became likely cities. Things were still moving in a positive direction.”

  Walter and Bud kept upbeat and kept moving forward. Of all the possible cities, Walter zeroed in on St. Louis and decided to go for that one. There were to be three partners. Walter was going to be the minority owner (in more ways than one) of the franchise. One of the other partners, a member of the Busch family, was putting up the lion’s share of the money, and the other partner was a real estate mogul who would be building the stadium. Those two and Walter had gotten together and were deciding how things were going to go. The problem was, things started to go not so well.

  The other two partners got to bickering about who was going to have the controlling interest in the franchise. They were basically arguing over the 1 percent vote. You know, “One percent more than y’all.” It got ugly, and I’m talking lawsuit kind of ugly. As the 11th hour approached for a deal that’d give them a St. Louis team, Walter called me to talk about his frustration with the process. “Man, you ain’t going to believe this shit that’s going on,” he said. “These people up here are arguing about who’s going to own what percentage and all that.”

  I was just listening and letting him vent. “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Walter continued, “the NFL doesn’t want to hear it either, and they got me in the middle ’cause one guy has the money and the other has the property. They got me all jacked up here trying to take sides and smooth it out. I just feel like taking a stick and whoopin’ everybody’s ass who’s involved in this whole thing. I mean, it’s just going along fine and looks like it’s going to happen, and then they start with all this?”

  I wasn’t an expert on all the ins and outs of NFL business dealings, but it didn’t sound like it was going to work out to me. “Well, I guess that means I ain’t going to be the personnel guy in St. Louis,” I said. Walter and I had talked about my becoming the personnel director once the team got going.

  “I don’t know,” Walter responded. “We’ll see how that all works out. We got to get over this hurdle first. If they don’t quit this bickering, we’re going to lose the franchise. They’ll just award it to somebody else.”

  Well, they never quit the bickering, and I guess Walter had had enough because he went missing. They had built a new stadium for the team and people were getting nervous about the way things were going, so a private plane was waiting for Walter at Butler Aviation in Chicago to fly him to St. Louis for a big press conference to promise the new stadium wouldn’t go empty. You know, just to set minds at ease by building up the idea that it’d all work out in the end. The problem was, the airplane waited and waited for Walter. Then it waited some more. Walter didn’t show. The other partners kept calling Bud, wanting to know where Walter was and why he wasn’t on that plane. Bud didn’t know. Nobody knew. He just didn’t show up, and that was all there was to it. He’d had enough, and instead of calling someone, Walter was just calling it quits.

  With the threat of a lawsuit already hanging over the partnership, and now with Walter pulling his disappearing act, the NFL awarded the expansion franchise to Jacksonville instead. St. Louis was still going to get a team, but it was going to be an existing one. The Los Angeles Rams moved to St. Louis, but they already had an owner, so they didn’t need Walter. He was out.

  “Walter, what the hell?” Bud asked once he finally connected. “Why’d you do that? Man, we hunted you and hunted you and everything, and you never showed up. Where the hell were you?”

  “I just was riding around,” Walter said, as if he didn’t know or care about the trouble he’d caused. “That’s just business, man. Sometimes things don’t work out, okay? Sometimes you just have to back up, regroup, and change your game plan, like in a football game.”

  “Walter…” Bud tried to interrupt.

  “If I can’t be an owner, I don’t want any of it,” Walter said.

  “Well,” Bud came back with some frustration, “you’re gonna get your wish.”

  As it turned out, they wanted to give Walter 5 percent ownership, which would be worth about $30 million on today’s market. That’s what he was giving up. At that point, though, he was bitter about it all and just wanted to get away from it. He wasn’t thinking about percentage points or money or nothing like that. He just felt burned by the NFL and the whole process. Walter had already gone down and done a ton of work over a period of three and a half years, helping to set the stage for the team, and getting the stadium built in St. Louis in anticipation of the expansion. They put a bond issue together for like $450 million to build the stadium, and now some other owner’s team was going to be in there. Though he didn’t help matters by skipping the press conference, Walter was bitter and pissed off and just felt used and abused. He put three years of his life into schmoozing and being paraded around like a prize pony to everyone, and it was all for nothing. He was slapping backs and shaking hands and smiling and taking pictures to make the whole thing work, but he didn’t have anything to show for it. That was one of the low points in his life because he really wanted to be the first black owner of an NFL football team. That would’ve put him back where he wanted to be, back in football and part of a team.

  Walter started to lose his identity through all of that. He no longer had the football field on which to escape, and all he could see was his fame and the hounds gathering around it. He was starting to lose himself a bit, and Bud could see what was happening. As Walter’s manager, partner, shrink, father, and friend on all of his business (mis)adventures, Bud knew better than anyone how much it was all weighing on him and how much Walter was struggling to find his place in this new post-football world. “When Walter would spend time with Eddie and come down and go hunting and just be with the boys out in the woods…that’s when Walter was really, really, really on top of the world,” Bud said. “You take him out of that environment and it’s kinda like a Hank Williams song written after Hank made a bunch of money and became famous and all that. The basic idea of the song is, We now have the finest of everything, but in this world, there is no place for me.”

  Walter felt out of place in that corporate dog-eat-dog world he was in, where everybody wanted to get a piece of Walter Payton for themselves and their pockets. The pressure was getting to my baby brother in a big way, and he wasn’t blind to what was going on. He’d lost his team and his sport, and now all he had was his fame. He was starting to feel like that was all he was to the people around him. “All anybody wants out of me is to make a dollar for themselves,” Walter said at the time. “They don’t give a damn about me.”

  Like any normal person, he was feeling down about it, especially because he felt like with the whole franchise fiasco, he’d wasted three and a half years of his life that he couldn’t get back. He now had to start from zero again, and I think the thought of starting from zero just made him long to start from the beginning. You know, before he had fame. Before people knew who he was. Before people stopped loving him for being Walter and started loving him for being Sweetness. He just felt down about how everybody saw him, and he wanted to find someone, anyone, who didn’t know who he was.

  Well, that someone came in the form of a young flight attendant—I’ll call her Linda. Walter was on trip to Atlanta, and for the first time in a long time, he’d met someone who didn’t know his
name before he told it to her. Linda was a very pretty woman who didn’t know anything at all about Walter Payton, and that proved to be a very dangerous combination for my brother. After all those years fighting off the aggressive advances of other women, along came someone who just didn’t know to be aggressive. After all that time resisting the irresistible, Walter had finally found a woman he just couldn’t resist.

  Now, I’m not excusing it, of course, and neither would Walter, but it was sort of a perfect storm for him. Linda came along at just the right (or maybe I should say wrong) time and gave Walter just what he thought he was looking for. Walter and Linda hit it off immediately, and he came to the conclusion that this girl liked him for who he was and not because he was a celebrity football player. They started dating and getting more and more serious as time went on. Walter kept his two worlds separate for a while, but eventually they had to collide.

  It started with Bud. At one point, Walter decided he wanted to introduce Linda to Bud. It didn’t sit well with Bud at first because, though he said Linda was very pleasant, it was the first time he’d ever seen Walter with any woman other than Connie. He just wasn’t sure how this could end up in a positive way. Perhaps Walter wasn’t either, but he apparently got deep enough into it that he wanted someone close to him to know about Linda. “Walter always treated me like a daddy, I guess,” Bud said. “Actually, when his daddy died, he asked if I’d be his daddy. Anyway, I guess he just wanted to introduce his girlfriend to me as if I were his daddy, you know?” Walter was struggling at the time with who he was, being pulled one way by his celebrity and another by his desire to be removed from it.

  Introducing Linda to Bud was the start of what eventually led to Connie finding out. Obviously, the relationship between Walter and Connie had deteriorated over time, partly because of Linda, and they eventually filed for divorce. Bud wasn’t having it, though. He explained, “I told Connie, ‘You are a hell of a lot better off being a miserable Mrs. Walter Payton than the ex–Mrs. Walter Payton.’” Bud talked Connie out of divorcing Walter, but he couldn’t keep her from meeting Linda. In fact, he facilitated it.

  Walter brought Linda with him to his 1993 Hall of Fame induction, and they had a hotel room to themselves. Connie and the kids were at the induction, too, which proved to be a tougher balancing act for Walter than tiptoeing down the sidelines ever was. Walter was torn between two things: what he knew was right and what he wanted to do. He could only keep the shell game up for so long. Tension was understandably high there at the Hall of Fame induction, and Walter and Connie got in a scrap at some point.

  “I wasn’t with Walter when he and Connie got into it, thank God,” Bud said. “But Connie called me up later and said she wanted to know if I’d introduce her to Linda. I said, ‘Connie, if you want me to. I’ll see what I can do. I think they are all down there in the lounge.’ So, I went down there with Connie and introduced them. They were very pleasant to each other. Connie, Amanda [Connie’s close friend], Ginny [Walter’s personal assistant], and all of them were bunched up there with Linda. Connie and Linda got off to themselves for a few minutes at one point and had a very nice, pleasant talk, from what I could tell. And trust me, I was paying attention.”

  I think Linda wasn’t as comfortable as she was “pleasant,” because after that meeting, Walter started getting pressure from her to leave Connie. Walter told Linda he wanted to marry her but that Bud was the reason he and Connie weren’t getting a divorce. “So, I became the goat, you know, to Linda,” Bud said. “I was the problem for them. I was the reason they couldn’t ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. I was preventing it, in her mind. But I told Walter, ‘Hell, I just think it’ll be a damn mistake. The public has you sitting up on a pedestal. You’re going to get your image so damn tarnished if you up and abandon your wife and kids.’”

  Well, Walter and Connie weren’t divorced but they did separate, and Walter was living with Linda. He just couldn’t stay away from her. He could always talk with me, Connie, Bud, and a few other people about his problems before, but I guess Linda gave him something none of us could. She was someone he could talk to who wasn’t a part of his famous football life. She didn’t bring any of that baggage. He got into that relationship because he felt like he had nobody to talk to and that everyone else just liked him because he was a big star. The problem was that he still knew it was wrong, and so he became depressed even about having Linda in his life. He was torn between what he was supposed to do and what he wanted to do. And in that sense, he was no different than anyone else. Except, of course, he was different.

  If you are in the public eye like my brother was, you just can’t behave like Joe Blow, because nobody gives a damn what Joe Blow does. Walter was so open to public scrutiny, and it was hard for him to be happy living his life when he really couldn’t do what he wanted to do. I mean, at that time, he really was torn between his relationship with the mother of his kids (who also happened to be his college sweetheart) and the relationship with Linda. He couldn’t fully commit to either one of them because of who he was at the time. He was already down about losing three and half years of his life to the unfulfilled pursuit of the St. Louis franchise, but he was really depressed about the conflict between his two relationships. We all get depressed to one degree or another. We all go through periods of depression. We all deal with it at some point, even if it’s just for an afternoon, and most of us come out of it on the other side. Still, knowing suicide rates among former NFL players are six times the national average, we all had to pay attention to what Walter was going through.

  Bud really was like a father to Walter, and that was a role he took seriously. He stayed as close to Walter as Walter would allow and knows more about his alleged suicidal tendencies than anyone else. Bud said he got to feeling horribly sorry for my brother during that time. Walter would call him up and say things like, “I’m going to commit suicide. I’m going to end it.” That worried Bud for sure. And then one night, Walter’s longtime assistant, Ginny Quirk, called Bud and was hysterical. She said, “I promise he’s going to kill himself! Bud, he swears he is. He’s told us all good-bye and that he was never going to see us again. We’ll never see him again!”

  So, Bud started thinking things were getting out of control with Walter, and he wanted to do something about it. He knew Walter was flying to L.A. and was going to be interviewed by Roy Firestone before going down to drive in a celebrity car race with Jay Leno, Paul Newman, and some other celebrities. Ginny told Bud it’d be all right if he just showed up, so he hopped on a plane in Houston, where he was on a day trip at the time, and flew straight to L.A. He beat Walter there and was waiting for him when he got off the plane. Walter was surprised to see him. “What you doing here?” he asked, and then, according to Bud, he just laughed. Bud didn’t quite know how to respond. He said something about having nothing better to do and stayed out there with him for three days. Everything was fine. “You know, looking back,” Bud said, “I’ve often wondered if Walter just did that to prank me. I thought about it at the time, too, wondering if Walter wanted to see if he could trick me into leaving my day trip in Houston. I really wonder. I still wonder about that.”

  Listen, you can think what you want about my brother’s depression and whether it ever got to a point where he wanted to kill himself. If he was suicidal, it wasn’t because he was depressed (more on that in a minute). Walter was so squarely in the public eye that when he started to pull back from it, trying to deal with all the shit he was dealing with in retirement, some saw it as him being depressed to the point of wanting to end it all. Rumors got going as they always do when it comes to big stars like him. Really, though, pulling back just reflected who he was all along. He loved playing football in front of his fans and loved spending time with people he thought he could make a difference for, but he really wasn’t a social being like I was. He’d have rather spent time shooting at his gun range or fishing on a lake
or playing with his kids as opposed to going to some party or gathering and being introduced as “Walter Payton” to a bunch of people he didn’t know. He much preferred to be by himself, generally speaking, and certainly when it came to dealing with struggles and private matters.

  And I can also tell you that his depression was really more like anger. I mean, things would happen in his life that were not fun things to deal with, and he’d get more mad than depressed. Still, when he started to withdraw, some people would say, “Well, he’s not coming out, so he’s gotta be depressed.” Most of the time, though, when he was dealing with something, he’d call me up and just get pissed off about whatever the situation was and want to talk about everything that was going on, who was to blame, etc. He never threatened to kill himself; he just threatened to kick someone’s ass. Where Walter and I are from, we don’t call that depression. We just call it getting mad.

  When reporters and other people started pointing to the supposed evidence that Walter was suicidal, well, I didn’t buy any of that for one minute. Not one bit. Listen, Walter liked to push buttons, we know that. Did he pull a prank on Bud? Well, I wouldn’t put it past him, but the fact is we’ll never know for sure. If he ever was suicidal, it was the concussions talking.

  “Dr. Frank Jones explained a concussion one time to a jury,” Bud detailed. “He referred to a concussion on cross examination like this: ‘If I were to take a handful of mud and sling it up against that wall, and it splatters, well, that’s what a concussion is.’ When your brain is jarred so heavily that the brain is flattened out against the skull, that’s a concussion.”