Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  It was an act of unheard-of cockiness; an act that, in ordinary Mississippi circumstances, would have resulted in whites branding him an “uppity nigger.” A mere fifteen years earlier Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman. And now, 190 miles to the south, here was Walter Payton, taunting his white pursuers.

  In one corner of the stands, a handful of college football coaches watched in disbelief. In attendance were assistants from Ole Miss and Mississippi State, as well as Barney Poole, an assistant coach at the nearby University of Southern Mississippi. As soon as Payton held the ball aloft, the men began complaining aloud. One was more vocal than the others. “Can you believe the nerve of this kid?” said Bob Hill, an assistant coach at Jackson State College, Mississippi’s largest historically black school. “To have that little respect for an opponent is inexcusable. I would never sign someone like that.” Hill, of course, wanted Payton in the worst possible way. “I hoped the other coaches would buy my bluff,” he said. “They tended to think in packs.”

  Poole, a former all-American end at Ole Miss who played professionally for six seasons, was visibly disgusted. Upon returning to his school’s Hattiesburg campus, Poole filed a scouting report that read: “Tremendous athlete, but we don’t need a smart-alecky nigger on our team.”

  Payton was far from “smart-alecky.” He was humble and soft-spoken, but he had been taught to play sports with emotion and flavor. Throughout black high schools in the South, mild trash talking was not merely accepted, but encouraged. So was taunting. Midway through the season Boston had to explain to Davis that the way some of the black players behaved on the bus rides to road games—talking and laughing and busting chops—was nothing to get upset over. “He didn’t understand,” said Boston. “I said, ‘Tommy, they’ll be ready. Just let them be.’ ”

  Columbia led Prentiss 7–0 at halftime, but with the exception of Payton’s long run the team looked out of sorts. At the beginning of the third quarter, Payton struck again. On a second down and ten from the Columbia twelve-yard line, Johnson grabbed the snap, spun hard, and presented the ball to his charging fullback, who ran straight toward Keith Brenson, the Bulldogs’ 240-pound nose tackle, cut left, and burst into the guts of the defense. The second Bulldog to have a shot at the tackle was Nobles. “I was playing strong side linebacker, and I was supposed to key on Walter,” said Nobles. “On the bright side, I can honestly say he didn’t run over me. But that’s only because he didn’t need to—he was so fast, I never came close to catching him. He left me in the dust.” It was Walter’s second touchdown of the game. Remarkably, the play had been mishandled—Walter was supposed to head outside, not stay behind the center and guards. No matter.

  The Bulldogs scored late to make the final score 14–6, and when the final gun was fired the noise in the stadium was deafening. White fans and black fans, forever separated by societal rules, cheered together. Afterward, few in Columbia were discussing the snapping of the twenty-one-game losing streak, or Davis’ new offense, or the play of the poised black quarterback.

  “Walter was the story,” said Forrest Dantin, a white lineman. “He was beyond belief.”

  If you listen to many of Columbia’s white denizens, this is the point when peace and understanding commenced. Thanks to Walter Payton’s athletic brilliance, the narrative goes, whites and blacks merged as one, bound together over the beautiful game of football and the Wildcats’ newfound success. For the first time ever, they cheered together, laughed together, cried together. All because of high school football. All because of Walter Payton.

  “Walter came along and started setting all these records,” said Hugh Dickens, the superintendent of Columbia schools. “And suddenly whites found themselves applauding the blacks. That made the black community feel proud because it was finally getting recognition, and it made the white community feel proud, too. Our success in football resulted in our success as a whole.”

  Is this true? Much depends on who’s asked. On the one hand, Columbia’s whites were now infatuated with Walter Payton—slapping him high fives, shaking his hand, singing his praises, and bragging about “our” star. When he drove to school in his green Chevrolet pickup truck, people—black and white—honked and waved. The change of heart was remarkable, if not sadly predictable. The Progress, a newspaper that, for its first eighty-eight years refused to cover seemingly any event involving blacks, started hailing the senior back as a gridiron savior and claiming him as one of Columbia’s own.

  Yet the majority of the town’s blacks surely saw through the façade. Now that the school was integrated, it cancelled all of the previously held dances and the senior play for the 1970–71 academic year. Just a few months earlier Columbia extemporaneously closed its town pool after an increasing number of blacks began to use it. “That shows what some thought of us,” said Michael Woodson, a black player. “We were second-class.” Walter Payton had been a marvelous kid long before integration. He was polite, intelligent, well-spoken, engaging. “After they saw Walter could run the football,” said Eli Payton, “everyone was yee-haw! and happy.” This was hardly a phenomenon unique to Columbia. As towns throughout the South experienced the positive athletic impacts of their new black stars, white Mississippians even came up with a phrase—“Give the ball to LeRoy”—to surmise their philosophy. As long as the black boy could play football, he was perfectly welcome. “White Mississippians said it all the time, thinking they were being funny,” said Charles Martin, a civil rights expert and the author of Benching Jim Crow. “ ‘LeRoy’ was a term, like darkie, like coon, like nigger. Only it had a little less sting.”

  Thanks largely to Payton’s heroics, the integrated Wildcats were the kings of Columbia. They followed the opener with a 20–0 victory over Hazelhurst that included the most spectacular touchdown of Payton’s high school career. “It was a long [run], and I was hit three or four times,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The first guy that hit me nearly knocked me over. I spun around and put my hand out to keep from going down, but when I recovered my balance and straightened up I ran over another guy who tripped me up. As I started to fall forward a defender grabbed me from behind, which was just enough to keep me from falling. When I shook loose of him, I was gone.” (Recalled Emmett Smith, Hazelhurst’s head coach: “We spent our entire week working out a way to stop Walter Payton, and on Friday we learned we couldn’t stop Walter Payton.”)

  After that victory, Columbia traveled 126 miles northwest to Vicksburg to face Warren Central High, which had beaten the Wildcats 39–0 a year earlier. The Vikings were coached by Dewey Partridge, a star receiver at Ole Miss in the late 1950s. In the week leading up to the game, Partridge devised a plan to shut down Columbia’s rushing attack. He took offensive lineman Archie Anderson and lined him up on the defensive line, across from the tight end. As Warren Central’s strongest player, Anderson’s job was to lock up the tight end, thus allowing a linebacker to go unobstructed after Payton. “From the standpoint of getting me and the tight end on each other, it worked,” said Anderson. “But it was a failure, because you were asking the linebacker to tackle Walter Payton one-on-one. And that was impossible.”

  “At one point they threw a screen to Walter, and I thought I was about to pick it off,” said David Chaney, a Warren Central defensive end. “Then—snap! Out of nowhere, he jumped up, caught the ball and took off. I’d never seen anyone move like that. Never.” Payton scored three touchdowns and ran for 123 yards in the 32–0 win.

  “We were just kicking ass and taking names,” said Johnson, the quarterback. “Greatness came very easily for that team.”

  The Columbia High Wildcats beat Mendenhall 16–6 to improve to 4-0, then downed Crystal Springs 34–21 to post the first 5-0 mark in school history.

  Leading up to the clash at Gardner Stadium, Crystal Springs coach Leon Canoy managed to get his hands on a few rolls of Columbia film. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. Davis and Boston had designed fou
r special plays just for Payton. Two, Spider Left and Spider Right, were screen passes into the flat that, with proper blocking, were seemingly impossible to stop. Two others, Alcorn Left and Alcorn Right, were misdirections that gave Payton the option of running or throwing. Also unstoppable. “Back then the taping would be done off of a little ol’ tripod, and the tapes would start up close, then go wide,” said Canoy. “You’d watch Walter, and the image would always switch to a wide shot because he’d wind up running away from everyone. He’d almost be out of the picture by the end of the plays.” High school running backs generally fall into one of two categories. They are either gnatlike slashers, à la Moses, or straight-ahead bowling balls. Payton was both. He ran hard on every play, never stopped churning his arms and pumping his knees. His stiff-arm, developed on the sandlots of Jefferson, could paralyze opposing defenders, and his hips rarely locked into one position. “I began to see that once in a great while you can use getting hit to keep your balance,” Payton wrote. “It’s all a matter of reflexes and coordination and eyes and hands and feet.” In other words, opponents were helpless. They might stop him once. Twice. Three times. But inevitably, he’d break a run.

  Like the other men faced with shutting down Columbia High’s high-powered offense, Canoy devised a plan: His linebackers would cheat toward the line, hoping to make contact before the play developed. They would grab Payton’s legs, drag him down, and force Johnson to throw the ball.

  “Didn’t work,” Canoy said.

  Payton, Moses, and Johnson teamed to rush for more than two hundred yards. “They were incredible,” said Jimmie Stovall, Crystal Springs’ cornerback. “I’ll never forget my one big play against Walter. He came around that corner and I hit him and he hit me. We both went down. I mean, it was a heck of a collision. He came back one play later and scored. I came back a bunch of plays later and was never the same. Forty years later, my shoulder still hurts.”

  If older white fans were thrilled by Columbia High’s football prowess, they had mixed feelings over the social implications. Until Payton’s senior year, young blacks and young whites were almost completely separate. Unless you were a black child whose mother served as a nanny for white families, odds are you lacked interactions with the opposite race. Now, however, blacks like Payton, Johnson, and Moses were genuine heroes on the Columbia High campus. They walked the halls with heads held high and chests puffed out. They wore their jerseys the days of games, and sported snazzy green-and-white football jackets with their nicknames (“Spider-Man” for Payton, “Sugar Man” for Moses) embroidered atop the chest. The initial skepticisms of white teammates eroded quickly. Most of the athletes—black and white—were deliberately grouped together in physical education class, and a bond developed. “Those guys on that team wouldn’t let other people talk badly about their teammates—black or white,” said Dantin. “Not because of race, but because that’s your teammate.”

  On the bus rides back from road games, one of the black players—often Payton—would break out a transistor radio and blast the music. The songs were almost always Motown—Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas—and the crooning grew louder throughout the ride. As gifted a dancer as he was a runner, Payton stood, arms waving, rear shaking. “It sounds like a scene from a movie,” said Dantin. “But the black kids would start singing The Temptations, and we’d all join in. All of us. Those trips became like Temptation greatest hits sing-alongs. It was so incredibly fun.”

  In preintegration Columbia, decades of Jefferson football players either partied in someone’s backyard or, occasionally, at Pete Walker’s Place, a black club, that featured a three-songs-for-a-quarter jukebox and Pete’s special brand of bootleg. But the world was changing. Accompanying Columbia’s football players on the bus trips to away games was the school’s all-white fleet of cheerleaders. In the past, a black kid in Columbia wouldn’t dare glance longingly toward a white girl. “Integration,” said Woodson, “completely mixed that notion up.”

  Throughout his early high school days, Walter had dated a black girl named Jill Brewer. Notably pretty, with big brown eyes and high cheeks, Jill attended nearby Marion Central High, and was two years Walter’s junior. She wasn’t his first girlfriend. (“Walter was a popular guy, and he’d dated some girls,” Brewer said. “But he was my first boyfriend.”) They had met in 1967, at a semipro football game being played at Gardner Stadium. She was shy and guarded. He was also shy, but a bit more bubbly. “Apparently I gave him my number,” she said. “We grew to be very close.” The two met up at various school functions, at sporting events, at parties. Brewer’s mother ran a small recreation center known as the Shop, and together they played pool and ate ice cream. Because Brewer lived nine miles outside of Columbia on Highway 43, the couple struggled to see each other every week. “But,” she said, “I really liked him. Walter was such a sweet boy. If I had a daughter I’d want her to have a boyfriend who treats her with the respect he gave me.”

  By the time Columbia desegregated its schools, Walter and Jill were no longer a pair. “When we broke up, he said I was breaking his heart,” said Brewer. “I told him it was just puppy love. From then on, whenever I’d see him, he’d greet me the same way—‘Hey, Puppy Love!’ ”

  Payton’s first intimate moment with a white girl came in the fall of his senior year. Walter and Kim Fink, the white backup quarterback, discussed the idea of setting each other up with girls from the opposite race. “We were both kind of progressives,” said Fink. “I had friends who would have had nothing to do with African-American girls. But not me. I was excited.”

  One night, with his parents perched in front of the television, Fink snuck out of the house with a six-pack of Falstaff Beer and picked up Walter. They headed for a spot known as the Duck Pond, an undeveloped subdivision on the outskirts of town where kids went to make out. The girls met them there—Walter’s was blond, with blue eyes; Fink’s had brown hair, with brown eyes and dark skin. “We just fooled around and stuff—nothing big,” said Fink. “But we had to meet far away for it to happen. You couldn’t get caught doing that stuff back then.”

  Which made Walter’s life increasingly difficult. Because in that marvelous fall of 1970, he developed a crush on a beautiful cheerleader with peachtoned skin who sat in front of him in biology class. Her name was Colleen Crawley, though friends called her “Tweet” for her thin, birdlike legs. She was, like Walter, a senior, with long brown cascading hair, doe eyes, and an easygoing manner that had half the senior boys smitten. Unlike some of her peers, Colleen was open to the idea of having black friends. Her mother, Patricia, had been born and raised in New York City; a Queens girl who came to Mississippi by way of marrying an air force enlistee from the Magnolia State. Colleen was seven when her family relocated, but she maintained her open-mindedness. “My mom wasn’t a sheltered person,” said Colleen. “She worked for a social organization that got a lot of federal grant money to help race relations. Part of her job was going to black homes, then writing proposals. She’d come back and tell us, ‘You wouldn’t believe how these people are living. You just wouldn’t believe it.’ ” Because of Patricia’s overt empathy, the Crawfords found themselves on the receiving end of threatening calls from the KKK. “Mom heard the phrase ‘nigger lover’ quite a bit,” said Donna Williams, Colleen’s sister. “But she was tough.”

  Colleen never aspired to become a cheerleader, but when Diane Weems, the captain of the Columbia High team, transferred to Columbia Academy, her friends talked her into filling the vacancy. She knew little of pom-poms or touchdowns, but took an immediate liking to the fast kid in the No. 22 jersey. On bus rides, Walter was funny and respectful. He was the type of boy who surrendered his seat for the girls, and waited patiently for others to exit the vehicle before doing so himself. “Something about Walter stood out, and not just football,” said Crawley. “I think it’s that he was just very nice.” There were three senior cheerleaders in 1970—Colleen, Sandra Height, and Dawn Givens—and
each one paired up with a black senior star. Height bonded with Johnson, the quarterback. Givens took to Moses, the fleet halfback. And Colleen Crawley often found herself alongside Walter Payton.

  They became close—the cheerleader who thought of Payton as a friend; the running back who thought of Crawley as a love interest. The two sat next to each other on the bus, smiled in the hallways, waved from afar. On more than one occasion Walter carried her books home from school, a quaint act that surely caught the ire of her neighbors on North Park Avenue. “He’d see me walking and he’d get his friends to drop him off so he could walk me to my house,” she said. “I invited Walter over every now and then if my parents were out and I was babysitting. He came to my home once or twice with some of the other black guys. I remember that some of the kids would bring a six-pack of beer and we’d play records. But Walter never drank.”

  Walter clearly believed he and Crawley were an item. Or at least a potential item. He bragged to his friends about her, and was smitten by her beauty. “Oh, he had a thing for Colleen,” said Woodson. “He wanted to date her badly.”

  On more than one occasion during his senior year, Payton bragged to his friends and teammates that he was close to bedding Crawley. One time, as he told it, he knocked on the front door to Colleen’s house, and heard her voice call, “Come in, Walter! It’s open!” Upon entering, he spotted her on the bed, naked, waiting for him. “So I ran all the way home,” Walter would say, laughing. “I couldn’t get caught with a white girl in her house. They’d kill me.” Because boys are boys and tall tales of sexual conquest seem to be a requisite part of the male adolescent experience, Walter can probably be excused that the story was pure fiction.