Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Jackson State’s Mighty Tigers will need a complete turnaround in 1971 or the term “Mighty” may be replaced with “Meek.” . . . A new head coach with a penchant for winning and a veteran quarterback [Sylvester Collins] who led the Southwest Athletic Conference in total offense in 1970 are the keys to the Tigers hopes.

  The Tigers opened their 1971 season by traveling to Prairie View, Texas, for a September 18 afternoon game against perennially subpar Prairie View A & M. Hill’s plan was in place—his well-conditioned team would pummel the Panthers with brutal physicality. He envisioned a final score of 30–0. Maybe even 40–0. “We were better in all areas,” he said. “No contest.”

  Yet in a matchup as dull as it was sloppy, Prairie View slogged its way to a 13–12 win, the difference courtesy of Triplett’s missed extra point early in the first quarter. On the bright side, the defense played well, and Eddie Payton ran for two touchdowns. On the down side, Walter Payton showed why freshmen were freshmen.

  In anticipation of the opening kickoff, Walter stood alongside a fellow back named James Marshall. As the ball came closer, Walter moved up, hesitated, backed away, slammed into Marshall, stumbled, then let it bounce three or four times before jumping atop it on the seven-yard line and being flattened by a mound of Prairie View tacklers. As he trotted toward the sideline, he did his best to avoid Hill. To no avail. “Walter, what the hell were you thinking!” Hill barked. “Sit your ass on the bench, and don’t let me see you again!” It was the last time Walter touched the ball that afternoon.

  The aftermath of the Prairie View loss was not pretty. If Jackson State’s players thought they had it hard in the lead-up to the opener, they learned quickly that Hill’s devotion to punishment knew few boundaries. The Tigers had two long weeks before their second game, a trip to Frankfort, Kentucky, to play lightly regarded Kentucky State, and Hill was determined to weed out the weak links. He looked over his roster and knew the talent was legitimate—along with the Payton siblings, ten others, including senior flanker Jerome Barkum and freshman linebacker Robert Brazile, would go on to play in the NFL. But under McPherson the work ethic had been underwhelming; the accountability nonexistent. Losses were greeted with dismissive shrugs, and players could often be found partying later in the evening. “No longer,” said Hill. “I wouldn’t accept that.”

  The coach had three favorite methods of punishment. First, there were the rocks. Hill would chew out a player, pick up a small rock, scream, “See this rock? Go find it!” then chuck it over a fence into a pack of weeds. Whether it took two minutes or two hours, the guilty party had to return with the exact rock. Second, there were the down-ups. “He’d stand there like a military drill instructor, screaming ‘Down! Up! Down! Up!’ ” said Douglas Baker, a sophomore center. “You’d jump onto your stomach, jump up, run in place, then jump back down over and over again.” The worst, however, was rolling. Were Hill really angry, he’d order players to line up on a goal line, lie down, and roll a hundred yards to the opposite goal line. “It doesn’t sound especially bad, but it was torture,” said Porter Taylor, a reserve quarterback. “You’d vomit, and it’d make you sick that evening and well into the next morning. There was nothing I wanted to hear less than, ‘Roll the field.’”

  Several Tigers quit instead of dealing with the coach’s brutality. They were either upperclassmen who had grown comfortable with McPherson or naïve freshmen unaware that they had signed up for the Green Berets. Earnest Wiley, a highly recruited defensive end from Mississippi, left the team after a month, when Hill ordered him not to marry his girlfriend. “I decided my life was more important than football,” Wiley said. “So I got married and quit.”

  “Some guy passed out on the field, and throw-up was coming out of his mouth,” recalled Lafayette Nelson, a tight end who transferred to Lane College. “Bob Hill screamed for someone to get him off the field, and they picked him up and towed him off. I knew I needed to get out of there.”

  Although Walter Payton didn’t fully escape disciplinary action in the wake of his poor debut at Prairie View, Hill thought it wiser to develop the kid than break him down. “I always told my players the same thing,” he said. “ ‘There ain’t no such thing as treating y’all alike. I’m gonna be fair with all of y’all—but not alike.’ ” Walter had received solid tutoring in high school under Boston and Tommy Davis, but he was still green. Jackson State’s offense utilized the quick pitch, which baffled Walter to no end. Jackson State’s offense counted on a back reading his blockers. Again, Walter had no idea. “He had competitive speed,” said Eddie Payton. “But not blinding speed. And when he arrived, he had no real grasp how to use it.”

  Beginning that week, and lasting throughout their time together, Hill took Walter under his wing with the vision of creating a team-carrying superstar. “The first thing he needed to learn was how to block,” said Hill. “Walter never really had to do it before.” At nights, when most of the other players were watching TV or studying, Hill dragged Payton to Jackson State’s gymnasium, where he hung a tackling dummy from a steel beam. “He’d pound that thing over and over until he was sore and the dummy was even sorer,” Hill said. “If you were going to play in my backfield, you had to be able to do more than just misdirect an oncoming tackler. You had to destroy him.”

  Hill’s second priority was changing the way Walter ran. Though larger and stronger than his older brother, Walter tended to take handoffs and immediately break for the outside. This worked in high school, when he was faster than the majority of cornerbacks and safeties. But here, in college, it infuriated Hill. He wanted his ball carriers to emulate Alan Ameche, the legendary Colts fullback who had impressed him during his brief stay with Baltimore in 1956. “I put Walter at the top of the I-formation behind a fullback, but he wouldn’t go up in the hole,” Hill said. “He hated contact.”

  Hill had an idea. He stopped a practice and called for Willie Swinning, the team’s trainer. With Walter within earshot, Hill handed Swinning a satchel and bellowed, “Bring this to the brick pile over there and fill it with three or four bricks!” When no one was looking, Swinning placed four footballs—not bricks—into the bag.

  Hill positioned himself near the out-of-bounds line and resumed practice. He called for a drill involving a handoff. Sylvester Collins, the quarterback, gave the ball to Payton, who—as always—started to drift outside. Hill charged forward, wildly swinging the bag toward Payton’s head. “Back inside!” Hill screamed. “Get your ass back inside!” The play was called again. And again. And again. “It took him a couple of times with me swinging that bag of bricks,” said Hill, “but he finally started charging into the hole. That’s how he began running inside.”

  Back in Columbia, Boston had advised Walter to run with raised knees—to lift them as high as possible in a chopping motion. Hill, the old workhorse back, hated the style. Great running backs, he told Payton, run with long strides and extended legs. They make it as hard as possible for opposing defenders to drag them down. “If you’re running with your knees high, they’re gonna be close to your body,” he said. “And if your knees are close to your body, a tackler can grab everything at once.

  “If you want to be explosive, the best thing to do is run with long strides. The longer your strides, the faster you go. We’re gonna open holes for you, but if you have short, choppy steps somebody will grab you around the legs and trip you up. I want you to stick your legs out, and if someone tries grabbing them, keep extending . . . keep pumping. I know you’re from the country. You know when the cows come out to the pasture and eat all the green corn? Then you come out to get them and if you’re running they start shitting over everything and the shit is flying everywhere? Well, that’s how I want you to run. I want to see shit flying.”

  As a boy, Walter Payton had never milked a cow, chased a cow, or watched a cow eat green corn. Nonetheless, he grasped what his coach was saying—run hard.

  If the botched kickoff return against Prairie View taught Hill anything,
it was that perhaps he was asking too much, too soon of Walter. In the 42–33 win over Kentucky State, Payton dressed and played, but only occasionally spelling his brother or John Ealy, another back.

  Next up for the Tigers was their home opener against Bishop College at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. Located five miles from campus in downtown Jackson, Memorial was considered a football jewel. Beginning with its grand opening in December 1950, the stadium—oval in shape, with dueling cement stands reaching high into the sky—served as home to many of the great contests in Mississippi football history. The place officially held forty-six thousand spectators (though an extra fourteen thousand could be crammed in), and the state’s two Division I football powerhouses, Ole Miss and Mississippi State, regularly scheduled games there. “When you walked into Memorial and the stadium was filled with fans, it was something else,” said Curtis Jones, a Jackson State defensive back. “You felt like a king.”

  Coming off of a win, the Tigers entered the game filled with optimism. The Blue Tigers of Bishop College, on the other hand, were a mess. A Division II school from Dallas that offered only a handful of half-scholarships, Bishop’s coach was Dwight Fisher, a man in his mid-sixties whose antiquated offensive and defensive schemes dated back to the 1930s. Fisher’s roster was comprised of nonprospects and castoffs. From 1971 to 1975, the offense scored ten total touchdowns. “Our players were mostly guys who couldn’t make it anywhere else,” said Herman Jordan, Bishop’s quarterback. “We had a nice campus, but no facilities and no staff. A couple of days before home games, all the players would be out there lining the field.”

  So certain was Hill his team would dominate that, for the start of the game, he sent the freshman Payton back to return the kickoff. Standing toward the right hash mark, his white jersey bright and unblemished, he caught the ball on the twenty-five-yard line, turned left, dashed past a gaggle of flailing tacklers, and was finally brought down thirty-three yards later, at Bishop’s forty-second. Three plays later, Collins connected for a touchdown with Barkum, the senior flanker who would go on to a twelve-year career with the New York Jets, and the Tigers were on their way.

  The Blue Tigers were listless and inept, falling behind 14–0 before the completion of the first quarter. With the game already in hand, Hill began the second quarter by inserting Walter into the backfield, alternating him with his older brother in the first-ever Payton-Payton rotation. “You didn’t want to tackle one,” said Hill. “And you didn’t want to tackle the other.”

  Walter Payton’s first collegiate touchdown came on first and goal from the two, when he took the handoff from Collins, bent his knees, sprung high into the air, and dove over the top of the line of scrimmage and into the end zone.

  Near the end of the half, Eddie Payton ruined a Jackson State scoring opportunity by fumbling on Bishop’s two-yard line. Though the Tigers ended the half with a 21–0 lead, Hill was incensed. As his team returned to the field after the break, Walter was told he would carry the load. “It was the right time to test him out,” said Hill. “We weren’t going to lose that game even if he struggled.”

  After holding Bishop to three and out, Jackson State’s offense received the ball and casually marched down the field. On first and ten from Bishop’s twenty-five, Collins spun to his left and pitched the ball to Walter. The freshman charged behind Emanuel Zanders, his six-foot-one, 255-pound left guard, cut outside, and dashed down the field, untouched and all alone. If the 40–7 win belonged to Barkum, who caught five passes for ninety-nine yards and scored three touchdowns, the breakout performer was Walter Payton, whose 143 rushing yards on eighteen carries introduced the city of Jackson to its newest star.

  “That day was when I knew Walter would one day play in the NFL,” said Brazile. “When you watched him run with the ball in that game, it was clear he was special.”

  Without drastically changing Eddie’s role, Hill increasingly turned toward Walter. The two backs substituted for each other, slapping hands as one entered and the other exited. By late in the season they were splitting time until, before the game at Mississippi Valley State on November 20, Hill decided he would finally go with the all-Payton starting backfield. “It just made sense,” said Hill. “They both ran hard, they both blocked well, and they both were lethal catching screens out of the backfield. In practice I would pit them against each other as motivation, but they didn’t need it. They were motivated without me.”

  The game took place on a bright and windy afternoon in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and if spectators believed they were witnessing some sort of sports sibling history, little was discussed. “Nobody gave it much thought,” said Eddie. “Even we didn’t. We both felt we were good enough to start together, so it was something we’d expected. When you expect something, it’s not shocking or overly memorable.” On the Devils’ dirt-and-rock-coated field, Jackson State won 17–7, with Eddie running for his tenth touchdown of the season to take hold of the SWAC scoring lead. Walter’s longest run was a twenty-yard burst up the middle on the second play of the game. He also kicked a seventeen-yard field goal and two extra points. Had Ole Miss or Mississippi State started brothers at running back, the media crush would have been overwhelming. The Clarion-Ledger marked the Payton pairing by not even mentioning it in the following day’s paper, and misspelling Payton (as “Peyton”) five different times.

  “It was never surprising,” said Eddie. “Just really pathetic.”

  The Tigers won their final two games of the season, finishing with a 9-1-1 record (mere percentage points behind Grambling for the conference title) and sealing Hill’s anointment as the SWAC Coach of the Year. Eddie led the team with 799 rushing yards, and Walter followed with 651 more. He also kicked three field goals and thirteen extra points.

  “Walter spent his first year showing us how good he could be,” said Hill, “and the next three years turning into a legend.”

  CHAPTER 7

  SOUL

  THERE ARE NICE BELTS AND THERE ARE UGLY BELTS. AND AT JACKSON STATE College, there was Mary Jones’ extra-special belt.

  The bullet one.

  Yes, you read that correctly. Somewhere within Mississippi’s capital city in the early 1970s, there was an eighteen-year-old female student from Tunica, Mississippi, with short straight hair, brown eyes, long legs, an engaging personality, and a belt featuring the bullets of an M16 assault rifle.

  Jones purchased the accessory at a vintage clothing store in Oklahoma during a field trip several years earlier, when she served as a majorette in the Rosa Fort High School marching band. “To be honest, the bullets were replicas,” said Jones. “But they looked real, and the belt was neat—brown, with these gold bullets covering it. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to buy it.”

  Jones arrived on Jackson State’s campus in May 1972. Fresh off of high school graduation, she enrolled in summer school and asked Earl Dishman, a pal from back home, to drive her to campus. “He had my clothes in his car, and he dropped me off and said he’d be back in a few hours,” Jones recalled. “Well, Earl had some friends on the other side of Jackson and he decided to stay with them. I didn’t see him for a week.”

  Jones found herself stuck in wardrobe purgatory. She had a dorm room to live in and cafeteria food to eat, but no spare clothing. “So every day for my first entire week on campus I wore the same thing—the same jumpsuit, the same bullet belt,” she said. “People started looking at me and saying, ‘Hey, Bullet!’ They never called me Mary again. Always Bullet.”

  Before long, Mary “Bullet” Jones became famous at Jackson State for two things: her ubiquitous belt and her out-of-this-galaxy dancing skills.

  Beginning when she was a little girl, Bullet emulated her mother, Mary Francis Jones, as she boogied around the house, arms waving, rump shaking. By the time she reached Jackson State, Bullet was as dazzling a dance-floor practitioner as many had ever seen. “Boy, could she groove,” said Coolidge Anderson, editor of the Blue and White Flash. “Weren’t many people on camp
us who worked it like Bullet did.”

  Well, there was one. If Bullet was Jackson State’s Ginger Rogers, its Fred Astaire was Walter Payton. Throughout a freshman year noteworthy for gridiron excellence, Payton generated equally rave reviews for his improvisational dance talents. Wherever one looked, he could find Walter dancing. Inside classrooms. Within the corridors of Sampson Hall. Standing in line for lunch. On the bus rides to away games. “He danced just like Rerun from What’s Happening!!” said Jackie Slater, an offensive lineman who went on to a twenty-year NFL career. “The moves were crazy and wild and extremely athletic.”

  “There was a porch in front of our field house, and as we were getting ready to play the football games Walter would stand there and dance, dance, dance, dance,” said Porter Taylor, a quarterback. “Coach Hill would walk by, take a look at Walter moving all around and say, ‘OK, we’re ready.’ ”

  At the start of his sophomore year of college, Payton’s primary goal was to lead the Tigers to the SWAC title. With Eddie having graduated and playing professionally in Canada, Walter knew Jackson State’s hopes rested largely on his shoulders. He spent much of the summer in Jackson on the banks of the Pearl River, running through its quicksand-like terrain and envisioning glorious Saturday afternoons inside Memorial Stadium. “If you have to come under control to make a cut, the pursuit will catch you,” Payton once said of running along the river. “In the sand, you have to move one leg before the other is planted. It makes all your muscles work. Sometimes when I’m done even my neck will be aching.”