Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Holmes stopped him midsentence.

  “Hell, why wouldn’t I?” he said. “Bring the nigger up here and lemme meet him.”

  Hill laughed. Such was Bud being Bud.

  Now, five years later, Hill and Holmes were at it again. The NFL Draft was scheduled for January 28, 1975, and according to the many scouts who had visited Jackson State’s campus, all three players were guaranteed to be selected—Payton and Brazile within the first dozen or so picks. The problem, however, came with representation. While various Southern attorneys and agents scoured the campuses of Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Southern Miss, few—actually, none—trekked out to Jackson State. It’s not that the Tigers lacked talent. Everyone knew Hill’s program was a buffet of NFL prospects. No, this was about reputation. The white Mississippi agent who represented black players was known as a sellout to his race. College coaches wanted nothing to do with you. Prospects were told to ignore your phone calls. “Truthfully,” said Holmes, “I didn’t give a shit. If you could play, you could play.”

  That’s why Hill and his players were here, in Holmes’ office, seeking out representation. The five men spoke for roughly twenty-five minutes, with the coach and agent doing 99 percent of the talking. Holmes would look up at Payton and Brazile and Young, their eyes wide, their lips pursed. He felt as if he understood what it was to be them—young and black and Southern born. That’s why, as the meeting closed and silence choked the room, he turned to Hill and spoke loudly.

  “Coach,” Holmes said, “I just don’t think I can represent these boys.”

  Hill was stunned. “Really,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Well,” said Holmes, “they seem like perfectly nice niggers. But look at those purses. I’ve never, ever represented any little queers before.”

  With that, the players burst into laughter. Holmes shook their hands and promised honesty and respect. “All I ask of you is to be good citizens, look people in the eyes, and carry yourself with dignity,” he said. “If you can do that, we can work together.”

  Walter Payton nodded. He had no idea what he was getting himself into.

  Born on October 29, 1932, Bud Holmes was raised in the shadow of D.W. Holmes, his larger-than-life father. A onetime captain of the Ole Miss baseball team, D.W. played several years as a semipro pitcher before earning his law degree from Ole Miss. In 1948, at age fifty-seven, D.W. was elected mayor of Hattiesburg—a progressive, forward-thinking Democrat who planned on adding blacks to the city’s police force (a radical idea at the time) and refused to cower at social progress. While growing up in Lake, Mississippi, D.W.’s closest lifelong friend was a black man named Lawyer Cox. “Lawyer was like Daddy’s brother,” said Bud Holmes. “It wasn’t that Daddy always thought he had to do right by blacks. He just thought people should be fair. If that meant giving people equal rights and respect, then that’s what it was.”

  Two years after his election, D.W. was traveling through the nearby town of Collins, Mississippi, when he was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had swerved into the wrong lane. He died on impact.

  Eighteen years old and a senior at Hattiesburg High, young Bud Holmes was met by a harsh reality. His father was dead—and real life wasn’t easy. “We were never rich, but we were comfortable,” he said. “Well, two days after Daddy died my car didn’t have any gas, my dogs didn’t have any food, and I had two dollars in my pocket. It was my wake-up call that the world wasn’t going to show me much pity.”

  Bud took a job in the bookstore at the University of Southern Mississippi, working with athletes who needed academic assistance. He enrolled at the school, and befriended a professional baseball player from West Point, Mississippi, named Bubba Phillips. Working his way through Detroit’s minor league system, Phillips, a Southern Miss grad, needed someone local to watch his automobile while he attended spring training in Lakeland, Florida. Holmes was happy to oblige. “That alone made me a big man on campus,” he said. “Hell, I was driving Bubba Phillips’ car. You couldn’t get much bigger than that.” Holmes graduated in December 1953 with a degree in history, then spent two years in the army before attaining his law degree from Ole Miss in June 1958.

  Holmes began practicing law locally, and also worked on a handful of political campaigns. His true passion, however, was assisting the Southern Miss athletic department. Oftentimes alongside Phillips, he combed the state looking for high school gridiron stars worthy of playing for the Golden Eagles. The Southern Miss brass came to trust Holmes, who compensated for his lack of athleticism (he was a high school cheerleader) with a keen eye for talent and a confident swagger that sold his alma mater to dozens of youngsters. Holmes also put his legal knowledge to use, representing Southern Miss athletes in various minor skirmishes.

  Before long Holmes was an established part of the Southern Miss family. In 1969, he was asked by the school to negotiate a deal with the New Orleans Saints, a four-year-old NFL franchise, to relocate its training camp from Bowling Green, Ohio, to the Southern Miss campus. Two years later, the team was in Hattiesburg. “I succeeded, and that helped my reputation a great deal,” he said. “It made a statement.”

  Shortly thereafter, Ray Guy, Southern Miss’ all-American punter, approached Holmes about representing him in the 1973 NFL Draft. Guy remains the only punter in NFL history to be selected in the first round. A year later another Southern Miss player, defensive end Fred Cook, asked Holmes to be his agent. Cook was taken in the second round. “I didn’t do anything special,” Holmes said. “But I was honest and up-front with those boys. They appreciated that.”

  From the very beginning, he had a different perspective on race. With his father’s commitment to decency, Bud was never one to condemn blacks, or demand segregation, or openly fear the coming of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. As far as Bud was concerned, to deny someone a piece of the pie based solely on skin color was sinful. When D.W. died, Bud’s first call was to Lawyer Cox.

  And yet, his take is complicated. As far as Holmes was concerned, blacks were blacks and whites were whites, and the societal divide was—to a certain degree—a key to harmonic living. “I grew up in a town where, at most, you had one or two murders per year,” he said. “Nobody had a lock on their door. If a black man didn’t support his family, the black community had a group of preachers and hardworking men called a spirit group. And they’d visit him and say, ‘Listen, if you don’t take care of your family, we’ll take action.’

  “Well, today there’s killing, there’s dope, there’s fighting over the welfare checks. I don’t mean to say we necessarily should go back to a segregated society. But when you had segregation, you let the blacks come forward and control their people. And they did. There are a lot of negatives to the problems integration brought. A lot of older blacks would say that if they could do it over again, they’d take it back. There were black movie theaters, black banks, black funeral homes. The blacks took great pride in themselves. And if a kid screwed up at school, the black teacher would call home and say, ‘I wore him out.’ Then the parent would wear the child out, too. Today they learn all you have to say is, ‘That white teacher called me a nigger.’ And the teacher gets in trouble. So they learn all they have to do is holler ‘Racism! Racism!’ And the school system went to shit. People try to run and hide from that, but it’s the truth of the matter.”

  Dating back to his youth, Holmes has tossed around the word” nigger” with the casualness of a throw pillow. From his viewpoint, it isn’t stated with contempt, merely as a word that’s no less inappropriate than “apple” or “hello.” A nigger can be a nice black or a jerk black, a successful one or an utter failure, male or female, young or old. In the heart of rural Mississippi, Holmes is beloved by many blacks as an honest, straightforward purveyor of truth. “There aren’t many people I’d trust with my life,” said Eddie Payton. “But Bud is one of them. His word is his bond.”

  Walter Payton didn’t initially know what to think. He trusted Hill, and Hill trus
ted Holmes. Yet as two big showcases for the nation’s elite college seniors, the East-West Shrine Game and the Senior Bowl, approached, Payton wasn’t certain his best strategy would be to hire a local agent with a limited number of NFL clients. On December 24, he and Brazile flew to California to participate in the East-West Shrine Game at Stanford Stadium. The players spent five days in Palo Alto, practicing, mingling with peers, conducting interviews, meeting with scouts, and being wooed by agents. “The only time I ever saw Walter cry was that Christmas morning,” said Brazile. “Truth is, we both were crying, because it was the first Christmas for either of us without our families. I saw a different side of Walter, and he saw a different side of me.” The East-West flew in players from across the nation. The big names were Steve Bartkowski, the University of California quarterback (widely presumed to be the number one pick in the upcoming draft), and Maryland defensive lineman Randy White. Payton was a curiosity. “People probably wanted to know how he would hang with bigger, tougher, more prominent players,” said Holmes. “Back then Jackson State was discarded, if people even heard of it at all.”

  One person well aware of Payton’s potential was Mike Hickey, at the time a scout with the New England Patriots. Hickey had made two trips to Jackson State during the season, and he urged his franchise to find a way to add the running back. “He was a kid who excelled in every category,” said Hickey. “Besides his obvious ability, Walter had a maturity that was well beyond the SWAC or anywhere else. A lot of guys from small schools come up with chips on their shoulders, and it’s not a good thing. But Walter was calm and easygoing, and he got along with everyone. If you didn’t like him as a scout, you had no business being in the profession.”

  On one of the days leading up to the East-West game, Hickey was chatting with Payton and Brazile inside their hotel room at the Hyatt. The phone rang every ten minutes or so, one agent after another offering his services. “This phone is killing us,” Brazile said. “It’s so annoying.” The next time it rang, Hickey picked up. Howard Slusher, sports’ most powerful agent, was on the other end—probably the tenth time he’d called in three days. “He thought I was Brazile, so he started giving me the big pitch,” Hickey said. “I cut him off and said, ‘Man, I don’t want you.’ ” Both players laughed, and Payton had an idea. Hickey was a nice guy in his early twenties with a laid-back attitude and significantly deeper NFL ties than Holmes. “Hey Mike,” he said, “would you consider representing us? You seem to understand us, and you get along with us real well.”

  Hickey was flattered. He called home later that night, briefly debating the idea with his wife, Kathy. Red Hickey, Mike’s father, had been a well-known NFL player and coach and was now working as a scout with the Dallas Cowboys. That was the life Mike most wanted to emulate—finding players, not negotiating on their behalves. “Plus, I had a wife and two little girls in Foxborough, Massachusetts,” he said, “and I thought I would be cutting off my career if I left the Patriots.”

  Payton (as well as Brazile) wound up sticking with Holmes, whose advice to his newest client in the lead-up to the collegiate bowl games was simple: Show that you belong on this level. Prove the doubters wrong.

  Playing for an East squad led by legendary Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, Payton rushed for forty-nine yards on sixteen carries, unspectacular numbers that impressed absolutely everybody. Dave Pear, a highly touted defensive lineman from Washington, long recalled trying to tackle the mysterious Division II running back. “Never heard of him,” said Pear, who went on to a six-year NFL career. “Then he hit me and I never forgot him. The guy was an absolute horse. He refused to fall down. Just flat-out refused.”

  Though the scouts in attendance marveled at his performance, Payton was crestfallen. He was outrushed by two other players (LSU’s Brad Davis and Arizona’s Jim Upchurch), and worried that his stock had plunged. “Walter could be very insecure about himself,” said Holmes. “He was confident, but only to a certain point.”

  Two weeks later, Payton drove to Mobile, Alabama, to play in his second—and last—pre-Draft All-Star event, the heavily watched, heavily hyped Senior Bowl. Because organizers of the game had mistakenly scheduled it for the same day as the Honolulu-based Hula Bowl, they had to woo players with thousand-dollar payouts. It would be Payton’s first professional check.

  Payton had approached the East-West contest cautiously. Not this one. “He actually had an entourage around him leading up to the game,” said Jim Germany, a running back from New Mexico State, “and the entourage was all the black college players hanging all over him. They knew how good Walter was, and they gravitated toward him.”

  “The first time I noticed Walter was on picture day,” said Emmett Lee Edwards, a wide receiver from Kansas. “We were all standing together for photos, and everyone was trying to show who they were. I looked over at Walter, and something about him was just different. I came from Kansas, so I’d seen running backs like Gale Sayers and John Riggins. But I knew immediately Walter was in a different category. He looked like a guy who’d gained a lot of yards. You could see it. I went back and told Delvin Williams, my roommate, ‘This Payton guy has something to him. I don’t know what it is—he just does.’ ”

  Entering the week of the game, Mark Mullaney, a defensive lineman from Colorado State, had never seen or heard of Walter Payton. One day, after the North and South teams finished their practices, Mullaney was the last person to exit the locker room. He heard a curious noise from the stadium, and wandered over. There, all alone, was Payton, running the stairs and, afterward, standing in the end zone, jumping straight up and hanging from the goalpost. “He could actually grab it with ease,” said Mullaney, who went on to a twelve-year career with the Minnesota Vikings. “It was astonishing. Everyone else was long gone, probably eating dinner. And here’s this kid, by himself, working out.” Shortly thereafter, Mullaney received a call from his father, Ed, who worked as a player agent. “He asked me if there was anybody down there who particularly impressed me,” said Mullaney. “I told him about Walter Payton from Jackson State. And I’ll never forget his reaction. He said, ‘Walter who?’ ”

  “I was the captain of the team, and our coach said I could call my own plays, but that I had to give this Jackson State kid his fair share of carries,” said Bob Avellini, a quarterback from Maryland. “I had no idea who he was. On the first day of practice I turned to hand the ball to him and he was so quick, I barely got it to him. Then I watched him run—oh my God!”

  Three days before the January 11, 1975, contest, Payton told the assembled media that he planned on cruising off in the brand-new Dodge Charger awarded to the game’s MVP. “I didn’t have a good game in the East-West,” he said, “and I want to show everybody what kind of back I am.” The cockiness hardly came naturally to Payton, who rarely uttered so much as a peep on the football field. But he believed he needed attention to secure his future. “We just didn’t know,” said Brazile. “Everything was a mystery to us.”

  In a dull 17–17 tie, Payton led all rushers with seventy-three yards on thirteen carries. He returned two kickoffs for forty-two yards, caught two passes and punted three times for a forty-one-yard average. On the first play of the game, he was stopped for a loss by Dave Wasick, a defensive lineman from San Jose State. “I hit him, and he jumped up real quick,” said Wasick. “So I jumped up real quick, too. I thought we were gonna fight, but he just ran back to the huddle. Later on I asked him why he got up like that. He said, ‘When you play in the SWAC, if you don’t get up quickly they’ll gouge your eyes out.’ ”

  Though the MVP award went to Bartkowski (likely because writers decided on the winner before the completion of the game—the South team tied the score on a field goal with twenty-five seconds remaining), a point had been made. “Walter was the best guy in the draft,” said Hill. “And it was obvious.”

  Well, maybe not obvious. At least not to everybody.

  Shortly before the January 28–29, 1975, NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons se
nt offensive lineman George Kunz (as well as the number three overall pick) to Baltimore for the right to select Bartkowski, the golden-haired quarterback out of Cal. At six foot four and 212 pounds, Bartkowski was the model big-statured, big-armed pocket passer. As a senior he had thrown for 2,580 yards and twelve touchdowns, and his breathtaking spirals evoked comparisons to a young Roman Gabriel. During one practice, Bartkowski had supposedly launched a ball an unfathomable 103 yards. “I am strictly a thrower,” he said. “I drop back and turn the ball loose.”

  After the Falcons made their pick, Bartkowski was flown from California to Manhattan to meet the press. Payton, for his part, followed the goings-on from his room inside Jackson State’s Sampson Hall, sitting alongside Brazile and hoping for an early telephone call. Because the draft was not yet televised or broadcast, players were forced to wait for a team to contact them with the good news. Payton knew the Falcons were going to go with a quarterback, and that was fine with him. For all its hype as a growing Southern metropolis, Atlanta was too close to Mississippi for Walter’s tastes. One year earlier, leading into his junior season, Payton had actually been drafted by the Birmingham Americans of the fledgling World Football League (the league selected underclassmen). Even had he desired to turn pro at the time, there was no way in hell Walter Payton was going to kick off his career a mere 240 miles away from Jackson. Where was the adventure in that?

  No, Payton wanted to go somewhere different. Somewhere snazzy. Which is why he had hoped and prayed that the Dallas Cowboys, holders of the draft’s second overall selection, would take him.

  Coming off of an 8-6 season, Dallas was a model NFL franchise. The team was blessed with a cornerstone quarterback in Roger Staubach, a dazzling wide receiver in Drew Pearson, and the game’s best young offensive line.