Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  While lip service was paid to beating Pittsburgh, most of the All-Stars came to Illinois anxious to party. Dave Wasick, a defensive lineman from San Jose State, arrived at the Orrington one day after Payton. Strolling through the lobby, he was greeted by the sight of Dennis Harrah, the Miami offensive tackle, lugging three cases of Budweiser toward the elevator. There was Russ Francis, the tight end from Hawaii, serenading a gaggle of young women with his guitar. “Every night was all-out craziness,” Wasick said. “Randy White, Steve Bartkowski, Dennis Harrah, myself—we’d hit the town, stay out until three or four in the morning. One night we went to this bar, and these two enormous bouncers wouldn’t let us in. Well, both of the bouncers ended up being punched out cold. It was wild.”

  The tone was set during the first official team meeting. With his fifty-four players sitting quietly, McKay strode to the front of the room and played a video from a practice session of the 1973 College All-Star team (the 1974 game had been cancelled because of an NFL players’ strike). Instead of preparing for their matchup against the Miami Dolphins, the reel showed members of the team playing volleyball with a football, using one of the goalposts as a net.

  “That was the last time this game took place, and there’s no way we’re doing things that way again,” McKay said. A hushed silence blanketed the room. The coach smiled—“That’s because this year we’ll make sure to get you guys a real volleyball!” The players burst into laughter.

  The initial practice was held on a Friday afternoon at Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium. Bartkowski was one of the first to arrive, and he took the field early to warm up with Pat McInally, the wide receiver/punter from Harvard. While leisurely tossing the ball, Bartkowski spotted something that stopped his arm, midmotion. It was Walter Payton—and he was walking on his hands. “But not just a few feet,” Bartkowski said. “Walter exited a field house on his hands, walked a hundred yards to the field on his hands, walked all the way around me to the far goalpost on his hands, and walked back on his hands. I’m talking about three hundred yards, easy.”

  Brazile and Tate had four years of freaky Payton athleticism under their belts. The other All-Stars did not. Payton leapfrogged coaches and dunked basketballs and tossed eighty-yard spirals. He stuck out his tongue and, somehow, turned it 180-degrees upside down. “He was a gymnast,” said Louis Carter, a running back from Maryland. “He would bounce around, fall down, bounce right back up.” Said Larry Burton, a Purdue wide receiver: “Walter was pulling out these handstands and backflips, and we were all like, ‘What planet does this guy call home?’ ”

  In an effort to impress his more famous teammates, Payton spent the first week of practices pulling out all the stops. He threw his forearm shiver at White and Wasick and every other defender naïve enough to step in his way. His stiff-arm froze defensive backs like Colzie and Texas A&M’s Tim Gray. He held kicking contests with McInally, who went on to a Pro Bowl punting career with the Cincinnati Bengals, and launched bombs alongside Bartkowski and Haden. “Walter was always the last guy to leave practice,” said McInally. “He would hang around and shag our kicks, and he’d run them all back forty yards at full speed.”

  “We couldn’t wait to hit the bars and drink,” said Jim Obradovich, USC’s tight end. “Meanwhile, Walter would be working his ass off.”

  Midway through his three weeks at Evanston, a seemingly irrelevant life-altering moment took place. Known as “L’il Monk” at Jackson State, with the All-Stars Payton was referred to as either “Walter” or “Walt.” One day, during an otherwise unremarkable practice, Payton was carrying the ball when he approached Colzie, the hard-hitting defensive back. Smiling ear to ear, Payton yelled, “Your sweetness is your weakness!” then stutterstepped, lifted one leg high into the air, and burst down the field.

  “What did Walter say to you?” Colzie was asked by teammates.

  “Some nonsense,” he replied, “about my sweetness being my weakness.”

  A nickname was born. From that point on, Payton was “Sweetness.” After a lifetime of imperfect monikers that never quite worked, here was one that fit perfectly. The smiley, goofy, soft-spoken Payton was a sweet person. The cutting, dashing, swiveling Payton was a sweet runner. “We had a big blackboard in the middle of our locker room,” said Ralph Ortega, a linebacker from the University of Florida. “Every single morning Walter would walk in and write SWEETNESS EQUALS WALTER PAYTON across the board. I thought, ‘Who is this clown?’ ”

  Two weeks into workouts, Payton was having the time of his life. McKay was the anti–Bob Hill, limiting practices to an hour and a half (and usually watching from the stands, a cigar wedged between his lips), refusing to enforce a curfew, and often returning to the hotel as intoxicated and redeyed as his players. “My best times with Walter were racing through the streets of Chicago in his Datsun, him driving like a madman,” said Richard Wood, a USC linebacker. “He was absolutely giddy.”

  Unfortunately, on the afternoon of July 19, the fun ended. While carrying the ball during practice, Payton tripped and fell to Dyche’s artificial turf on his right elbow. A fiery pain shot through his arm. Within minutes, his elbow swelled to the size of a large grapefruit. By day’s end, it looked like a coconut. “It was twice the size of what it should have been,” said Kurt Schumacher, an Ohio State offensive lineman. “The thing was enormous.”

  McKay pulled Payton from further workouts and enlisted Allen Carter, his halfback at USC, as an emergency replacement. (“The joke was that McKay turned us into the USC All-Star team,” said Walter White, a tight end from the University of Maryland. “Which he pretty much did.”) The Bears sent Fred Caito, the club’s longtime trainer, to Evanston to investigate the matter. Payton was suffering from bursitis of the elbow—his bursa, a fluid-filled sack that serves as a cushion between skin and bone, had become inflamed, and the elbow was infected. “I went to Walter’s hotel and introduced myself, and told him we were going to see a doctor,” recalled Caito. “Walter was a scared kid from Mississippi who didn’t know what the hell he was doing in the big city.” Caito brought Payton to his car, and the two began driving to the office of Dr. Ted Fox, the Bears’ physician. Thirty-five years later, Caito still chuckles at what happened next. “We’re in the car and his elbow is swelling and we have no idea what’s going to happen,” Caito said. “And Walter turned to me and said, ‘Can you stop at that Baskin-Robbins down there?’ I remember thinking, ‘What? I don’t have time for this.’ But I agreed. So we went in, and then he didn’t have any money. The kid was the highest-paid rookie in team history, and the first time we met he needed me to buy him an ice cream cone.”

  Fox examined Payton’s elbow. He told him he’d have to sit out several days, and that he should wear special padding to prevent further impact. The doctor then reached for a long needle, with the intent of giving Payton a cortisone injection. Payton’s face turned pale. Sweat poured down his forehead.

  “I don’t do needles,” he told Fox.

  “Well,” said the doctor, “you do now.”

  The Steelers’ All-Star game was played a week later, on a Friday night. More than fifty million viewers watched on ABC, and a near-capacity crowd of 54,562 fans (including the entire Bears roster) packed Soldier Field, anxious to see the Super Bowl champions, but also anxious to see their city’s new featured halfback. Before kickoff, the public address announcer introduced each of the players as they jogged to midfield. The last one was Payton. And now, the first pick of the Chicago Bears—Waaaaaalllllttteeer Paaaaaayyyton . . .

  “Soldier Field just lit up,” said Fred O’Connor, the Bears’ running backs coach. “And Walter jogged out, and he looked like the most magnificent athlete I had ever seen. I turned to Jack Pardee and said, ‘I think I can coach this kid.’ ”

  Chuck Noll, the stoic Steelers coach, assured the media his team was here to win, and he was correct. On the All-Stars’ first offensive series of the game, Bartkowski hit McInally with a twenty-eight-yard touchdown pass. As the Harvard recei
ver crossed the goal line, a Pittsburgh defender delivered a decidedly late blow, breaking McInally’s left leg. “The guy was so embarrassed, he hit me after I scored,” McInally said. “They had to carry me off on a stretcher.”

  The All-Stars actually led 14–7 at halftime, but played sloppily in the second half and lost, 21–14. With his elbow entombed in a white bundle, Payton paced the team with seven carries for a paltry sixteen yards. His primary goal—to prevent his elbow from exploding into a thousand pieces—was accomplished. “The whole three weeks was just a wonderful experience for Walter, for me, for all of us,” said McInally. “We really bonded as a group of guys starting our careers at the same time.”

  On the day after the game, McInally found himself in Northwestern Hospital, his left leg immobilized, his spirits crushed over an injury that would wipe out his entire rookie year. He heard a knock on the door, and looked up to see a smiling Walter Payton. “He went out of his way to visit me,” said McInally, who would play ten seasons. “I’ve never forgotten that.” Payton even brought a card, which McInally continues to keep in one of his drawers. It reads: “Hang in there. You’ll make it. But take the year off and eat.”

  Walter Payton arrived at the team’s new Lake Forest, Illinois–based training camp with bells on. Literally. That’s the sound many of the 1975 Chicago Bears associate with their first impression of the rookie running back from Jackson State—the jingling of bells.

  Why did Walter Payton, a relatively humble young man, decide it’d be a good idea to introduce himself to teammates by tying a couple of small brass bells to his shoelaces, thereby broadcasting his attendance during drills with a jolly jingle? “I’m not sure,” said Jerry Tagge, a journeyman quarterback. “Some of the veterans thought it was incredibly cocky. Personally, I found it sort of neat. If he ran for fifty yards, you would just listen to those bells ring—ding a ling, ding a ling, ding a ling. There was a real rhythm to it.”

  “I heard those bells and my first thought was, ‘Who is this guy, and who does he think he is?’ ” said Witt Beckman, a rookie receiver out of Miami. “But then he ran, and nobody could touch him.”

  Not that Payton’s NFL beginnings were purely sweet music. With his elbow still a mess, his participation in workouts was sporadic. He practiced one session, then missed the next three. He took one handoff, cut left, juked right, and burst fifty yards down the field. He took another handoff, absorbed a hit, and fell to the ground withering in pain. At one point Payton was sent to Illinois Masonic Hospital for further treatment, missing the exhibition opener against San Diego. When Pardee was asked about his young runner, he smiled and uttered the company line. “He’s such a great guy,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “He went out for a pass and the ball hit him in the arm. He couldn’t fight the tears running down his cheek. But he was hurt.”

  For the Bears’ new coach, the words tasted like soap. A sensitive elbow? Are you kidding me? Born April 19, 1936, in Exira, Iowa, Pardee was a person who, from a very early age, believed only in hard work and harder work—excuses be damned. He was milking cows on the family’s farm at age five and digging holes for septic tanks at ten. By age fourteen Pardee was jackhammering in the oil fields of Christoval, Texas, a town of roughly five hundred people near San Angelo where his family had relocated. “To live I had to work,” he once said. “Outside of football, the greatest pleasure I got was from working on our farm . . . working the tractor. I guess I’m just hyperactive, but I can’t stand sitting around doing nothing for more than two days.”

  Pardee played his college football under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. He will forever be identified as one of the “Junction Boys”—the thirty-five of one hundred players who survived Bryant’s hellacious preseason training camp in Junction, Texas, when the temperatures reached 110 degrees and water was nowhere to be found. Pardee went on to spend fifteen years as an NFL linebacker with the Rams and Redskins, though his career—and life—came to a halt in 1964, when a mole removed from his right forearm was found to be melanoma. Told he could either die or have the arm amputated, Pardee chose option number three—an experimental eleven-and-a-half-hour operation in which his collarbone was broken and his body temperature drastically reduced. “I didn’t think I’d die,” he said. “I probably always had an indestructible attitude. Nothing was ever gonna happen to me. I’m not afraid of dying—it’s not gonna happen.”

  If cancer was his greatest life challenge, Pardee’s toughest football hurdle took place in 1974, when he was hired to coach the Florida Blazers of the fledgling World Football League. Though initially elated by the chance to guide a team, Pardee became disillusioned when, midway through the season, the players’ checks began to bounce. “Somehow the owners who stopped paying everyone still had the services of a chartered jet,” recalled Bob Bowser, Pardee’s special assistant with the Blazers and Bears. “The whole situation was laughable.”

  Despite every possible reason for his men to pack it in (No money. Games in Orlando’s dilapidated Tangerine Bowl. Putrid facilities. A schedule that changed week to week. Minimal fans.), the Blazers kept playing, reaching the WFL title game before losing to Birmingham. When Jim Finks heard of the unpaid group of journeymen and their feisty coach, he knew who he wanted to replace Gibron on the Chicago sideline. “It was more of a gut feeling than anything else,” Finks said. “We looked for something deeper.”

  Now, as Pardee arrived in Lake Forest each morning not knowing whether Payton would be on the field or in the trainer’s room, he doubted the rookie’s toughness and commitment.

  But not his talent. Throughout his month in camp, Payton was the talk of the Bears. The hype began shortly before his arrival, when O’Connor, the new running backs coach, interrupted a team meeting one day to show a film clip of Payton at Jackson State. “I think it was done to inspire us,” said Berl Simmons, a rookie kicker out of Texas Christian. “Walter must have run over or around all eleven defensive people, and we were just amazed. It was probably unusual for them to show that, but Walter was an unusual player.”

  On his first day of working out, Payton hung with the other running backs and receivers, fielding punts from Bob Parsons. When it was their turn, players waited for the balls, stepped to the left, stepped to the right, moved in, moved back—then made the catch. “Not Walter,” said Jim Osborne, the veteran defensive lineman. “Bob kicked these beautiful punts, big spirals high into the sky, and when the ball finally came down Walter would catch them behind his back. I’d never seen anyone do that before.”

  In the NFL, great athletes are the norm. Everyone is either incredibly fast or exceptionally strong, so much so that the remarkable can often appear mundane. There was nothing mundane about Payton. “He had a gluteus that I’ve never seen on another person in my life,” said Ken Valdiserri, the Bears’ longtime media relations coordinator. “His ass was chiseled. It was the most unique thing I’ve ever seen. And if you walked into the locker room it was like, ‘How can a guy have an ass like that?’ The curvature and the depth and the definition of it.”

  “He was like an acrobat,” said Tom Donchez, a backup running back. Ross Brupbacher, a Bears linebacker, called him, “A muscle.” Don Rives, the ornery linebacker, said tackling Payton “was like tackling a barrel. I hit him as hard as I could in practice and he shed me like I was Little Bo Peep.” Said Doug Plank, the team’s twelfth-round pick from Ohio State: “At first I thought it weird that Walter was always flexing. Then it hit me—he’s not flexing. He’s made of rocks.” Payton walked on his hands, flipped up, and landed in a split. He stood below a regulation basketball hoop, jumped up, and dunked with ease. “The punters were practicing one day, and he decided to give it a try,” said Dave Gallagher, a defensive end. “He walked over, picked up a ball, punted it sixty yards, and walked away. No biggie.”

  “Genetically, he seemed to be just like a rubber ball,” said Larry Ely, a linebacker. “When he got tackled, four . . . five . . . six people would have his legs, his neck, his arms, a
nd he’d bounce back like a rubber ball to the huddle. How in the world did his ligaments and muscles take the pounding and bounce right back? You looked at him and wondered how any human being could be blessed with such a body.”

  “He took up golf one day with the Bears,” said Bo Rather, a receiver. “He picked up an eight or nine iron and told us, ‘See that light post out there? I’m gonna hit it.’ The post must have been a hundred and twenty yards away, and Walter took the club, swung, and hit that post right down the middle. It was phenomenal. Whatever he did, he would be good at it.”

  Despite the mixed reaction to his shoelace bells, Payton was embraced by veterans and fellow rookies. He was assigned to share an apartment with Gary Hrivnak, a third-year defensive end out of Purdue who was surprised to find himself with a black roommate. “I don’t know if they were trying to integrate the team more, but it was an eye-opener,” said Hrivnak. “Walter was very quiet, but in a good way. He wasn’t always talking about himself and everything he could do. He was unaffected by being a high pick and making good money.” Hrivnak remembered Walter plastering a small section of wall with photographs of Connie, his college sweetheart. He also recalled the time he approached the room and heard the thump of soul music blaring from behind the door. “I walk in, and Walter had four or five African-American players inside and they’re all dancing,” Hrivnak said. “Well, he tried to drag this old white guy in the middle and teach me to dance. Everyone laughed—I was the butt of the joke. But it was OK, because Walter was just a nice, funny, lighthearted kid.”