Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Temporary relief came in the second week, when Chicago hosted the Philadelphia Eagles and, against a more-talented team, pulled out a 15–13 victory on a Bob Thomas field goal with eight seconds remaining. Payton, in the words of the Tribune’s Pierson, “[Shedded] his goat horns with uncanny brilliance,” rushing for ninety-five yards and making several key catches from quarterback Gary Huff after Douglass was benched. “I recall that game very well,” said John Bunting, an Eagles linebacker, “because afterward I remember thinking, ‘I need to get out of this league, because some rookie just made a fool out of me.’ Walter was young and raw, but he had a different speed, a different twitch, a different quick.”

  The victory, however fulfilling, proved to be a mirage. The 1975 Chicago Bears were bad, bordering on putrid, and if anyone held out hope of a play-off run, eight losses over the ensuing nine weeks shut those thoughts down. Having coached the Florida Blazers to the World Football League’s World Bowl only a few months earlier, Pardee had a vision of success. This wasn’t it. Consequently, Chicago’s roster became a conveyor belt, with seemingly every available former Blazer coming in for a game or two, then being deemed substandard and shipped off to the scrap heap. Midway through the season, Chicago’s offense featured an unheard-of seven new starters from the previous year. Payton was essentially playing for an expansion franchise. “You tried remembering names,” said Richard Harris, a veteran defensive lineman. “But guys were in and out so quick, it wasn’t always worth the effort.”

  “We realized we had to bite the bullet and rebuild the franchise one player at a time,” said Pardee. “If you played for me in the past and you had some talent, I was giving you a look. Just take a number and line on up.”

  With the Lake Michigan winds becoming increasingly fierce and the losses piling up like mounds of icy snow, life with the team turned unbearable. The Bears traveled to Bloomington, Minnesota, and were pasted by the Vikings, 28–3 (Payton’s postgame quote—“They weren’t as good as I expected”—was greeted with dumbfounded silence by teammates), then visited Pontiac, Michigan, for what many of the players hoped could be a win over the mediocre Lions.

  Instead, Detroit handed Chicago one of the most humiliating losses in the history of the franchise. Though the scoreboard read 27–7, Lion players mocked their rivals throughout. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen an opponent laugh at the other team,” Pardee said afterward. “That’s what they were doing out there. Laughing at us. We looked like a bunch of little boys playing grown men.”

  Payton accrued no yards for the second time in four weeks, and left midway through the game with a calf bruise. In the following morning’s press conference, Pardee protected the rookie (“He played a good game. He blocked well.”) and ripped the offensive line as a dysfunctional band of dolts. Unlike earlier in the season, however, when hope still existed and the mood remained upbeat, now fewer veterans were willing to hear such drivel. Payton and his little shoelace bells had been cute during camp, and talk of his inevitable greatness could be chalked up to giddy optimism. But now, when the games mattered, the kid wasn’t performing. Did Franco Harris ever have the offensive line as a scapegoat in Pittsburgh? Did O. J. Simpson in Buffalo? Lydell Mitchell with the Colts? No, no, and no. So why wasn’t Payton taking some of the blame and admitting he missed a lot of open holes?

  Truth is, while Payton was liked from the beginning, many teammates found him perplexing and, as the season progressed, increasingly irksome. “He had this loud whistle that he’d do for no reason in the locker room,” said Don Rives, a veteran linebacker. “I’d hear that and want to strangle him around the neck. But he was twenty-two. At that age, people are immature and stupid.” Before the game in Detroit, Payton—who steadfastly attended team chapel services on Sunday mornings—asked all of the offensive linemen to join him in the shower of the visiting locker room. Bob Asher, a backup tackle, thought he wanted to review the Lions’ defense. “Walter had us all join hands,” Asher said, “and then he started praying—this really spiritual prayer that made everyone very uncomfortable.”

  Those who knew Payton well (his girlfriend, his mother, his brother) urged him to fight back the awkwardness and make a sincere effort to reach out toward teammates. But instead of endearing himself, Payton overcompensated and reverted to the mischievous kid from Columbia. He threw balled-up, damp, dirty practice socks at the heads of unsuspecting teammates (and whipped towels at bare rear ends and flicked ears with his drawn-back index finger). Before arriving for team meetings, he liked to stop at the neighborhood pet store, purchase a one-dollar mouse and, while Pardee was talking, let the rodent run free. Such was the way he behaved at Jackson State, and—because players at all collegiate levels ritually laugh at anything the star does—he thought he was being funny. Chicago, however, was a long way from Jackson. “Walter was starting to act like your annoying little brother or the middle kid who isn’t getting enough attention,” said Schubert. “He wanted to make sure you knew he was there.”

  “Walter was childish,” said Bob Avellini, a rookie backup quarterback. “A nice guy, without a doubt, but childish. We’d be working out in shorts and he’d pull your shorts down. Maybe it’s funny the first time. By the fifth time, it’s not.”

  Equally agitating was Payton’s mounting whininess. Back in training camp, when his elbow was swollen and throbbing, Payton ached to get onto the field. Now, in the midst of nonstop losing, the drive lessened. “He had some frustrating times,” said Jim Osborne, the defensive lineman. “I understood. There were guys on the Bears who wouldn’t have made my college team at Southern. It was that bad.” Payton always seemed to have a complaint—his elbow was acting up, his hamstring was tight, his knee felt funny, he had a cold. He moped loudly, and with little restraint. “In that game against the Lions, he came out and we looked him over,” said Fred Caito, the team trainer. “When I told him I’d retape him and send him back out there, you could look at his face and sense his thinking—‘I’m hurt and we’re getting blown out. I don’t want back in.’

  “At that point I had real questions about Walter. He was supposed to be a good player, but he didn’t have much of a desire to play. I even told him, ‘Walter, everybody is hurt, everybody has something.’ But he was a kid and he needed to grow up.”

  During one memorable practice, Payton was participating in a noncontact drill when he approached Earl Douthitt, a rookie cornerback out of Iowa, lowered his forearm, and slammed it into Douthitt’s chin. Payton chuckled, but the defensive players stewed. On the next play, Payton again ran through the hole, where Douthitt was waiting. This time, he flattened Payton, sending him sprawling to the ground. “He gets up and he wants to fight me,” said Douthitt. “He could dish it, but he couldn’t take it. Typical whiner.”

  Payton’s biggest gripe was with the play calling. Thanks to a lengthy history of preposterously terrible drafts, the Bears lacked anyone resembling a competent starting quarterback. Douglass had been mercifully released, Huff could not figure out NFL defenses (in six professional seasons, he would complete sixteen touchdown passes and fifty interceptions), and Avellini was raw and plodding (teammates nicknamed him “Slo-Mo Bob”). As a result, Chicago ran the ball with such regularity that defenses barely acknowledged the presence of wide receivers. Payton faced a never-ending string of eightman fronts, and he came to dread the inevitable poundings.

  On the day following the Detroit setback, Payton called Bud Holmes, his agent. “The coaching here is a joke!” he screamed. “Everything is so predictable! Pardee doesn’t believe in throwing the ball! I can’t take it!”

  Holmes waited until his client was done venting. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Hold on one second. I’ve got it right here.”

  “What do you have?” Payton asked.

  “Your contract,” Holmes replied. “Those sons of bitches! Those sons of bitches! I’m getting on the phone right now and I’m calling Jim Finks and we’re gonna have it out!”

  “What are
you going to say?” Payton asked.

  “Boy, they ain’t paying you a damn to coach, and I’m sick of it,” Holmes said. “All this damn coaching you want to do, and those sons of bitches ain’t paying you a dime! Those sons of bitches are gonna pay you!”

  “No,” said Payton, “don’t call.”

  “I’m going to!” countered Holmes.

  “Don’t,” begged Payton. “Please don’t.”

  Holmes paused, embracing his client’s nervousness.

  “Now listen here, you son of a bitch!” he said. “That coach wants to win more than you do because his job depends on it. Now you might disagree, but you do what he tells you. If he says you should stand on your head and bounce up and down, you go stand on your head and bounce.”

  “OK,” Payton said. “I get it.”

  “And never call to complain about this again,” Holmes said. “They pay you a lot of money to play football. Now shut the hell up and go play it!”

  For Chicago, the biggest matchup of a dismal season came on Sunday, October 19, when the Bears traveled to Pittsburgh to face the defending Super Bowl champions at Three Rivers Stadium.

  Payton spent the week leading up to the game going through workouts with half hearted intensity. When others ran, he jogged. When others jogged, he walked. One of the veteran Bears, a fullback named Cid Edwards, was in the final season of his career and beaten down by the losing. Throughout the week, Edwards was in Payton’s ear, encouraging him to loaf. “Let the white boy take the carries,” Edwards said of Mike Adamle, the backup halfback. “You’ve had a long season.” Though now familiar enough with Pardee to know he was no cupcake (Said Carter: “In my two years of playing for Jack I think he smiled twice. And in both instances, he was really just squinting because the sun was in his eyes.”), Payton figured his coach would understand that, on certain occasions, featured backs need to take it easy.

  The Bears held their practices at Ferry Hall, an abandoned all-girls school near Lake Forest College. The offices and meeting centers were all converted classrooms and the locker room had been a science lab. While the facility was uninspiring by nearly all standards (Said Caito: “The guys from UCLA and USC would go there for the first time and shudder in disbelief.”), it allowed players numerous inconspicuous spots to sneak off and smoke a cigarette or take a quick sip from a flask. So Payton hid. He stayed out of the way, lingered behind a corner, avoided Pardee’s glare at all costs.

  Upon arriving at practice Friday morning, Payton told O’Connor that his knee was hurting, and he needed a day off. The coach was incredulous—the Steelers featured a halfback, Rocky Bleier, whose right leg was filled with shrapnel from a grenade attack during Vietnam. A rookie with five games under his belt was asking out?

  “There’s an enormous difference between being hurt and being injured,” said O’Connor. “Was Walter hurt? Sure. But he certainly wasn’t hurt to the point that he couldn’t participate.”

  As Payton watched from the sidelines, the Bears practiced with Adamle, a fifth-year halfback out of Northwestern, filling in. After the team retreated to the showers, Pardee called Payton into his office. “Walter,” Pardee said, “we have a very strict rule here. You don’t practice, you don’t play. That’s how it is, and it’s written in stone. So you’re out for Sunday. Mike’s getting the start.”

  Payton nodded, left the room, sat down at his locker, and put his headphones over his ears.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Roland Harper, the rookie fullback who used the neighboring locker.

  “He won’t let me play,” Payton said. “I’m out.”

  “Walter pouted,” said Harper. “He couldn’t believe what Jack was doing to him.”

  Far from beloved, Bears players found Pardee to be unfriendly, unemotional, and when it came to the team’s dull offense, unimaginative. “He put a bad taste in a lot of our mouths,” said Wally Chambers, the defensive lineman. “We were used to Abe Gibron, the big teddy bear. There were no warm, fuzzy feelings toward Jack.”

  In this instance, however, the coach’s decision was brilliant. Veterans applauded it. Though he approached every game hoping to win, Pardee realized that, whether his starting halfback was Payton or Adamle, the Bears were almost certainly not going to go on the road and beat the mighty Steelers. So why not make a statement?

  “Long after I had played for Coach [Bear] Bryant at Texas A&M, I’d go to coaching seminars to hear him speak,” said Pardee. “He used talk about disciplining players, and how if you’re going to make a point you better do it with a good player, not the fourth-string tackle. Coach once sat Joe Namath for a game in college, and Namath never missed another one.

  “Physically, Walter could have played against the Steelers. And I suppose I could have overlooked his faking the injury. But I saw it as an opportunity to make an important statement to everyone about what we expected.”

  That Sunday, Payton stood on the sideline in his uniform as the Bears battled the Steelers in what the Tribune’s Ed Stone rightly termed a “morbid” mismatch. Though it was hard watching his team slog through a 34–3 embarrassment, what upset Payton most was Adamle making his first NFL start.

  As a white, undersized (five foot nine, 198 pounds) running back, Adamle had spent much of his five years in the NFL trying to prove he was worthy of more than special teams play. Yet in two seasons with the Chiefs, then another two with the Jets, he never exceeded 303 yards or two touchdowns. There was always a bigger name (Ed Podolak in Kansas City, John Riggins in New York) in front of him, as was now the case in Chicago. Yet at long last, thanks to Payton’s phantom malady, Adamle was getting a shot. With dozens of family members and friends on hand, he gained 110 yards on seventeen carries, the best game for a Bears running back since Gale Sayers’ retirement. Harper, a rookie also making his first NFL start, added eighty-six more.

  Throughout the afternoon, Payton did and said the right things. He patted Adamle atop the helmet, applauded his effort, told him to wait for his blocks and steer clear of Jack Lambert, Pittsburgh’s terrifying linebacker. Inside, he was devastated. “You could watch him sitting there and know he was upset,” said Caito. “But that was the whole idea. He should have been upset. Great players are selfish. They want the ball.”

  Throughout his life, Payton bemoaned the afternoon in Pittsburgh. He told anyone within earshot that Jack Pardee had been wrong to keep him glued to the sidelines. “He liked saying, ‘Bud, I could have played! I could have played!’ ” said Holmes. “And I liked saying, ‘Walter, you fucked it up! You fucked it up! ’ ”

  Did the lesson stick?

  In thirteen seasons, Payton never missed another game.

  Decades before extensive broadcast coverage made the sport ubiquitous, there was something genuinely magical about ABC’s Monday Night Football. The commentators—especially the cantankerous Howard Cosell—were national icons, and Pop Warner, high school, and college players dreamed of one day appearing on the telecast. From the first time he glanced over the Bears’ 1975 schedule, Payton had anticipated breaking out on Monday night against the Vikings at Soldier Field. He imagined all his old friends glued to the television in Jackson State’s Sampson Hall and back home in Columbia, Mississippi.

  Instead, it turned into one of the worst nights of his life.

  Because of his 110-yard performance against the world champion Steelers the previous week, Adamle got the start again. He opened the scoring with a fourteen-yard draw play for a touchdown. “I can’t believe it’s the Mike Adamle we were watching with the Jets,” Cosell raved. “He’s suddenly getting an opportunity with the Bears and proving he’s a big-league runner.” Payton was a backup for the first time since his freshman year in college, as well as the team’s new kick returner. His special teams gig began well, as Payton fielded his first NFL kickoff and ran it back forty-three yards. Three plays later, however, Payton took a pitch from Huff, swept around the right corner, bolted down the field, twisted, ducked, swiveled—then fumbled when Minnesota
’s Terry Brown knocked the ball loose. “He was just making a great run,” a disgusted Pardee said afterward. “In making the second effort he exposed the ball.”

  The Bears lost, 13–9.

  Payton, who carried only ten times compared to Adamle’s fourteen, was down. His NFL dreams had never involved working as a backup and returning kicks. “If they want me to run, I’ll run,” he told Joe Mooshil of the Associated Press. “If they want me to block, I’ll block. If they want me to catch passes, I’ll do that. And if they want to use me as a decoy, I’ll be a decoy.” The words were straight out of Bud Holmes’ Guide to Media Talk: 101 and they were insincere. Payton wasn’t in Chicago to block or return kicks (though he would lead the league with a 31.7 yard average on fourteen returns) or act as a decoy. He was a football player for one reason—to run the ball.

  It was around this time—at his lowest point—that Payton needed a friend to confide in. He found one in Roland Harper. In the 1975 NFL Draft, teams selected a total of 442 players over seventeen rounds. Harper, an obscure fullback out of Louisiana Tech, was picked 420th—and only because Chicago had accidentally noticed him while scouting Charles McDaniel, the Bulldogs’ star halfback. “Walter never felt he had to prove himself to the world,” said Harper, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana. “But I did. I felt in my heart that I would play in the NFL, and that my blocking was good enough to take on any level of player.”

  Throughout training camp, Bears players and coaches went about the tasks at hand when—SMACK!—the unmistakable sound of pulverization caught their attention. “That was Roland doing his thing,” said Tom Donchez, a reserve running back. “When he hit people, it stung.” Payton and Harper shared myriad commonalities. Both were Southern blacks who took part in the integration of a high school (Harper’s senior class at Captain Shreve High in Shreveport, Louisiana, was the first to include whites and blacks). Both were driven to succeed and unwilling to accept failure. Both were raised by warm mothers and hard-driven fathers (Harper’s dad, Eural, installed floors for banks and hospitals). Both played in the backfield. Both kept Bibles in their lockers and attended the team’s weekly prayer meetings. Unlike Payton, however, Harper was universally beloved. He was talkative without being annoying and insightful without being arrogant. Teammates referred to him as “Preacher.” The kid possessed an air of wisdom.