Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Before long the two backs were inseparable. They talked at length about God and about race and about football. Once, in an attempt to prank Fred O’Connor, the running backs coach, they swapped jerseys and showed up at a frigid practice wearing wool ski masks. The jig lasted for ten minutes, until O’Connor turned to Harper and said, “You might be wearing number thirty-four, but you’re not Walter Payton.”

  “We became bookends,” said Harper. “I understood what made him tick, what made him angry, what made him determined. He felt pressure to be the star, and if he didn’t rush for one hundred yards he sometimes felt as if he was disappointing people. He was incredibly competitive, and if he didn’t meet standards he wanted to hide.”

  With Harper at his side, Payton survived the rest of the horrible season, eventually returning to the starting lineup. But it wasn’t fun. He hated the snow and dreaded the wind. Having spent 95 percent of his life in shorts and a T-shirt, Payton wondered aloud why people subjected themselves to Chicago’s winters. At the time, Payton didn’t know enough to embrace Chicago’s greatness—the bountiful restaurants, the theatre district, the bustling nightlife, and nonstop action. He was a scared kid longing for simplicity.

  Payton’s spirits were hardly lifted by the junk that surrounded him. Chicago’s quarterbacks combined to throw twenty-two interceptions in 1975 (with just nine touchdowns), and when asked to assess Payton, Pardee praised his running, his blocking, and—of all things—his ability “to pursue [interceptors] real well.”

  “Jack wasn’t even trying to be funny,” said Pierson. “We all cracked up—the Bears were so sad that a running back was being saluted for his skills as a tackler.”

  Payton saved his best game for his last, gaining more than three hundred total yards against the hapless New Orleans Saints at the Superdome. With his parents watching from the stands, Payton rushed for 134 yards on twenty-five carries, including a fifty-four-yard touchdown run. He returned two kicks for 104 yards. The Bears won 42–17, their fourth and final victory.

  Payton’s 679 rushing yards were the most for a Bear back since Sayers gained 1,032 in 1969, but the achievement provided little solace. Payton never wanted to go through a season like that again. He never wanted to be benched, and he never wanted to be considered an afterthought.

  As soon as the Bears returned to Chicago, Payton packed up his apartment, loaded the Datsun, and headed back to Mississippi. He longed for warm weather and familiar smiles and some time away from the NFL grind. He spent his days fishing, napping, seeing old friends, and hanging out in old haunts.

  Five months later, when he prepared to return to Chicago for summer training camp, Payton turned grumpy and dark. He dreaded going back. He asked Connie about moving with him to the Windy City—a proposition she found most unappealing. “If you want me to be there with you,” she said, “then we need to be together the right way.”

  “So let me get this straight,” he said. “If I don’t marry you, you really aren’t going to come to Chicago?”

  Connie nodded.

  A day later Walter presented Connie with a ring and assured her he would take care of the wedding arrangements. He called a pastor at Mount Cathray Baptist Church in Jackson and roped in two friends to serve as witnesses. Just how meaningful was July 7, 1976, the day they were to be wed? Connie forgot all about it. “I was out at the mall wandering around with some friends,” she wrote. “I came home that evening with some shopping bags, only to find him sitting in my living room, pouting.” With a furrowed brow, Walter glanced toward his future wife. “How dare you forget this day,” he said. “First, you’re going to make me marry you, and then you forget the day?”

  “No, I’m ready,” Connie said. “Let’s go now.”

  The two headed for the church. No family members were invited or, for that matter, informed. The service was unremarkable. Afterward, Connie called her mother to explain. “You and Daddy work so hard every day, and to even give me the wedding you would feel I wanted would have been a financial burden,” she said. “I don’t want you to feel like this is something you have to do for me.”

  Oh, one more thing. Their daughter was dropping out of college to move to Chicago.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE WAKE-UP CALL

  THE MESSAGE WAS FAR FROM SUBTLE. BUT, THEN AGAIN, NEITHER WERE JIM Finks and Jack Pardee, the two men responsible for turning around football’s most woeful franchise.

  On February 21, 1976, right around the time Walter Payton was fishing along the Pearl River, the Bears announced that the winner of the Brian Piccolo Award as the team’s rookie of the year was—drum roll—Roland Harper.

  Roland Harper?

  From afar, it made little sense. Sure, Harper was a punishing blocker who started ten games and ran for 453 yards. But even when the holes didn’t exist and defenses were stuffing the line with eight men, Payton was routinely spectacular. Many of his 679 yards materialized from nothingness, and his twisting, spinning dashes for daylight reminded one of a butterfly evading a net. “He could jump through the smallest hole,” said Bob Avellini, the Bears quarterback. “And even if that hole became stuffed, he’d still find a way to get four yards. When Walter didn’t gain yards, he still gained yards.”

  But as the Bears prepared for the 1976 season Finks and Pardee continued to question the half back’s drive, work ethic, and durability. Almost immediately after the players reported to Lake Forest—a college town twenty-five miles north of Chicago—for training camp in July, Payton began complaining of nausea and dizzy spells. On July 14, the third straight day of two-a-day workouts, he twice had to be helped off the field, much to the chagrin of his head coach. “I hope he’s all right,” Pardee told reporters. “I don’t know what it is. He feels good and wants to go out and then he has dizziness and feels weak. He has a sinus condition which can affect the inner ear and cause nausea. But we’re not going to work him out when he’s sick.”

  Pardee, a man who survived Bear Bryant’s ten-day summer football camp in Junction, Texas, as well as a near-death battle with cancer, wasn’t going to be overly sympathetic to a hundred-thousand-dollar football player begging out because of dizziness. Even as Payton repeatedly complained, Pardee continued to deny his players water during workouts. “It was barbaric,” said Wayne Rhodes, a rookie cornerback out of Alabama. “The heat was intense, we’re doing two-a-days, and I’m having to suck the water out of my shirt. Everyone was dehydrated, and the coaches think they’re building men. You’re not building men. You’re killing them.”

  When he managed to participate, Payton was exceptional. Having spent the off-season high-stepping through the sands along the Pearl River while completing work on his master’s degree in special education at Jackson State, he reported to camp faster and stronger than the previous year. His rookie season had been an education in what to expect from NFL defenders, and Payton committed himself to running with an extra viciousness. “He was in the best condition I’ve ever seen anybody in,” said Bo Rather, the wide receiver. “There was nothing extra on him. All lean muscle.”

  To Pardee, Payton was immature and unprepared; gifted, yet unwilling to put in the time to improve. As a man whose fifteen-year NFL career resulted in disjointed fingers and creaking bones, Pardee expected his minions to devote 100 percent of their on-field time to improving. They weren’t here to joke or rest or goof off. They were here to follow orders and play football. Payton, however, was twenty-three years old and impossible to make sense of. Before games, as other players taped up or reviewed strategy, Payton habitually lay prone beneath a table, eyes closed, deep in some sort of zenlike trance. When he wasn’t complaining of headaches or charging through defenses, Payton could be found in his rainbow-hued van, featuring an eighttrack player and shag carpet. He went about his business quietly, which Pardee liked, but then, seemingly without warning, would pull these juvenile pranks that reminded everyone of his youth. Payton enjoyed sliding behind the Bears’ switchboard and, in the highest of high
-pitched voices, answering the phone as Louise, the female receptionist. He took to filling the socks of unsuspecting teammates with Swiss Miss hot cocoa powder and lathering their jockstraps with Ben-Gay (then giddily watching them scream in agony).

  As one practice at Soldier Field came to an end, Payton was granted permission to leave a few minutes early in order to nurse a sore hamstring. “You could see these dark clouds over the horizon, and it started storming,” said Ken Downing, a cornerback who spent four months on the taxi squad. “The entire team rushes for the locker room and Walter’s locked all the doors. It’s raining and lightning, and he’s sitting in the hot tub, singing. They had to get a security guard to open the door.” The players weren’t laughing. “We were tired and cold,” Downing said. “And a little confused as to why anyone would find that funny.” (Years later Payton pulled a similarly obnoxious prank, blindly tossing a lit M-80 into a locker room filled with teammates. Amazingly, no one was hurt.)

  The Bears opened the six-game exhibition season with a 15–14 win at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, yet Payton missed most of the action after bruising his knee during warm-ups. He asked out of the next contest, too, a 27–16 triumph at Seattle, watching in street clothes from the sidelines. Fed up, Pardee announced after the game that Johnny Musso, the backup halfback who gained 176 yards against the Seahawks, might be the new starter. “You couldn’t get a better game out of a back than that one,” Pardee said. “If he keeps performing that way, I’m certainly not going to consider him a second stringer.”

  With that, Walter Payton miraculously rediscovered his health. The headaches and nausea disappeared. The knee no longer throbbed. When Finks slyly told the Tribune that “Durability is the test of greatness,” Payton’s ears burned. He ran for 122 yards and two touchdowns on thirty-one carries against the Colts, and added eighty-two more yards in a loss to the Cardinals. The following week at Tampa Bay, Payton rambled for ninety-one yards on a stiff right leg that caused him a slight limp. Asked by Pardee whether he should come out, Payton refused. “It was sore, and I’m still sore,” he said afterward. “But I wanted to be in there.”

  Like many athletes at his skill level, Payton’s primary motivator wasn’t anger or love or a fiery speech from a coach. It was the insecurity that often accompanies greatness. Payton didn’t mind missing a game or sitting out a practice. But the moment Pardee suggested someone might do it better, the running back perked up and stood at attention. When Mike Adamle ran through the Pittsburgh defense, Payton fumed. When Musso was named a potential starter, Payton bristled. “There was one game that we were leading big in the fourth quarter, so Walter was on the sideline,” said Avellini, the quarterback. “His backup took off for some forty-yard gain, and everyone was clapping. But Walter was pissed. He turned to me and said, ‘Those are my yards.’ ”

  For the second straight year, the Bears entered the regular season hopeful. Avellini was a vast improvement at quarterback over the horrid Bobby Douglass and Gary Huff. The team used its first-round pick on an offensive tackle, all-American Dennis Lick of Wisconsin. Though there were no Dick Butkus types on defense, Wally Chambers was an All-Pro pass rusher, and linebacker Waymond Bryant was a splendid athlete. “We had sound talent,” said Brian Baschnagel, a rookie receiver from Ohio State. “We weren’t going to win the Super Bowl, but we weren’t the worst team in the league, either.

  “What it all came down to,” said Baschnagel, “was Walter.”

  Conservative in every sense of the word, Pardee was of the mind that defenses won football games and offenses rested the defense. Nearly a decade before he became a proponent of the high-flying run ’n’ shoot passing attack with the Houston Gamblers of the United States Football League, Pardee’s ideal run-throw ratio was roughly 4:1. “The truth is, the running game was all we had,” said Pardee. “If we were going to have any chance to win, it would be by protecting the ball, playing great defense, getting excellent field position, and controlling the clock. My goal as a coach was to find a way to win, and our best chance to win was to run.”

  The Bears opened the 1976 season against Detroit at Soldier Field. A year earlier, Payton debuted with one of the great thuds in team history, rushing for zero yards vs. Baltimore. Payton never let go of the humiliation from that afternoon—fans booing, Colt players taunting, coaches looking away in disgust.

  Much like the Colts of ’75, Detroit’s roster was a mediocre collection of players coming off of a .500 season. Nevada oddsmakers listed the game as a toss-up, and they were right. The Lions were terrible. The Bears were terrible. The game was terrible. With the 54,125 spectators inside Soldier Field alternating boos with yawns, Chicago won 10–3.

  Although Detroit stuffed the line on almost every down, Fred O’Connor, the team’s backfield coach who called plays from the press box, refused to throw. He had Payton run twenty-five times, down after down after down. The scene was redundant: Avellini takes the snap. Avellini turns and hands to Payton. Payton slams into the defensive line after gaining little ground. With the exception of a fifty-eight-yard pass from Avellini to Greg Latta, the offense was a bore. Payton, who gained seventy yards, loved running the football, but he also loved an exciting, diverse, wide-open, play-to-win game plan.

  Afterward, the embarrassed running back stormed off without speaking to the media.

  He was as frustrated as ever.

  Back in the mid-1970s, the NFL was a wasteland of chemical addictions. A large number of players smoked cigarettes and drank to excess. On the Bears, the drugs of choice were marijuana and cocaine.

  “There was one offensive player in particular who had a serious coke problem,” said one Bear. “Every night I would stand there and watch him blow his nose, and all these towels would be filled with blood. Sometimes I’d have to drive him places because he was so high. He wasn’t alone.”

  Was Pardee aware of such goings-on? No. Was Finks? Probably not. But were you a member of the team, and were you interested in getting high, there were countless places to turn. Many of the players had their own personal dealers, and were more than willing to spread the word.

  “Most of the guys on that team were smoking a whole lot of weed,” said Ron Cuie, a running back selected in the fourteenth round of the ’76 Draft. “There was a local bar near training camp, and all the guys would go there and get drunk and high. But not Walter. Never saw him.”

  “A lot of guys got hooked on drugs beginning with their time in the NFL,” said Earl Douthitt, a former Bears defensive back. “That’s what happened to me—cocaine abuse started when I got to the Bears. And man, was it hard to break.”

  Newly married and living with Connie in a small apartment in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling, Payton had nothing to do with the drug scene. Throughout his first twenty-three years of life, he’d drank fewer than ten beers total, and never took a hit from a joint. As for snorting lines of cocaine—not even a consideration.

  Yet while Payton didn’t use, the argument can be made that he was a direct victim of those who did. According to several players, drug use made the Bears a sloppy, oft-disinterested group of ballplayers that focused mildly on football excellence and intently on partying after the game. Whereas elite teams like the Steelers and Vikings played with methodical, robotic excellence, Chicago was messy. Blocks were missed. Routes were botched. Easy balls slipped through fingers. Wins were greeted happily, but losses were greeted indifferently. To watch a highlight film of the ’76 Chicago Bears is to watch NFL football played not merely at its worst, but at its most inconsistent. “That,” said Douthitt, “is what makes so much of what Walter did so incredible.”

  Payton was a man on an island, expected to deliver excellence, but lacking the necessary help to get him there. Except for Harper, the bruising fullback, Payton found few friends among his teammates. He laughed at their jokes and pulled colorful pranks and patted them on the rears in the aftermath of good plays, but for the most part the connection ended there. When Jerry Muckensturm, a Chicago
linebacker, said, “I liked Walter, but I never felt like I got to know him,” he spoke for the majority of teammates. Walter was trying to find his footing in the Windy City, but the going was slow.

  Following the listless victory over Detroit, the Bears flew to San Francisco to face the 49ers, another mediocre team coming off of a 5-9 record. Because it was being played on the West Coast, and because the 49ers and the Bears both appeared to stink, and because the snoozer of week one had placed many Chicago fans in a catatonic state, the pregame buildup generated the buzz of a librarian convention. The contest lacked a single marquee name—Payton was still an unproven curiosity, and at the moment the Niners’ best player was probably their kicker, Steve Mike-Mayer.

  On the afternoon of September 19, 1976, everything changed.

  With the skies clear, the Candlestick Park wind unusually still, and a crowd of 44,158 fans eagerly anticipating the home debut of head coach Monte Clark, Payton stepped onto the rocky brown-and-green field (still being used by baseball’s San Francisco Giants) and pummeled the 49ers. Behind a mediocre offensive line, with a mediocre quarterback and a mediocre scheme, Payton ran for 148 yards and two touchdowns, the best game of his career. “He was incredible . . . just incredible,” said Tommy Hart, a 49ers defensive end. “Before that game, the name Walter Payton meant very little to me. Afterward, I couldn’t forget it.”

  Chicago received the opening kickoff, marched down the field, and scored on a twenty-yard Payton run that, more than thirty years later, Hart still struggled to comprehend. Immediately after taking the handoff, Payton was met head-on by Hart, San Francisco’s six-foot-four, 245-pound Pro Bowler. Frozen behind the line of scrimmage, Payton’s chest was smothered in Hart’s jersey. The lineman began the process of bringing the back down when—hips twisting, knees rising—Payton somehow spun away and galloped for a big gain.