The remainder of the game was Payton ducking beneath tacklers, slashing through the secondary, eluding men double his size, and buckling the knees of Jimmy Johnson and Bruce Taylor, San Francisco’s veteran defensive backs. On the 49ers sideline running back Delvin Williams, a future Pro Bowler, couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. “The hardest thing to do is run when everyone knows you’re getting the football,” said Williams. “In those situations, you have to know where the flow is coming from and where the weakness of your blockers will be. You have to slow a bit, wait to make a move, then let it unfold. You use your ability and hope your teammates don’t get in your way. It’s extremely hard, yet Walter was out there doing it perfectly. And he was just a kid.”
In the aftermath of the win, an incredulous pack of reporters listened as Payton pooh-poohed his performance. “I should have scored at least four touchdowns,” he said. “And a hundred and forty-eight yards, that still wasn’t good enough. A couple of times I got caught in the backfield and I shouldn’t have.”
Beginning at Jackson State, and throughout his years with Chicago, Payton habitually talked down his own efforts, bemoaning a yard left on the field or a phantom touchdown that should have been. The device was all Bob Hill: The less the hype, the lower the expectations. “I’d say part of that was an act,” Avellini said. “Walter enjoyed being the star.”
Now, in the heart of the ’76 season, he suddenly was. Payton cleared 100 yards in three of the next four games, ripping through the Redskins for 104, then the Vikings for 141 and the Rams for 145. His weapon of choice was the stiff-arm, which Payton originally mastered on the sandlots of Columbia. When most running backs faced oncoming defenders, they lowered their heads and barreled ahead. With ever-increasing frequency, Payton opted to stick out his arm, jab an enemy in the face mask or sternum, and send him flailing. The highlight reels were now filled with the technique, one player after another dropping like a damp sandbag. “Other backs used stiff-arms, but Walter’s recoiled, then exploded into you,” said Frank Reed, a safety with the Atlanta Falcons “I mean, the dang thing stung. Once he hit you with that, it was KO.” Don Wedge, an NFL official for twenty-four years, said Payton was the only offensive player to regularly reach out and grab for defenders’ face masks. “It’d start as a stiff-arm and turn into a mugging,” said Wedge. “It was, technically, a penalty, but it was so rare for an offensive player to do it that we never called it on Walter. He was ruthless.”
Perhaps the most telling sign of Payton’s greatness was that he was, in baseball lingo, tipping his pitches—giving the defense advance warning of what he was going to do. When a handoff was designed to head right, Payton’s stance appeared normal. When a handoff was called for the left, however, Payton inadvertently lifted his right foot and tiptoed it forward seconds before the snap. “Other teams were well aware of it,” said Johnny Roland, at the time an assistant coach with the Eagles. “You’d watch tape of the Bears and see the tendency. But even though we knew it, there wasn’t much we could do. He could cut back so fast, so crisply, that he’d be gone quicker than you adjusted.”
Though the Bears were barely average, winning three of their first four before dropping three straight, Payton emerged as the fresh young face of the NFL. In mid-October the Los Angeles Times sent Elizabeth Wheeler to write a lengthy profile, the first time a national publication took serious note. Shortly thereafter, Sports Illustrated requested a detailed file on Payton from Kevin Lamb, a writer for the Chicago Daily News. Lamb’s words painted the narrative that Bud Holmes, Payton’s attorney, wanted people to see. Holmes’ PR advice to his client was simple: Say little, accentuate the positive, keep negative opinions to yourself. Hence, the bundle received by SI’s Eleanore Milosovic was a glowing ode to Walter. He liked the drums and listening to music, once interned briefly at Jackson’s NBC affiliate, and was loved and respected by teammates. Wrote Lamb: “When Steve Schubert dropped a punt against Atlanta that set the Falcons up on the Bear fifteen in the fourth quarter of a scoreless tie, Payton was the first to talk to him on the sideline and console him. Last year a Lion player was running out-of-control toward a portable heater when Payton caught him.”
Was Payton the only Bear to console Schubert? Hardly. Were there NFL players who actually would have allowed the Lion to barrel into a heater? Probably not. Did veterans find Payton’s ongoing pranks obnoxious and irritating? Yes. But Chicago was a town crying for a hero, and Payton—handsome, talented, young—fit the suit.
With the mounting hoopla (Payton appeared on the cover of the November 22, 1976, Sports Illustrated, beneath the headline THE NFL’S NEW STARS), even People magazine joined the fray. Dennis Breo, a Chicago-based freelance writer, pitched the idea of a young, newly-married heartthrob who was tearing up the NFL—then was shocked when a lifestyle publication that rarely delved into sports actually bit. Breo spent ten days with Payton, and found himself neither liking nor hating the man. “Mostly, I was confused by him,” Breo said. “He was shy and very secretive. Most of the time I was trying to interview him he was wearing his headphones, bobbing to music coming from his hi-fi stereo. I literally had to pull them off his head to ask a question.”
At the time, one of the hot books in America was Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? which hypothesized that the technologies and religions of many ancient civilizations were supplied by space travelers. Though generally mocked, von Daniken’s work had its supporters. Like Walter Payton. “Walter was a believer in it, which I found surprising,” Breo said. “He believed in life on other planets, and that aliens had been here before us. He said it was something that intrigued him.”
The story was published in the November 22, 1976, issue of People, and Payton—not one to express pleasure or scorn to the press—was livid. “The article is fine,” he told Breo. “But what you guys did with that picture was just wrong.”
That picture depicted Walter and Connie, fully clothed, rolling around on their bed.
“He was a private guy,” said Breo, “and he didn’t want people thinking of him that way.”
What way is that?
“Good question,” said Breo. “I guess the kind of guy who sleeps on a bed.”
Long before the Hertz commercials. Long before The Naked Gun. Long before the Monday Night Football gig. Long before Nicole and Ronald, before the Ford Bronco, before the ill-fitting leather glove, before the acquittal heard around the world, before the thirty-three-year sentence for armed robbery.
Long before it all, O. J. Simpson was a football player. A fabulous, gamechanging football player.
Heading into the 1976 season, there was Simpson, Buffalo’s eighth-year halfback, and there was everyone else. The Juice had led the league with 1,817 rushing yards in 1975—his third crown in four seasons. The closest challenger, Pittsburgh’s Franco Harris, trailed him by a whopping 571 yards. Though hardly the type to barrel over opposing tacklers, like Payton or the Redskins’ John Riggins, Simpson’s blinding speed made him a defense’s nightmare. “When I was a rookie with the Patriots in 1975, we played O. J. at Buffalo,” said Steve Schubert, a Bears wide receiver. “I swear, I saw the guy come into the line of scrimmage, then float out the other side without being touched. He was smooth like silk.”
Drafted by the Bills out of USC with the first pick of the 1969 NFL Draft, Simpson walked with an air befitting a Hollywood star, not an upstate New York rookie. That’s the way Simpson viewed himself—as a multifaceted entertainer whose gifts as an athlete could be used as a gateway into other high-profile worlds. Simpson wanted to be the center of attention. He craved the bright lights and glitter, and had recently filmed a cameo role for ABC’s upcoming smash television hit, Roots. Among his close friends were Lee Marvin and Richard Burton.
“He was so much bigger than the team or the city of Buffalo,” said Tom Donchez, a running back drafted in the fourth round by the Bills in 1975. “Buffalo was a whistle stop for him—a place to pick up a check. O. J. would hold court and h
ave an expert opinion on anything, merely because he was O. J. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t liked by teammates, because he was. He was funny and engaging. But I think you took him with a grain of salt.”
Simpson reveled in his place atop the NFL. With Jim Brown a decade retired and Gale Sayers five years gone, he reigned as the undisputable king of backs. It was with a skeptical eye and great cynicism, therefore, that Simpson began hearing about the kid from Jackson State trespassing on his terrain. When Sports Illustrated described Payton exploding “from his set like a grenade from an M79 launcher,” Simpson dismissed the praise as excessive hyperbole. When O’Connor, Payton’s backfield coach, said of his star, “God said he wanted a halfback, and he made Walter,” Simpson chuckled. He never publicly mocked or questioned Payton, but within the sanctity of the Bills’ locker room, Simpson scoffed. Hot backs came, hot backs went. Payton wouldn’t last for long.
Just one problem: In the midst of one of his best seasons, Simpson couldn’t shake free of Payton in the race for the NFL rushing title. As the Bills (who would finish 2-12) and the Bears (who would finish 7-7) slogged through forgettable campaigns, their featured stars went back and forth atop the leaderboard. Through the first six games, Payton held a seemingly insurmountable advantage—694 yards to 376 yards. Then Simpson went on a roll—tearing up the Jets and Patriots for a combined 276 yards in weeks seven and eight, and torching the hapless Lions for an NFL-record 273 yards in week twelve. Payton lost the rushing lead to Simpson on Thanksgiving Day, but regained it a week later with 110 yards against the Packers. On December 6, the second-to-last week of the regular season, he carved up the first-year Seahawks for a career-best 183 yards. It was his seventh hundred-yard game, a new team record, and though the contest was played in Seattle’s Kingdome, a nation was captivated.
Early in the game, a message scrawled across the video board informed the crowd that Simpson had just rushed for a seventy-five-yard touchdown against Miami. Seattle’s 60,510 fans cheered wildly. At that point, Payton had gained a mere nine yards on five carries, and the Seahawk defense, featuring ex-Bear Richard Harris, was playing with uncharacteristic ferocity. Pride mattered to Seattle coach Jack Patera, and the last thing he wanted was for his club to offer an opposing player easy access to a rushing title.
Yet Payton had pride, too. Led by the loquacious Harris, Seattle’s defensive players spent much of the first quarter barking inanities—“Not today! Not on our turf!”—that only served the infuriate Payton.
“You didn’t want to motivate Walter,” said Harper. “He fed off of that stuff.”
By the time the half ended, Payton had run for 114 yards, but he was hurting. Spasms in his diaphragm were making it difficult to breathe, and a doctor and trainer helped him into the locker room. As the second half began, Payton was nowhere to be found. With the video board continuing to display Simpson’s yardage (he gained 203 against Miami), however, Payton somehow regained his breath. Though the game was well in hand (the Bears won, 34–7), he carried nine times in the fourth quarter. Three runs nullified by penalties would have given him 227. Afterward, Pardee felt no need to hide the Bears’s motives. “We weren’t going to risk anything,” he said. “But the line wants Walter to win the rushing title.”
Entering the final week of the regular season, the NFL was filled with riveting story lines. Would the 12-1 Oakland Raiders fulfill their destiny and win the Super Bowl? Would the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, first-year laughingstocks, go 0-14? Could Colts quarterback Bert Jones finish strong enough to hold off Oakland quarterback Ken Stabler in the MVP race? (Answers: Yes, yes, and yes.)
All the news, however, paled in magnitude to the most fascinating rushing race in the fifty-six-year history of the league. With one game remaining, Payton led Simpson by a mere nine yards, 1,341 to 1,332.
Simpson-Payton carried the weight of a political election. People took sides—Payton was the upstart; the new kid. Not nearly as flashy as his rival, but gritty and determined. Simpson, on the other hand, was electric and explosive. He was the running back kids emulated in their backyards. Everyone wanted to be the Juice.
For their final game of the season, the 7-6 Bears would play host to the Denver Broncos, an 8-5 club with two things going for it: First, the Bronco players were comfortable enough in inclement weather so as not to flinch at stiff winds and twenty-three-degree temperatures. Second, Denver’s Orange Crush defense excelled against the run, allowing a paltry 3.4 yards per carry, second best in the league. Payton was hardly helped by Soldier Field’s cementlike turf, which only hardened with the winter cold. “There was actually a big hump in the middle of our field,” said Bo Rather. “And the surface burned your knees and elbows, and that shit never healed. There was no worse place for a back.”
Simpson, on the other hand, would be playing at Baltimore. The Colts had a lousy run defense, and Memorial Stadium offered a relatively cushy, well-maintained surface. Advantage: Juice.
With Soldier Field’s scoreboard, in the words of the Tribune, “not equipped with the conveniences of the twentieth century,” the Bears took the quasiembarrassing, quasi-quaint step of hiring cheerleaders from nearby Warren Township High School to carry placards around the sidelines to update fans on Simpson vs. Payton. Despite the weather, which included 13 mph winds, Soldier Field was packed. Among those in attendance were Holmes, Bob Hill, and Alyne Payton, Walter’s mother. The three flew up together from Mississippi on Holmes’ private Learjet. Planning for a celebration, Alyne brought with her one of Walter’s favorites—a raisin, pecan, and apple cake she had baked the day before.
Thanks to Baltimore’s Sunday Blue Laws (a sporting event could not start before two o’clock Eastern Standard Time), both games were scheduled to kick off at one P.M. central time, meaning neither back would know in advance what he needed to shoot for. “There’s no point in thinking about what’s happening halfway across the country,” Simpson said beforehand. “All I can do is concentrate on the Baltimore defense and hope that everything comes out well.”
“I’m just going to go out there and play up to my ability,” said Payton. “I’m not going to do anything different, I’m not going to go out there and make silly mistakes or take anything into my own hands, because I can’t do it.”
Because the Broncos had been eliminated from play-off contention, they could have understandably closed the season with limited interest. Instead, Denver’s players took the field and attacked. Blessed with Randy Gradishar and Tom Jackson, two of the sport’s best young linebackers, as well as an unblockable nose tackle named Rubin Carter, Denver’s defense overwhelmed the Bears, clogging Payton’s lanes and reducing Avellini, a subpar quarterback to begin with, to mud. He threw seventeen passes. He completed two.
The cheerleaders hired to flash placards had only bad news to report. In Baltimore, the Colts defense was playing dead, and Simpson accumulated seventy-five yards by halftime. “One of our guys was keeping up with Walter through a fan’s radio on the sideline,” Simpson said. “I had to keep telling him, ‘Hey, cool it. We gotta play this game here.’ ” Payton, on the other hand, found himself smothered by a wall of orange and blue. Two yards. Three yards. One yard. Four yards. Midway through the third quarter, he picked up the phone and called O’Connor in the press box. “My teammates are more interested in me winning the rushing title than us winning the game,” he said. “They’re not focused. So do us all a favor and take me out.” O’Connor refused. Avellini was a problem, the offensive line was a problem, the weather was a problem. Payton was not a problem. “He was the one thing we had going for us,” O’Connor said.
Late into the third quarter, with his stat line reading forty-nine yards on thirteen carries, Payton took a handoff, cut to the right, and was sandwiched by Jackson, Gradishar, and safety Bill Thompson. Payton felt his right ankle tweak, and he crumpled to the ground in pain. It took Fred Caito, the Bears’ trainer, less than a minute to diagnose a sprain. Payton’s day was over.
As their lone sup
erstar gingerly walked from the field, Chicago’s fans let loose a long, powerful cheer. In the chilling silence that ensued, they watched Payton retreat to the bench, slump under a coat, place his head in his hands, and sob. Pardee strolled over to pat Payton on the back. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he told him. “You’re a champion.” The man questioned for his toughness only four months earlier had stepped up. Never again would anyone ask about Walter Payton’s drive.
The Bears lost, 28–14. Payton lost, 1,503 yards to 1,390 yards. (He did, however, surpass Gale Sayers’ single-season team rushing record.) Though loathe to admit such an emotion at the time, Payton craved the rushing title. In his mind, Simpson was the galloping gazelle from Southern Cal and he was the small-town kid from Mississippi. It was David vs. Goliath, only with the wrong ending.
“It was, I guess, the low point of my career,” he later said. “So much had been made of the fact that I had a chance to beat O.J. Simpson out for the rushing title. When I found myself lying there on the field and knew I had failed, it was like I didn’t want to get back up . . . I’m a competitor. Being injured, not finishing the game, was eating inside of me. I didn’t know how to cope.”
That night, with the ankle still throbbing, Payton coped. He hosted his mother, agent, and college coach at his one-bedroom apartment. Together, the four, along with Connie, laughed and hugged and talked old times.
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