Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  “There was no way I was going to run for 199 yards on that surface,” he wrote, “so I could just forget about that. The sole concern now was to figure out how to beat the Giants in their own stadium on a terrible day.”

  The words come straight from Payton’s 1978 autobiography, and while they read nicely, the sentiment is untrue. Dogged to the end, Payton wanted the record, and his linemen really wanted the record. “The Giants hadn’t played by the rules,” said Albrecht, the rookie left tackle. “They didn’t sweep the field beforehand, which would have been the right thing to do. But before the game our locker room was very emotional. We needed to win. But we also needed to get Walter what we thought was his.”

  “All of our linemen felt very loyal to Walter, and they probably felt like that record was also their record,” said Pardee. “But we got to the stadium and there was ten inches of snow on the field. We were a running team. We had a running philosophy. Our running back was the best in the NFL. But ten inches of snow is ten inches of snow.”

  When the Bears players stepped onto the field for warm-ups, they were shocked. To hell with running—it was hard enough to stand without falling. Ray Earley, the team’s longtime equipment manager, had packed everyone’s turf shoes for the trip, an enormous error in judgment. As the weather forecasters had predicted, this wasn’t a field, so much as the East Rutherford municipal skating rink. “It was a joke,” said Peiffer, the center. “The worst surface I’ve ever seen.”

  Shortly before kickoff, Bob Markus, a writer for the Tribune, called a friend who ran a sporting goods store in New Jersey. The man said he had a couple of dozen pairs of spiked shoes available, if the Bears so desired. Earley bolted the stadium, picked up the footwear, then rushed back. “It was kind of a leathery sneaker with a grip,” said Jeff Davis, who was working the game for NBC. “They were better than nothing.” By they time the shoes reached the locker room, however, it was halftime, and everything that could have gone wrong for the tennis shoe–clad Bears had gone wrong. The score was 3–3. Chicago fumbled the ball twice, while gaining a mere twenty-one yards on the ground. Half the players were suffering from frostbite, and Payton was shivering by his locker. Snot dripped from his nose. He was coughing. “It was miserable,” said Joe Lapointe, who covered the game for the Chicago Sun-Times. “There were thirty-five thousand no-shows wisely missing a game nobody wanted to watch.”

  With the 5-8 Giants playing for pride and a paycheck (“Our organization was a complete mess,” said Gordon Gravelle, an offensive tackle. “Dysfunctional inside and outside the locker room.”), the host team’s primary focus was keeping Payton’s name out of the record book. New York excelled in few areas, but it boasted a stout run defense that ranked eighth in the league by allowing just 126.6 yards per game. “The only thing we did well was shut down running backs,” said Clyde Powers, a New York defensive back. “We had Brad Van Pelt, who was a strong tackler, and Harry Carson was emerging. That gave us a chance against someone like Walter.”

  Both teams failed to score in the third quarter, but the Giants took a 6–3 lead early in the fourth when Joe Danelo kicked a nineteen-yard field goal. The Bears responded by marching down the field behind Avellini, whose twenty-six-yard pass to Scott set up Earl’s four-yard touchdown run. Bob Thomas’ extra point attempt was blocked, however, and Danelo’s twenty-seven-yard field goal with thirty-eight seconds left in regulation tied things at nine.

  The game was heading into overtime.

  “There has never been a worse day to play football, so while I really, really wanted to win, I also really, really wanted the game to end so I could go inside,” said Peiffer. “I remember on one play the Giants had an interception on us and I was cutting across field, completely uninvolved. The defensive tackle had an angle on me, and he hit me hard. I landed on my back and slid about ten feet across the ice. My shoulder pads acted as a scoop and loaded my jersey with ice. I looked at him and said, ‘Goddamn, was that necessary?’ He just laughed and laughed.”

  The Bears had gone fourteen years without reaching the postseason. Though Payton’s chances of breaking Simpson’s record had long ago evaporated, Chicago’s players wanted to win and get the hell out of the cold and into the play-offs.

  Early in the extra session, a handful of short Avellini passes set up a thirty-five-yard field goal attempt. Thomas jogged onto the field, stepped back, waited for the ball to be snapped, burst forward, swung back his right leg, and pushed it wide left. Two possessions later the ritual repeated itself, this time at the eleven-yard line. Thomas prepared to kick, the ball was snapped, and then bounced twice before being picked up by Avellini, who threw an incomplete pass to linebacker Doug Buffone. “I was getting worried there a little,” Plank later said. “I was starting to wonder, ‘How long can this keep going on?’ ”

  The Bears mounted one last drive. With 1:22 remaining, they took over at New York’s forty-five-yard line. Avellini hit tight end Greg Latta for one yard, then for eighteen yards down the middle of the field. The quarterback called for a time-out with forty-two seconds left and returned to the field facing first and ten at the Giant twenty-five. The few remaining fans stood on their feet and screamed as loud as possible. Avellini dropped back and, with linebacker Brian Kelley charging fast, spotted Payton in the right flat. The running back caught the ball, broke a tackle from free safety Larry Mallory, took off downfield, and was finally wrestled down at the eleven-yard line. The run was beautiful but maddening. It was vintage Payton, but his decision not to run out of bounds and stop the clock baffled Avellini. “It’s such a macho thing, staying in bounds, and it was very poor thinking,” Avellini said. “Now the clock is running. We were so screwed up, so poorly coached, that half the field goal unit was running onto the field while I’m planning on killing the clock with a play. None of this confusion would have happened had Walter run out of bounds.”

  With thirty-two seconds left and no time-outs remaining, Payton and the other offensive players jogged back off the field just as Thomas and the field goal unit sprinted to their marks. “Part of the field was covered with snow, another part was covered by cracked ice,” said Thomas. “And beneath the cracked ice was freezing water.” A spindly five-foot-ten, 178-pound Notre Dame grad, the kicker was something of an odd fit among teammates. An avid reader who, twenty-three years later, would become a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, Thomas was a thinker. At times too much of a thinker.

  Now Thomas was deep in his own psyche. This was a big kick. A really big kick. He looked up and spotted Don Rives, the team’s ornery linebacker, barreling his way. “Thomas,” Rives said, placing both hands around the kicker’s neck. “You miss this, I’ll chop your nuts off.”7

  Just in case the sentiment didn’t resonate, punter Bob Parsons followed with some wisdom of his own. “[He] grabbed me by the shoulder pads and picked me up and said, ‘If you don’t make the kick, I’ll break your neck,’ ” recalled Thomas. “So I said to him, ‘You obviously weren’t a psychology major at Penn State.’ ” Sitting in the stands, Thomas’ mother, Anne, was too nervous to watch. She ran into the nearest bathroom and hid in a stall.

  The snap from center Dan Neal was perfect, as was Avellini’s hold. Thomas kicked the ball straight through the uprights, jumped into the air, and sprinted off the field. Anne was greeted in the bathroom by screams of “We won! We won! We won!” She assumed her son missed—until the reveler was identified as Jack Pardee’s wife, Phyllis.

  What if Thomas had shanked another one?

  “I saw an exit sign to the left,” he joked afterward. “I would have had them forward my mail to Asia.”

  Payton finished with forty-seven yards rushing, his second-lowest output of the season. It mattered not.

  Chicago was going to the play-offs.

  Upon their return to Chicago at eight thirty Sunday night, the Bears were greeted at O’Hare Airport by more than three thousand fans, many of whom serenaded the players with “Mine eyes have seen the glory/Of the
coming of the Bears . . .” A large number of revelers wore Bear jerseys. Others held signs, ranging in message from SUPER BOWL–BOUND BEARS to WALTER, KISS MY CHILD.

  The Bears had no chance.

  In eight days they would open the play-offs with a visit to Dallas, where the 12-2 Cowboys awaited. No matter how many Chicagoans told the players they could do it and no matter how starved the city was for a postseason victory, most of the Bears were well aware this was an unwinnable game. The Cowboys were the class of the NFL, blessed with an all-world quarterback named Roger Staubach, an all-world wide receiver named Drew Pearson, a wondrous rookie halfback named Tony Dorsett, and a defense featuring two of the game’s elite linemen, Randy White and Ed “Too Tall” Jones. With the exception of Payton and perhaps Wally Chambers on the defensive line, an argument could be made that none of Chicago’s players were good enough to start for Dallas. “It was a total mismatch,” said Rives. “There was no way we could have won.”

  If a couple of Bears entertained even a slight hope of pulling off the shocker, it was squashed when the organization—long known for its thriftiness under George Halas—refused to fly the team to a warmer climate for a week of practice. Instead, Pardee’s men were forced to work out in daily blizzards, with temperatures hovering in the low-teens. When the climate was absolutely unbearable (in Pardee’s world, anything below five degrees), the team retreated to the Naval Station Great Lakes, which featured a handful of shoddy indoor dirt fields. “Here’s how cheap the Bears are,” said Earl, the fullback/tight end. “It’s twenty-below zero here in Chicago and we have two feet of snow on the ground. Wouldn’t you think the organization would fly us down to Dallas and find us a place to work out and prepare? But oh, no. They bus us to a barn about forty miles away, where we work out on a dirt floor. There are chickens and hogs and goats. We went to the barn because it was only thirty-five degrees in there, as opposed to the negative twenty it was outside. Every day after practice I had to take a towel and wipe away the snot bubbles. And they were black, because of all the dust from the barn. How do you properly prepare for the biggest game of your life inside a dirty, chicken-infested facility? You don’t.”

  While most of his teammates were busy grousing about the shoddy conditions, Payton focused elsewhere. A couple of weeks earlier he had been told about the plight of Adrian Lister, a defensive end on the football team at nearby Wheaton Central High School. In a game against Glenbard South, Lister broke his neck, leaving him a quadriplegic. When Payton learned he was the boy’s hero, he rushed to the intensive care unit at Central DuPage Hospital, sat by Adrian’s bed, and spoke with him throughout visiting hour. Although the eighteen-year-old couldn’t speak, he looked up as Payton repeatedly insisted that God’s eyes were upon him. “If we athletes remember how lucky we really are, then we can’t forget the thousands of Chicago people—including young ones like Adrian Lister—who are in hospitals or sick in their homes during this Christmas season,” Payton told the Tribune. “Some, like Adrian, will be in bed when Christmas is long gone. We athletes know how these people admire our talents. So we must give one hundred percent of ourselves in helping the less fortunate.”

  Even with the big Cowboy clash approaching, Payton was thinking about Adrian. He visited him again in the hospital, and set up the Adrian Fund to pay for the entirety of the rehabilitation costs.

  On the morning of Monday, December 26, Doug Buffone, Chicago’s veteran linebacker, addressed his teammates. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got [the Cowboys] figured out. They’re gonna have to put twelve men on the field if they hope to beat us.” That afternoon, the Bears got hammered, 37–7, with Payton rushing for a mere sixty yards on nineteen carries. “We spanked the hell out of them,” said Jay Saldi, a Dallas tight end. “All we focused on that entire week was shutting down Walter.” While he was dispirited by the loss, Payton couldn’t get Adrian out of his mind. The boy would never walk again. He was confined to a wheelchair, his life forever scarred by one unfortunate moment.

  Losing to the Cowboys? Big deal.

  CHAPTER 15

  DARKNESS

  THE DARKNESS OF THE WORST YEAR OF WALTER PAYTON’S LIFE ENDS HERE. IN the town he will never again consider home. In the coroner’s office he never thought he’d visit. On a wood table covered with plastic film.

  Here.

  His father is dead—fifty-four years old, seemingly healthy as a thoroughbred one minute, cold and lifeless the next. When Bud Holmes called Walter to tell him the news, he was greeted by silence. Long, painful, awkward silence.

  “Walter, did you hear what I said?”

  Silence.

  “Walter . . .”

  On the evening of Monday, December 11, 1978, Peter Payton was tending to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of Columbia. “He called it his plantation,” said Holmes. “He grew tomatoes and peas and watermelons there, and usually went after work to blow off some steam.” While driving back home, Peter stopped at the small grocery store, where he had been going for years. As he entered the building, he blathered incoherently. “Pete, you better go home,” one of the workers said. “You look like you’ve had a lot to drink.”

  “I haven’t had anything,” he replied.

  Nobody believed him, because Peter Payton was a drunk. The smell of alcohol regularly reeked from his breath, and to spot him passed out on some bench or in the front seat of his truck was hardly an uncommon occurrence. As the father of two NFL players, Peter was a recognizable figure throughout Marion County. When a recognizable figure attaches himself to the bottle, folks notice.

  Peter exited the store and drove off. Moments later he crashed into an empty parked car at a gas station. When a couple of Marion County police officers arrived on the scene, they asked Peter to step out of his vehicle, then watched him stumble around, mumbling nonsense. When he refused to take a blood alcohol test, he was charged with driving under the influence of intoxicants and taken to the Marion County Jail. An officer allegedly tried contacting Alyne, but she was in Chicago with Walter. “You’re going to spend the night here,” Peter was told. “Sober up.” He was placed in a singleperson cell, with a concrete floor and an open toilet and a small bar of soap. The walls were made of cement.

  Shortly before midnight, a handful of inmates screamed for help. Peter was having trouble breathing, and he needed medical assistance. Depending on who one asks, the guards either called for paramedics or ignored the pleas and attended to their business. Moments later, Peter collapsed. His breathing stopped; his gasps for breath silenced. An ambulance was finally summoned, but by the time it arrived Peter Payton was dead.

  Walter couldn’t believe it. Though never especially close to his father—who concealed his emotions and buried himself in his work—loss was loss, and this one stung. How would his mother cope all alone? What would she do?

  Walter knew his dad drank too much, but there was no way he would be dumb enough to drive drunk. Peter Payton—a black man in the Deep South—had never before been arrested. Not once. So for his father to die in jail, all alone, was unbearable for Walter.

  When he finally collected himself, Walter asked his agent to go to Columbia and deal with the situation on his behalf. Holmes drove the thirty-four miles from Hattiesburg, met with Robert Bourne, Columbia’s mayor, and then headed for the jail, where he ran into Sergio Gonzalez, the Laurel, Mississippi–based doctor brought in to perform the autopsy. Having spent much of his life as a Mississippi power player, Holmes knew seemingly everyone, ranging from the most famous politicians to the mangiest streetwalkers. He asked Gonzalez whether he could sit in.

  “Sure, Bud,” the doctor replied. “I don’t see why not.”

  Holmes has never forgotten the experience. Like everyone else, he assumed Peter had died of a heart attack. “I watched the whole damn thing, A to Z,” Holmes said. “Because I didn’t want any misunderstanding.” Gonzalez began by making an incision from the left shoulder to the right shoulder to the base of the neck, then south to the base
of the pubic bone. He removed the breastplate/sternum to expose the thoracic organs. “Next he takes Peter’s heart out and he takes the lungs out, and he checks the lungs,” Holmes said. “The lungs are very clear. Then he checks his liver, his kidneys, his stomach—nothing. At this point, the thing he knows he’ll definitely find is a rupture in the heart, because it’s the only logical conclusion. He gets his heart, he slices it, then he cuts the ventricles.

  “Everything’s right there, clear as a bell. No ruptures. I remember [Gonzalez] saying to me, ‘If I didn’t know any better I’d think this man is twenty-one years old, because every artery and every vein is perfect.’ ” There was one last place to look. Gonzalez retrieved an electric saw and cut off the top of Peter’s skull. Gonzalez removed the dura, then sliced the jugular, carotid, and spinal cord, releasing the brain from the skull. “He didn’t see anything at first, so he dug in deeper to get into the brain,” said Holmes. “Well, there was a thing in there about the size of a big hen egg or turkey egg. He said, ‘OK, let’s see how long it’s been bleeding.’ He slices it, and it looks like a bunch of earthworms are hanging there. The brain is just in utter disrepair. [Gonzalez] looks at me and says, ‘Well, we now know how he died.’ ”

  Peter Payton wasn’t intoxicated, and he hadn’t suffered a heart attack. He passed from an intracranial berry aneurysm, a saclike outpouching in a cerebral blood vessel that ruptured and seeped blood into the cranium. Whereas the store clerks and police officers assumed Payton was merely under the influence, he was—in actuality—dying. According to Gonzalez’s report, “the clot had been seeping blood into the brain for seventy-two hours and his motor reflexes were impaired.” The pathologist’s report said the condition would give the appearance that Payton was drunk.

  Walter returned to Columbia with his mother, and the media couldn’t resist. Paul Harvey, the nationally syndicated conservative radio commentator, told his listeners that Peter Payton had been intoxicated and unruly—and Walter became enraged. “He never forgot what Harvey said,” said Ginny Quirk, who later worked for Payton. “That infuriated him.” The story had everything to offer: death, race, intrigue. What were the odds of a Mississippi police department letting a black man die all alone by accident? There had to be wrongdoing. “I got a call for an interview from a Chicago TV station talking about a civil rights investigation,” said Holmes. “I said, ‘What civil rights investigation? If there was any wrongdoing, let’s blast them. But let’s not lose our sense over a whole lot of nothing.’ ”