Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  “You were expected to be in the meeting room at seven o’clock that night,” said Ted Albrecht, the veteran offensive lineman. “I check into the hotel, get down there early, start saying hi to everybody. Then Ditka walked in and the room got very quiet.”

  The coach stood before his new players, a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl Ring adorning a finger on his left hand. He glared sternly toward Bob Fisher, a reserve tight end who was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap while nibbling on the end of an unlit cigar. “Lemme make this clear,” he scolded. “There’ll be no hats, no sunglasses, and no tobacco in my meetings.” Fisher, who would fail to make the team, felt two inches tall. Following the rant, Ditka asked the players to stand one by one and introduce themselves. Receiver James Scott, back after a disappointing year in the Canadian Football League, tiptoed into the room midway through and took a seat near the back. “Typical of Scottie,” said Fred Caito, the trainer. “He thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted.”

  Not anymore.

  “You!” Ditka yelled. “Who are you?”

  Scott stood. “James Scott,” he said. “Wide receiver.”

  “James Scott, wide receiver—get the fuck out,” the coach snarled. “You’re late, and I don’t do late.”

  Scott froze, dumbfounded.

  “James Scott, I’m not kidding,” Ditka said. “Get. The. Fuck. Out.” He called for Caito. “Fred, go grab one of those big garbage bags and empty James Scott’s fucking locker out.” Ditka and Scott stepped into the hallway, where the high-pitched screaming could be heard from miles away. After five minutes, Ditka returned. Scott did not. His possessions were, literally, tossed into the street. Two days later, with his tail between his legs, Scott apologized. “That was exactly the right message,” said Caito. “That we were no longer going to put up with the bullshit.”

  Ditka stepped back to the front of the room and the meeting officially began. He ordered all the players to tell a teammate, “I love you.” The commandment was met with awkward silence.

  “Do it!” Ditka said.

  I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .

  “This is a team, and a team is a family,” Ditka said. “We stand up for one another, we fight for one another, we defend one another, we love one another.” He proceeded to declare that the Chicago Bears were going to win the Super Bowl. “It’s not my plan,” he said. “It’s my reality.”

  A couple of veterans scoffed. Ditka didn’t stand for scoffing.

  “Look at everyone around you,” he yelled. “Really, look around.”

  He watched as players turned their heads left and right.

  “OK,” he said. “Eighty percent of you sons of bitches won’t be here come September first. That’s your warning.”

  Speech over.

  • Second, on April 27 the Chicago Bears held the fifth overall pick in the NFL Draft. According to the Tribune, the team was strongly considering Walter Abercrombie, a record-setting halfback out of Baylor University. Payton couldn’t believe it. The last thing the team needed was another running back.

  As usual, he braced for inevitable disappointment—then watched with glee as the Bears took quarterback Jim McMahon from Brigham Young. When Finks was running the team, quarterbacks were all but ignored. Finks was no longer running the team. “Taking Jim,” said Leslie Frazier, a defensive back, “was one of the most important decisions in turning the franchise around.”

  • Third, the Bears held a follow-up mini-camp at Lake Forest in May. It was supposed to be voluntary. According to league rules, it had to be voluntary. Wide receiver Rickey Watts, a player as lazy as Payton was driven, made a token one-day appearance before departing unannounced. He was the team’s second-leading returning wide receiver, a player whose size-speed combination had been regularly praised by Armstrong.

  “Clean out that fucker’s locker,” Ditka told Caito, the equipment manager. “He’s done, too.”

  As ordered, Caito once again tossed all of Watts’ possessions into a plastic garbage bag and placed it by a curb. When asked by the assembled media whether Watts’ absence was excused, Ditka audibly snarled. “I don’t know where he is,” the coach said. “Wanna ask me if I care?”

  “Do you care?” asked Kevin Lamb of the Chicago Sun-Times.

  “Nope,” said Ditka.

  He genuinely didn’t.

  “Rickey Watts thought he was the greatest thing since sliced cheese,” Ditka said. “And he was, talent-wise. But sometimes the gain of adding talent isn’t worth what you lose. What you lose in the locker room isn’t worth what you gain on the field.”

  Jack Childers, Watts’ agent, called his client later that day, urging him to return to camp. Watts did, and Ditka begrudgingly granted him a second chance. “You’re on a short fucking leash,” Ditka said. “Very short.”

  Payton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was as if Bob Hill, his coach at Jackson State, had been reincarnated into a stumpy white man with a Brillo Pad mustache and crooked fingers. Many of the older Bears came to detest Ditka, what with his militaristic ways and crazed snarl. For the coach’s first morning workout, the players were told to dress in full pads. They began with a live, thirty-play eleven-on-eleven scrimmage and ended with ten forty-yard sprints. Noah Jackson, the overweight offensive lineman, turned to fans during a water break, sighed, and moaned, “See what y’all get for saying ‘Good-bye Neill Armstrong?’ ”

  Payton, however, loved it. Maybe, at long last, winning was a priority in Chicago.

  Or, maybe not.

  Because Mike Ditka is a Bears icon, and because his team went on to eventually accomplish great things, people tend to forget that his first season as head coach was an unmitigated disaster.

  Chicago kicked off its year with listless defeats to Detroit and New Orleans (Payton ran for forty-six total yards). Then a fifty-seven-day player strike threatened to wipe out the season. The impasse ended, but the bitter feelings did not. Payton, who lost nearly two hundred thousand dollars during the lockout, wondered aloud why the work stoppage even happened. Several Bears were furious over their star’s hesitancy to support the union. “At first they were asking me if I would walk out and I said I’d have to get legal counseling,” he said. “A lot of guys were disappointed with me then, but it was the only thing I could say. Now I look back on the agreement and the eight weeks I was out with them was a total waste for me.”

  Though Payton embraced Ditka’s demands of excellence, the resumption of the season (seven more regular-season games would be played) reminded the Bears that, beneath his team-first verbiage, the running back possessed a selfish streak often obscured by statistics and smiles. For the bulk of his career, Payton had Ray Earley, the longtime equipment manager, keep him abreast of his rushing yardage totals during games. Payton would casually stroll past Earley, give him a look and hear, “You’re at seventy-three,” or “Eleven more and you’ve got a hundred.”

  “That was kept quiet,” said Jay Hilgenberg, the offensive lineman. “But we knew.”

  Had Chicago been winning, perhaps Payton would have ignored any urges to again mope and whine aloud. But with the team limping toward a 3-6 record, he felt compelled to speak out.

  “I don’t know how long I can play here,” Payton said. “I like it. I like Chicago. I’ve had no problem with management. I’m just disappointed. I’d rather not say why, but I’m going to call a press conference after the season and tell everything. I know what’s wrong, I know why, but I can’t say. At Jackson State, if we went 7-3 it was like a losing season. It’s kind of hard to get here, where everyone is supposed to be professionals, and end up with the record we’ve got now.12

  “I still like playing football. What are you going to write? How’s this? ‘A rose in a dandelion garden.’ ”

  Through the first four weeks of the season, Payton had averaged only fourteen carries per game—by far the lowest of his career (from 1975 to 1981, he averaged twenty-one carries per game). Whi
le the number alone served as an indictment of Ed Hughes, the team’s new offensive coordinator, it failed to convey the entire story. As opposed to his predecessors, Hughes, who knew Ditka from his time working as the backfield coach of the Cowboys, actually dedicated himself to establishing the pass. Even though he was but a raw rookie, McMahon was named the starter after the strike. Boasting a powerful arm, maneuverability in the pocket, and a feel for the position that Bob Avellini and Vince Evans (the two holdovers on the roster) lacked, McMahon’s presence offered the Bears legitimate offensive possibilities. “We were able to employ Walter as a blocker, which he was phenomenal at,” said Ted Plumb, the team’s receivers coach. “We’d sit in meetings and Walter would take more pride in a great block than a great run.” They could finally use Payton as a decoy and have opposing defenses bite. They could finally have Payton line up wide and not worry about the quarterback forgetting to look his way. They could finally throw deep.

  Knowing how Payton had spent years stewing over his team’s dud quarterbacks, Ditka assumed the back would be elated. He wasn’t. “I feel like I’ve been on a free ride the last two weeks, getting paid for nothing,” he said after carrying twelve times for sixty-seven yards in a Week 4 loss at Minnesota. “I thought you go with what’s working.”

  Having played alongside Sayers and having coached Tony Dorsett in Dallas, Ditka knew an unhappy halfback was a relatively useless one. Upon reading Payton’s words, he conferred with Hughes and insisted the Bears run more the following week, when they were scheduled to host the Patriots at Soldier Field.

  The day began optimistically. Payton carried the ball on the first four offensive plays of the game, and the drive concluded when McMahon hit Ken Margerum for a seventeen-yard touchdown pass. From that point on, though, Payton—who missed a good chunk of the action with a leg injury—played a secondary role. He ran a mere thirteen times for seventy yards, and caught three more passes for twenty-four yards. The Bears, however, won big, 26–13, and afterward, euphoric teammates converged around McMahon, who passed for 192 yards and two touchdowns in the best showing of his early career.

  One man sat alone at his locker, frowning.

  Payton addressed the media, accusing New England linebacker Clayton Weishuhn of deliberately twisting his ankle at the end of a play. (Said Weishuhn: “That never happened. I was a rookie just happy to be starting. Do you think I’d deliberately hurt Walter Payton? No way.”) He questioned the wisdom in giving him only thirteen chances and, off the record, ripped into Hughes.

  Question: Are you happy with the victory?

  Answer: “I’m happy we won,” he said. “I’m always happy when we win.”

  Q: Are you happier getting the ball more this week?

  A: Yeah, I guess I am. [Long pause.] But I’m still upset.

  Q: What are you upset about?

  A: When I hurt my ankle it was on a draw play. Either number fifty-three (Weishuhn) or number fifty-seven (linebacker Steve Nelson) rolled over on my ankle, and I think it was intentional.

  Q: That’s why you’re upset?

  A: I can’t tell you. I’m a little disappointed. I’ll tell you at the end of the year.

  Wrote Steve Daley of the Tribune in a scathing column titled, “Walter’s ‘Problem’ Has Bears on Run”:

  Is there a conflict between Payton and the offense being designed by Ditka?

  “I’m not going near that one,” an offensive starter said, lowering his voice. “No comment. That’s a pretty touchy subject around here.”

  . . . Payton wants the burden, needs the burden. He complains about his teammates from time to time in a broad, sweeping kind of way, but what he wants from them is simply a little more effort. Work harder, the message seems to be, and I’ll do the rest.

  If there is a change coming to the Bears’ offensive approach, a change that will be unwelcome to Payton, his method for dealing with it is a strange and private one. It is a kind of gamesmanship, a puzzle in which we are expected to guess the answer, whether Payton has an answer or not.

  When he first accepted the Bears job, Ditka had been warned in private that Payton’s image didn’t always match reality. The toothy smile masked moodiness; the confident walk hid insecurity. “Walter went from energetic and peppy to dour and angry in a second,” said Al Harris. “Like a light switch.” Yet even with advance notice, Ditka was blindsided by his occasionally poor attitude. “If you spent enough time with Walter, you picked up that he wanted his vast modesty to be universally accepted,” said Daley, a Tribune columnist from 1981 to ’85. “But I remember talking to some players on how they worried about Walter, and how he never seemed fulfilled. He always seemed angry without usually whining about it, and he had a lot of resentment. He was resentful when McMahon came along and he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated, and he was resentful when other Bears got the credit and he didn’t. He was lionized and revered in Chicago, but it was never enough.

  “Honestly I think Walter was unprepared for a team with other stars and a coach who was a star. He was the type of guy who said he was just part of the team, but who never fully believed it.”

  When told of Payton’s harsh words after the Patriots win, Ditka—who had resisted taking any shots at his franchise player—could no longer hold back. “It’s unfortunate,” he said. “I can understand [the whining] if you play golf or tennis or billiards. You’re one-on-one with the world. But we’re a forty-nine-man sport.”

  The following day, Ditka called Payton at his home to clear the air.

  “There’s no problem at all,” Ditka told the Tribune afterward. “Everything gets blown out of proportion.”

  Payton, who ended the shortened season ranked tenth in the NFL with 596 rushing yards, was asked for his take.

  “No comment,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  POWER

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1981, THE CHICAGO BEARS SIGNED A ROOKIE FREE AGENT wide receiver by the name of Mike Pinckney. In two seasons at Northern Illinois, Pinckney established himself as one of the better players in Huskies history. As a senior he earned second team all-Mid-American Conference honors by catching thirty passes for 392 yards and gaining another 563 yards on kickoff and punt returns. Always on the lookout for a hidden gem, the Bears gave the undrafted Pinckney a shot.

  Although on the Northern Illinois campus Pinckney gained mild notoriety for his football exploits, his true claim to fame was a most peculiar one: Mike Pinckney was a dead ringer for Walter Payton.

  From the charcoal skin tone to the high cheekbones to the muscular forearms, Pinckney looked as if he were the lead singer of a Sweetness tribute band. “When I first got to camp with the Bears, fans were stopping me all the time, yelling ‘Walter! Walter! Walter!’ and asking for autographs,” said Pinckney. “At first I corrected them, but after a while I’d just write ‘WP 34.’ It made life easier.”

  Pinckney found the confusion funny, if not somewhat embarrassing. Walter Payton was one of the great running backs of all time. Mike Pinckney was just trying to land a job. “I never even mentioned any of it to Walter,” he said. “Too weird.”

  During camp, Pinckney’s roommate was Tim Ehlebracht, a rookie wide receiver from nearby North Central College. One night, the two players took a drive to Naperville, where a handful of bars lined Chicago Avenue. Before settling upon a final destination, Ehlebracht hatched a plan. “Pinckney, let’s do this,” he said. “I’ll introduce you as Walter and we’ll see how far it can go.”

  Pinckney nodded, and as the teammates entered the first club Ehlebracht pulled aside the manager, a man he knew. “John, I’d like to introduce you to Walter Payton,” he said, pointing toward Pinckney. “Walter wanted to get away from camp for a night. He’d appreciate it if you could keep it quiet that he’s here.”

  Ehlebracht and Pinckney were guided to the club’s roped-off VIP section. John showered the men with free drinks and food, but couldn’t remain silent about the legendary running back’s presence. “We sit down, and pe
ople are all over us, taking pictures, asking for autographs, pointing, shouting,” said Pinckney. “Tim had introduced me to this beautiful girl as Walter Payton, and she was all over me. At one point the two of us walked to the dance floor, and all the people parted like the Red Sea. They wanted to see Walter Payton in the flesh.”

  After posing for a handful of pictures with the club’s owners, Pinckney and his new lady friend drove to his room. “We start getting it on, and quickly our clothes are off,” he said. “She’s incredibly beautiful—Latin American, hot as a person can be. A ten out of ten. At one point the woman actually screams, ‘I can’t believe it! I’m getting laid by Walter Payton!’

  “Well, it’s five A.M. and I need to take her back to her car at the club. We’re driving and she’s asking me if my life is like this all the time—clubs and parties and women and all. I’m starting to feel guilty. How can I let this girl walk away thinking she got laid by Walter Payton? So before she gets out of the car I say, ‘Listen, I have to tell you something important.’ ”

  “What is it, Walter?” she replied.

  “My name is not Walter Payton,” he said.

  “What are you talking about,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Michael Pinckney.”

  “No, you’re Walter Payton, the Chicago Bear. Walter Payton.”

  Pinckney opened up his wallet, removed his Maryland driver’s license, and handed it to her.

  Silence.

  “You bastard!” she screamed. “You fucking bastard.”

  The woman stepped out of the vehicle and slammed the door.