Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Upon returning from Rochester, Payton called Connie and asked that they hold a family meeting at the home at 34 Mudhank. The four Paytons gathered in the basement, and Walter—positive, laughing, upbeat—told his children that he required a liver transplant, and there was nothing to worry about. “I was kind of nervous, but he was Superman to me,” said Jarrett. “He didn’t say anything about dying. Everything was positive—‘When I get this transplant, I’ll be fine.’ I was numb. I didn’t cry, because I didn’t think he’d die. I assumed the best.”

  “I don’t think I understood,” said Brittney, who was thirteen. “I’d never been to a funeral and I never knew anyone who had been really sick. There were some tears and nervousness, but he assured us he’d be fine. Death wasn’t a part of my world.”

  At the time the Roundhouse was preparing to distribute bottles of its newest beer, Payton Pilsner, to the Dominick’s grocery stores scattered throughout Chicago. “The trucks were actually loaded and ready to go,” said Ascher, “and Walter called me and said, ‘I can’t explain, but please don’t deliver the beer.’ ” Ascher and Alberts were livid. Here was an enormous business opportunity. Why would Payton want to ruin things? “We knew Walter was a good man, so we begrudgingly pulled the beers off the trucks,” Ascher said. “It turns out he didn’t want his name on beer at the same time he was fighting liver disease. We had no idea.”

  Along with his various endeavors, Payton had been working with Matt Suhey, his old pal and blocking back, to purchase an Arena Football League team for Chicago. The two spoke regularly, and shortly after his return from Mayo Payton met with Suhey and several other potential investors at the Millrose Restaurant in South Barrington. When the meeting ended, Payton pulled Suhey close.

  “Matt,” he said, “I have a problem.”

  Throughout their friendship, Suhey had been pranked by Payton hundreds of times. He wasn’t falling for this one. “OK, Walter,” he said. “What’s the punch line here?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve really got a problem.”

  Payton wasn’t giggling. “He got an inch from my nose,” Suhey said. “We spent about an hour talking about it right there, and he was extremely positive he’d be getting a transplant.”

  What Payton didn’t know was that he had a zero percent chance of receiving a new liver. Whether he was misinformed by the Mayo Clinic or provided erroneous information via Quirk or merely lying through his teeth to maintain good karma and positively impact organ donations, well, one will never know. What is now known, however, is that by the time Payton had visited Mayo his body was being ravaged by cancer of the bile duct. It was spreading to the lymph nodes and throughout the liver. The jaundice and weight loss, neither of which are direct byproducts of PSC, were damning indicators. “Most people with sclerosing cholangitis look pretty good until they’re at the very end,” said David Van Thiel, director of the liver transplant program at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. “He may well have had sclerosing cholangitis for a long time, even when he was still playing football. It’s possible. I don’t know that, but it’s certainly possible to have mild sclerosing cholangitis that’s relatively asymptomatic.”

  According to one Chicago physician, a liver specialist who, in the late-1990s, worked specifically with transplants, Mayo’s doctors were informed that, were he in need, there was a liver available for Payton. “The people at Mayo told us, unambiguously, that he was not on the list,” said the physician, who requested anonymity. “Somebody misinformed Walter.” Payton was, in a sense, the Titanic passenger convinced the RMS Carpathia should be arriving in a matter of minutes. Unbeknownst to him, a transplant would never come. Once a person on the list is diagnosed with cancer, he is no longer a candidate for a new organ.

  John Brems, the director of intra-abdominal transplantation at Loyola, had the opportunity to view Payton’s X-rays. “You never say a condition is one hundred percent hopeless,” Brems said, “but he clearly wasn’t ever a transplant candidate. That would be impossible.”

  On the afternoon of January 29, 1999, Jarrett Payton held a press conference at St. Viator High School to announce that he would be signing a letter of intent to attend the University of Miami on a football scholarship.

  It was that time of year in America, when hundreds of high school gridiron stars ritualistically sat alongside their coaches and family members and donned red caps and blue caps and green caps and orange caps as the flashes exploded and local reporters collected uplifting quotes about the future.

  Now here was a smiling Jarrett, flanked by Kevin Kelly, head football coach at St. Viator, Connie Payton, and Walter Payton. “Miami is the best fit for me as a student and as an athlete,” said Jarrett, a six-foot-two, 210-pound block of granite who had passed for 973 yards and ran for nearly 1,400 yards as a senior. “When I went down there, I fell in love with it. I like the fact that it is a private school and that it has a small-school atmosphere where I can get help and not be just a number. It just felt right.”

  Jarrett’s future was interesting and intriguing, but the elephant in the room was Walter Payton, making his first public appearance since the diagnosis. Beneath a pair of dark sunglasses, Payton looked shrunken. By now he had lost more than fifty pounds. When a reporter asked about his slimmeddown figure, Payton lied. “I’m training to run a marathon in a year,” he explained. “I’ve lost twenty-three pounds.”

  Payton hoped the discussion was over. It wasn’t. That evening Mark Giangreco, the principle sports anchor at Chicago’s WLS-TV 7, cracked that Payton appeared “all shriveled up” and that he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. “I think,” Giangreco added, “I could take him on.”

  Watching from his home, Payton was devastated. “That upset me beyond what you can imagine,” he said. “I had felt betrayed.” So, for that matter, did Quirk. Though Giangreco’s barbs were the first public comments Payton had heard of his condition, that was only because he wasn’t paying attention. Throughout the Windy City, a vicious rumor had been spreading that Payton was dying of AIDS. “Walter was definitely not gay, though that was being said a lot,” said Quirk. “And he definitely didn’t have HIV, even though every person I would deal with in Chicago was asking me about Walter and AIDS. I’ve heard people in hindsight say that wasn’t a real rumor. Well, it was real. I was the one being asked—and I was being asked every single day.”

  Moved by Giangreco’s words and Quirk’s urging, Payton came to the dreaded decision to go public with his condition. He was scheduled to cohost his radio show, The Monsters of the Midday, on Tuesday, February 2, at Carlucci’s restaurant in Rosemont, Illinois. The scene, Payton concluded, would now double as a press conference.

  With as little advance hype as possible, Quirk and Tucker called the various Chicago media outposts and invited them to Carlucci’s for a ten A.M. announcement. Over the course of the previous weeks North and Jiggetts could tell something was seriously off. As with most of his acquaintances, however, Payton maintained enough of an emotional distance that neither man felt comfortable pressing the issue. “He looked more and more like Sammy Davis Jr. every week,” said North. “I don’t say that humorously—he really did. He lost all this weight, and he started wearing sunglasses for every show. One time I was able to see behind them, and his eyes were glowing yellow. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. That can’t be right.’ ”

  On the morning of the press conference, North received a telephone call from Jeff Schwartz, an executive with WSCR. “We have an issue,” Schwartz told him. “Walter has decided he’s finally going to talk about what’s wrong with him, and he’s using the radio show as an outlet to do so.”

  North, a nonstop gabber, was speechless. “Wow,” he said. “This is going to be big.”

  By the time the show was scheduled to begin, the thirty assembled seats in front of the broadcast table were filled. Payton had asked Tucker to write his speech, and despite having recently been discharged from the hospital with forty stitches caused by a ruptured appendix, she did
so.

  On most Tuesdays, Payton had looked forward to sitting down with North and Jiggetts for four hours of on-air gabbing. Now, with his arrival at Carlucci’s, he was visibly nervous. Payton had asked his assistants to make certain Jarrett would be there, and he was. What he didn’t count on—and what he did not want—was the presence of Connie. Armed with her comforting smile and Reagan-esque charisma, Connie approached her husband from behind, patted him on the shoulder, and said, warmly, “I’m here.”

  Payton couldn’t believe it. Despite their on-again, off-again dramas, he and Lita Gonzalez remained a couple. They spoke several times per week, and she even made a few trips to Mayo to accompany Payton. “Walter and Lita were in love,” said a mutual acquaintance. “It might have looked like he was with Connie, but that was all a show.”

  Now, standing on the stage, his wife by his side, Payton reached for Quirk and Tucker and barked, “I need to see both of you in the men’s room—now!”

  The three retreated to the lavatory, where Payton lit into his assistants. “Why the fuck is Connie here?” he screamed. “Who the fuck told her to come to my press conference? Which one of you fucking did this?”

  Tucker was irritated and in pain. She had spent the previous six hours finalizing Walter’s speech, and the last thing she needed was a lecture. “You know what, Walter,” she shouted. “It’d be much easier to deal with this if you were divorced! If you had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this problem right now, would we?”

  There was nothing Payton could say. He marched out of the bathroom and sat down at the middle of a long brown table adorned with a black-and-white radio station banner. Jarrett, wearing a plaid shirt, sat to his right. Connie, dressed in black, sat to his left—and Walter barely looked her way. As always, dark sunglasses guarded Walter’s eyes. A black leather jacket hung from his shoulders. He gripped a white microphone with his right hand and, in that familiar high-pitched voice, spoke about contracting a disease that, until recently, he had never heard of. “I can’t lay around and mope around and just hope everything is going to be OK,” he said. “I’m still moving and grooving.”

  Asked if he was scared, Payton didn’t flinch. “Hell yeah, I’m scared,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be scared? What can you do? I mean, like I said, it’s not in my hands anymore. It’s in God’s hands, and if it’s meant for me to go on and to be around, I’ll be around.”

  Over the course of the decade the media had been presented with a couple of similar situations. In 1991 Magic Johnson held a press conference to announce he had contracted the HIV virus. Four years later Mickey Mantle, his body ravaged by a lifetime of alcoholism, also met with the media to discuss the inoperable liver cancer that facilitated his need for a transplant. Both of those moments were memorable and, in the context of superstar athletes, shocking. Yet Johnson’s disease could be chalked up to unprotected sex, and Mantle’s to the bottle. Here was Payton, a shell of his former self, seemingly the victim of bad luck. “There was some unspoken comfort level in knowing that [Johnson and Mantle] had brought it on themselves,” Bud Shaw wrote in the following day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Not so with Payton.”

  Toward the end, Jiggetts asked Payton if there was anything he wanted to tell his fans. Payton’s hands began to shake. He put his head on his son’s shoulder and began to cry. “To the people that really care about me, just continue to pray,” he said. “And for those who are going to say what they want to say, may God be with you also.”

  Immediately after the press conference, Payton headed for O’Hare Airport to catch the forty-minute flight back to Rochester for some tests. He called Tucker and asked her to meet him outside the terminal to bring him some material. When she arrived, Tucker was shocked by what she saw: There stood Walter Payton, alongside his curbside car, moving to the music blasting from his speakers. “He looked so peaceful and so happy,” she said. “He said he was spending some time with God and he felt like dancing.”

  Later that night Larry King, famed host of CNN’s Larry King Live, left a message at Payton’s office. “Walter,” he said, “Larry King here. Listen, I’m not calling to get you on the show. I’m calling to give you my home number if you want to talk as friends [the two had never actually met], and just to let you know that I’m thinking about you and I want to make sure you’re OK.”

  When the sentiment was relayed to Payton, he told Tucker, “Call Larry King and tell him I’ll do the show.” On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 3, Tucker and Payton returned to O’Hare to fly to New York. Payton was dressed normally—jeans, collared shirt, thick jacket, sunglasses. Yet as he strode through the terminal, something staggering took place: Absolutely nothing. Nobody requested an autograph, asked for a picture, brought up that game against the Bucs in ’83. Nothing. “Not one person recognized him,” said Tucker. “That’s the first time I’d ever seen that happen.”

  When they boarded the plane, Tucker tucked her head into her arms and sobbed. “I knew,” she said, “that Walter Payton was done as we knew him.”

  Payton was the marquee guest on a program that also featured senators Robert Byrd, Dianne Feinstein, and Jon Kyl discussing the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. King introduced him by saying, “In case you are new to the planet, Walter Payton is forty-four years old . . .” and the interview took off. The majority of Americans had not seen Payton’s press conference, so this was their first glance at the emaciated star. The man who, only months ago, weighed in at 221 pounds was now hovering around 170. His skin and eyes were yellowish, and he wore the weathered appearance of a man in his seventies. As is the way of many athletes, Payton communicated with King in the lingo he knew best. “It was sort of like when I had Coach Ditka,” Payton said. “I said, ‘I’m going to believe in his philosophy, and I’m going to do as he tells me, because he’s going to take us to the Super Bowl.’ And the same way with this doctor. I’m going to use the same philosophy.”

  Payton told King he was on the waiting list for a liver—not true. He either didn’t know or didn’t mention that cancer was ravaging his body. Had King done his research, he would have known the visible symptoms Payton was showing had little to do with PCS and everything to do with bile duct cancer.

  The show’s finest moment came toward the end, when Payton looked at King and, for the first of many times, made an impassioned plea for organ donations. “I’ve been a donor, you know, ever since I had my Illinois license,” he said. “One of the things that I said was that, you know, being a football player for thirteen years, you know, I probably wore out just about everything in my body, but if there’s something in there that somebody can use, you know, so well. And Mike Ditka said it—in death you can give life and what better gift is there? And I think that a lot of people should look at that now. I know there are religious reasons and everybody thinks of other reasons, but I think that we all should just stand back and look at it.”

  After taking a couple of phone calls, King wrapped up what would go down as one of the most moving segments of his fifty-three-year career.

  Payton: When I do cry, they’re tears of joy.

  King: We wish you everything you wish yourself. Godspeed and when you get that transplant, you’ll be sitting right here and we’ll reminisce about carrying the football.

  Payton: OK.

  King: Thanks, Walter.

  Payton: Thanks, Larry.

  King: Best of luck.

  Payton: Oh, God’s with me. I’ll be OK.

  In the immediate aftermath of his appearance on Larry King, Walter Payton’s world shook. The calls of support were nonstop—from Mike Singletary and Mike Ditka; from Evel Knievel and Michael Jordan. Jay Leno sent a note that read, “We’re all here for you. When you get your new liver, put your old one in a jar and bring it on The Tonight Show.” Payton was a guest on Oprah and CBS This Morning. Connie and Brittney accepted an award on his behalf at the ESPYs (Payton watched from home, ordering in P.F. Chang’s). Col
umnists across the nation sang his praises as the new face of American courage. “Cry for him, pray for him,” wrote Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times. “But never lose faith in him.”

  Most amazing was the impact his condition had on organ donations. In the week following Payton’s press conference, the Illinois secretary of state’s office averaged 115 donor inquiries per day—compared to roughly twelve per day before the announcement. “Never before have we had anything come close to this happening,” said Jan Grines, manager of the secretary of state’s organ and tissue donor registry. “Payton has touched the hearts of Illinoisans.” The producers of the hit CBS television show, Touched by an Angel, asked Payton to film a commercial promoting organ donation that would air during the program. “Along with me, over sixty thousand Americans are awaiting organ transplants,” he said in the spot. “Only half of us will receive them unless a real hero steps up.”

  Payton’s press conference was held on a Tuesday. By Friday, his office had been besieged by nearly twenty thousand letters, postcards, and packages (some thirty-odd letters came from people offering their livers). Bundles of flowers lined the doorway. Payton didn’t merely look at the piles from afar. He dug in, reading many of the notes, personally responding to some of the people. One letter especially moved him:

  Dear Mr. Payton:

  My name is Christopher and I am nine years old . . . I have a [liver ailment] too. My doctors don’t know how I got it and they don’t know what caused it. They don’t even know a name for my sick liver. . . . I’ve got an enlarged spleen, too. I can’t play any sports so my spleen won’t bust. I need to help my liver. I’m real popular at the hospital. They keep taking my blood to run tests, but they can’t figure out why I have it . . . I’m sorry that you have to go through all of this. I’ll pray for you. Mommy said God will take care of you just like he’s going to take care of me. Don’t be scared, please. Maybe you can do tests with me at my hospital. Will you please write back?