Sweetness
Authors: Jeff Pearlman
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 11 - BIRTH OF SWEETNESS
CHAPTER 14 - THE STRANGEST RUN
CHAPTER 16 - THE UNBEARABLE BEARS
CHAPTER 17 - A ROSE IN A DANDELION GARDEN
CHAPTER 23 - A BOTTOMLESS VOID
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, October 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Jeff Pearlman
All rights reserved
Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54463-1
1. Payton, Walter, 1954–1999. 2. Football players—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV939.P39P43 2011
796.332092—dc22
[B]
2011011466
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A NOTE ON SOURCING
The identifications of four sources are protected by pseudonyms through this book. They are: Lita Gonzalez, Nigel Smythe, Angelina Smythe, and Judy Choy.
As an author, this is not something I relish. However, the contributions of the individuals were deemed more valuable than the names themselves.
To Cathy Lieberman
The embodiment of strength and compassion
Most of life is a falling away.
A gradual surrender of the dream.
The reason sports provide such
dramatic material is that the climax
comes so early in a man’s life,
the decline so swiftly.
—“The Athlete,” author unknown
PROLOGUE
THE OLD MAN ANSWERED THE DOOR. I DIDN’T SHUDDER OR TAKE A STEP BACK or cringe or gasp or stammer. I simply looked him over, hunched and shriveled inside a fleece jacket, a blue taxi driver’s cap pulled low atop his head.
I had been told ahead of time that Walter Payton’s administrative assistant would likely greet me at his Hoffman Estates, Illinois, office on this arctic February morning in 1999, and while I didn’t picture the person to be a senior citizen, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibilities that Payton—long known for his big heart and common-man sensibilities—would give a seventy-year-old the job.
“And who are you?” the man asked.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jeff Pearlman with
Sports Illustrated
. I have an appointment.”
“Uh . . . yeah,” he said. “I suppose you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m here to see . . .”
Then I stopped.
And gasped.
With a tilt of his head, I noticed something jarring: The old man’s eyes were yellow. Not light yellow, either. It appeared as if all the white had been drained from the sclera, replaced by the bright hue of a YIELD sign. That wasn’t all. Upon closer inspection, his cheeks were sunken, his shoulders coat-hanger thin, his forearms mere pencils.
He was not old. He was sick.
“Nice to see you,” the man said, nodding wearily before extending a hand. “I’m Walter Payton.”
That was the first time I met him.
That was the last time I met him.
We spoke for no more than thirty minutes. He sitting behind a desk, me—twenty-six years old and nervous as all hell—fiddling with my pen and notepad. A couple of days earlier, Payton had announced in a press conference that he was suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare disease in which the ducts that drain bile from the liver become inflamed and blocked. It was flabbergasting news—not merely because, at age forty-five, Payton was still relatively young, but because he was the last person you would
ever
think this could happen to.
Forget that Payton was the NFL’s all-time rushing leader, or that he is arguably the league’s best-ever all-around football player, or that he missed but a single game over thirteen seasons. In the course of researching this book, I’ve heard five hundred different descriptions of Payton’s unparalleled physicality—of the weights he lifted; of the linebackers he pulverized; of the cocksure muscleheads he arm-wrestled to submission; of the grip that, according to an old Bears fullback named John Skibinski, “took hold of you like a vise, until your hand turned blue and numb.” My favorite analogy came from one Richard McMurrin, a building superintendent at the Chicago Bears’ training complex in Lake Forest, Illinois, and a man not drawn toward exaggeration. “Walter,” McMurrin told me, “was like a cannonball with skin stretched over it.”