Sweetness (10 page)

After that victory, Columbia traveled 126 miles northwest to Vicksburg to face Warren Central High, which had beaten the Wildcats 39–0 a year earlier. The Vikings were coached by Dewey Partridge, a star receiver at Ole Miss in the late 1950s. In the week leading up to the game, Partridge devised a plan to shut down Columbia’s rushing attack. He took offensive lineman Archie Anderson and lined him up on the defensive line, across from the tight end. As Warren Central’s strongest player, Anderson’s job was to lock up the tight end, thus allowing a linebacker to go unobstructed after Payton. “From the standpoint of getting me and the tight end on each other, it worked,” said Anderson. “But it was a failure, because you were asking the linebacker to tackle Walter Payton one-on-one. And that was impossible.”

“At one point they threw a screen to Walter, and I thought I was about to pick it off,” said David Chaney, a Warren Central defensive end. “Then—snap! Out of nowhere, he jumped up, caught the ball and took off. I’d never seen anyone move like that. Never.” Payton scored three touchdowns and ran for 123 yards in the 32–0 win.

“We were just kicking ass and taking names,” said Johnson, the quarterback. “Greatness came very easily for that team.”

The Columbia High Wildcats beat Mendenhall 16–6 to improve to 4-0, then downed Crystal Springs 34–21 to post the first 5-0 mark in school history.

Leading up to the clash at Gardner Stadium, Crystal Springs coach Leon Canoy managed to get his hands on a few rolls of Columbia film. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. Davis and Boston had designed four special plays just for Payton. Two, Spider Left and Spider Right, were screen passes into the flat that, with proper blocking, were seemingly impossible to stop. Two others, Alcorn Left and Alcorn Right, were misdirections that gave Payton the option of running or throwing. Also unstoppable. “Back then the taping would be done off of a little ol’ tripod, and the tapes would start up close, then go wide,” said Canoy. “You’d watch Walter, and the image would always switch to a wide shot because he’d wind up running away from everyone. He’d almost be out of the picture by the end of the plays.” High school running backs generally fall into one of two categories. They are either gnatlike slashers, à la Moses, or straight-ahead bowling balls. Payton was both. He ran hard on every play, never stopped churning his arms and pumping his knees. His stiff-arm, developed on the sandlots of Jefferson, could paralyze opposing defenders, and his hips rarely locked into one position. “I began to see that once in a great while you can use getting hit to keep your balance,” Payton wrote. “It’s all a matter of reflexes and coordination and eyes and hands and feet.” In other words, opponents were helpless. They might stop him once. Twice. Three times. But inevitably, he’d break a run.

Like the other men faced with shutting down Columbia High’s high-powered offense, Canoy devised a plan: His linebackers would cheat toward the line, hoping to make contact before the play developed. They would grab Payton’s legs, drag him down, and force Johnson to throw the ball.

“Didn’t work,” Canoy said.

Payton, Moses, and Johnson teamed to rush for more than two hundred yards. “They were incredible,” said Jimmie Stovall, Crystal Springs’ cornerback. “I’ll never forget my one big play against Walter. He came around that corner and I hit him and he hit me. We both went down. I mean, it was a heck of a collision. He came back one play later and scored. I came back a bunch of plays later and was never the same. Forty years later, my shoulder still hurts.”

If older white fans were thrilled by Columbia High’s football prowess, they had mixed feelings over the social implications. Until Payton’s senior year, young blacks and young whites were almost completely separate. Unless you were a black child whose mother served as a nanny for white families, odds are you lacked interactions with the opposite race. Now, however, blacks like Payton, Johnson, and Moses were genuine heroes on the Columbia High campus. They walked the halls with heads held high and chests puffed out. They wore their jerseys the days of games, and sported snazzy green-and-white football jackets with their nicknames (“Spider-Man” for Payton, “Sugar Man” for Moses) embroidered atop the chest. The initial skepticisms of white teammates eroded quickly. Most of the athletes—black and white—were deliberately grouped together in physical education class, and a bond developed. “Those guys on that team wouldn’t let other people talk badly about their teammates—black or white,” said Dantin. “Not because of race, but because that’s your teammate.”

On the bus rides back from road games, one of the black players—often Payton—would break out a transistor radio and blast the music. The songs were almost always Motown—Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas—and the crooning grew louder throughout the ride. As gifted a dancer as he was a runner, Payton stood, arms waving, rear shaking. “It sounds like a scene from a movie,” said Dantin. “But the black kids would start singing The Temptations, and we’d all join in. All of us. Those trips became like Temptation greatest hits sing-alongs. It was so incredibly fun.”

In preintegration Columbia, decades of Jefferson football players either partied in someone’s backyard or, occasionally, at Pete Walker’s Place, a black club, that featured a three-songs-for-a-quarter jukebox and Pete’s special brand of bootleg. But the world was changing. Accompanying Columbia’s football players on the bus trips to away games was the school’s all-white fleet of cheerleaders. In the past, a black kid in Columbia wouldn’t dare glance longingly toward a white girl. “Integration,” said Woodson, “completely mixed that notion up.”

Throughout his early high school days, Walter had dated a black girl named Jill Brewer. Notably pretty, with big brown eyes and high cheeks, Jill attended nearby Marion Central High, and was two years Walter’s junior. She wasn’t his first girlfriend. (“Walter was a popular guy, and he’d dated some girls,” Brewer said. “But he was my first boyfriend.”) They had met in 1967, at a semipro football game being played at Gardner Stadium. She was shy and guarded. He was also shy, but a bit more bubbly. “Apparently I gave him my number,” she said. “We grew to be very close.” The two met up at various school functions, at sporting events, at parties. Brewer’s mother ran a small recreation center known as the Shop, and together they played pool and ate ice cream. Because Brewer lived nine miles outside of Columbia on Highway 43, the couple struggled to see each other every week. “But,” she said, “I really liked him. Walter was such a sweet boy. If I had a daughter I’d want her to have a boyfriend who treats her with the respect he gave me.”

By the time Columbia desegregated its schools, Walter and Jill were no longer a pair. “When we broke up, he said I was breaking his heart,” said Brewer. “I told him it was just puppy love. From then on, whenever I’d see him, he’d greet me the same way—‘Hey, Puppy Love!’ ”

Payton’s first intimate moment with a white girl came in the fall of his senior year. Walter and Kim Fink, the white backup quarterback, discussed the idea of setting each other up with girls from the opposite race. “We were both kind of progressives,” said Fink. “I had friends who would have had nothing to do with African-American girls. But not me. I was excited.”

One night, with his parents perched in front of the television, Fink snuck out of the house with a six-pack of Falstaff Beer and picked up Walter. They headed for a spot known as the Duck Pond, an undeveloped subdivision on the outskirts of town where kids went to make out. The girls met them there—Walter’s was blond, with blue eyes; Fink’s had brown hair, with brown eyes and dark skin. “We just fooled around and stuff—nothing big,” said Fink. “But we had to meet far away for it to happen. You couldn’t get caught doing that stuff back then.”

Which made Walter’s life increasingly difficult. Because in that marvelous fall of 1970, he developed a crush on a beautiful cheerleader with peachtoned skin who sat in front of him in biology class. Her name was Colleen Crawley, though friends called her “Tweet” for her thin, birdlike legs. She was, like Walter, a senior, with long brown cascading hair, doe eyes, and an easygoing manner that had half the senior boys smitten. Unlike some of her peers, Colleen was open to the idea of having black friends. Her mother, Patricia, had been born and raised in New York City; a Queens girl who came to Mississippi by way of marrying an air force enlistee from the Magnolia State. Colleen was seven when her family relocated, but she maintained her open-mindedness. “My mom wasn’t a sheltered person,” said Colleen. “She worked for a social organization that got a lot of federal grant money to help race relations. Part of her job was going to black homes, then writing proposals. She’d come back and tell us, ‘You wouldn’t believe how these people are living. You just wouldn’t believe it.’ ” Because of Patricia’s overt empathy, the Crawfords found themselves on the receiving end of threatening calls from the KKK. “Mom heard the phrase ‘nigger lover’ quite a bit,” said Donna Williams, Colleen’s sister. “But she was tough.”

Colleen never aspired to become a cheerleader, but when Diane Weems, the captain of the Columbia High team, transferred to Columbia Academy, her friends talked her into filling the vacancy. She knew little of pom-poms or touchdowns, but took an immediate liking to the fast kid in the No. 22 jersey. On bus rides, Walter was funny and respectful. He was the type of boy who surrendered his seat for the girls, and waited patiently for others to exit the vehicle before doing so himself. “Something about Walter stood out, and not just football,” said Crawley. “I think it’s that he was just very nice.” There were three senior cheerleaders in 1970—Colleen, Sandra Height, and Dawn Givens—and each one paired up with a black senior star. Height bonded with Johnson, the quarterback. Givens took to Moses, the fleet halfback. And Colleen Crawley often found herself alongside Walter Payton.

They became close—the cheerleader who thought of Payton as a friend; the running back who thought of Crawley as a love interest. The two sat next to each other on the bus, smiled in the hallways, waved from afar. On more than one occasion Walter carried her books home from school, a quaint act that surely caught the ire of her neighbors on North Park Avenue. “He’d see me walking and he’d get his friends to drop him off so he could walk me to my house,” she said. “I invited Walter over every now and then if my parents were out and I was babysitting. He came to my home once or twice with some of the other black guys. I remember that some of the kids would bring a six-pack of beer and we’d play records. But Walter never drank.”

Walter clearly believed he and Crawley were an item. Or at least a potential item. He bragged to his friends about her, and was smitten by her beauty. “Oh, he had a thing for Colleen,” said Woodson. “He wanted to date her badly.”

On more than one occasion during his senior year, Payton bragged to his friends and teammates that he was close to bedding Crawley. One time, as he told it, he knocked on the front door to Colleen’s house, and heard her voice call, “Come in, Walter! It’s open!” Upon entering, he spotted her on the bed, naked, waiting for him. “So I ran all the way home,” Walter would say, laughing. “I couldn’t get caught with a white girl in her house. They’d kill me.” Because boys are boys and tall tales of sexual conquest seem to be a requisite part of the male adolescent experience, Walter can probably be excused that the story was pure fiction.

“I liked Walter a lot—
as a person
,” Colleen said. “But there is no way we could have dated back then. Forget that I had two boyfriends my senior year, and that I was Junior Miss for the city and I was editor of the school paper and involved in community theatre. The problem was the times. In 1970, you could not be white and openly date a black person, or vice versa. It just wasn’t allowed.

“But he was very special,” she added. “And the thing I think a lot of people noticed about him was he never fully looked up. He would look down and glance up occasionally with his big bright eyes. He was very humble. There were other people better looking than he was, but it was his personality. He’d look at you and you had to feel good.”

Even without Crawley as a girlfriend, Walter and his friends found plenty of ways to entertain themselves. Buried within Payton’s quiet exterior lurked a daredevil. With the exception of running the football, Payton’s true love might have been the motorized scooter his parents had once bought him as a birthday present. When the days were long and dull, Walter revved up the red scooter and drove to the nearby town of Harmony, where the rolling, unpaved streets looped and curved like giant pretzels. At the time, the posted speed limit was 40 mph—which Payton promptly ignored. “He would kick it up to sixty miles per hour . . . seventy miles per hour,” said Woodson. “Boy drove like a maniac.” One day, while coming around a sharp turn, Walter skidded across the road before barreling through a barbed wire fence and into a pen of cows. “He wasn’t hurt,” said Woodson, “but only because of luck.”

Payton took pleasure in waiting for his father to fall asleep on the couch, then boosting his truck and driving into the night. It was a beat-up jalopy with a five-speed engine, and to take off one had to push the vehicle down the street, pop the clutch, and jump in. “Sometimes we’d get back to Walter’s house and his dad would be awake,” said Moses. “Boy, would he give Walter an earful. ‘Stop stealing my truck!’ But by this age he was too big to get hit. So we’d just laugh it off.”