Sweetness (19 page)

Because he had no telephone in his dorm room, Walter snuck into a Jackson State guidance counselor’s office and dialed Connie’s number. She had been told by her aunt that a college boy would be contacting her, but never believed it. He was in Mississippi, she was 190 miles away in the Crescent City. What was the point? “I was very surprised to hear Walter’s distinctive, high-pitched voice on the other end,” Connie once wrote. “We talked for hours [that first night].”

Shortly thereafter, Connie flew to Jackson for a visit. Hill picked her up at the airport and brought her to his house. Hanging from a living room wall were photographs of some of the great players he’d coached at Jackson State—Jerome Barkum, Leon Gray, Rodney Phillips, Walter. As Connie looked the images up and down, Hill said, “Which one of those young men do you think is Walter?” Connie zeroed in on one particular picture. The young man was black, with unkempt eyebrows, a wide nose, a miniature Afro, and pimples dotting much of his forehead. The curled-lip expression on his face suggested he had just whiffed sour milk. “Oh, boy,” she thought to herself, “please don’t let it be that one.”

Bingo.

“OK,” Connie said to Hill, taking a second glance. “Maybe he’s not
that
bad.”

Their first date came a day later, a stroll to nearby Lynch Street. Walter was awkward—far from what she had expected of a sports star. He glanced toward the ground a lot and struggled to make decent conversation. When he did talk, it was about Lorna and her intrusive mother. He jabbered on incessantly about the girl, until Connie wondered why she had bothered. “We spent that evening just kind of talking about her and that whole situation,” Connie said. “I ended the weekend thinking, ‘He’s a nice guy, he’s here, I’m going back home. That’s it, and I just hope he gets back together with his girlfriend.’ ”

To Hill’s dismay, in the following weeks Walter did not mention Connie again. He continued to mope over Lorna, desperate to make things work. In Hill’s mind, this wasn’t the way a real man behaved. To whine over a woman’s affection? The last thing Hill wanted was a halfback more concerned with a broken heart than the pigskin. “This was
my man
,” said Hill. “I helped a lot of my players with their girlfriends. These were my guys.”

In an act that violated approximately ten million NCAA regulations, in the spring of 1974, Hill dug into his personal account and paid for Payton to fly back to New Orleans and spend a weekend with Connie, her parents, and her three brothers. What if Walter refused to go? Not an option. He was going. “I called after two days to see how it was, and to check what time he’d be getting back here,” said Hill. “Betty was supposed to put Walter on the plane the next day, but he refused to go. He stayed the whole week. Betty told me he was sleeping on the stairway—he fell in love that quickly.”

Connie recalled things differently. She has said that Walter was guarded and lacking in manners. “When it was dinnertime, he wouldn’t eat with my family at the table,” she said. “When everybody was through with dinner, he would want me to then go with him and get something to eat. It was like he was too shy to eat with everybody else. My mother just didn’t understand that.”

Yet something about Walter Payton caught Connie’s fancy. He was sensitive, which was a rare trait among the men she knew. His bashfulness, while annoying, was also endearing. There appeared to be no phony machismo to the boy. No strut or bombast or arrogance. He only discussed football when asked, and never bragged about his own achievements. If anything, he appeared prouder of his dance moves than his off-tackle moves.

With Hill’s blessing, Connie and Walter kept in close contact. They spoke every week on the phone, and she visited Jackson State on multiple occasions. Eventually, Walter broke up with Lorna. “He did it in a very cowardly way,” Jones said. “He had his brother’s girlfriend tell me he didn’t want to date me anymore and that he had another girl. I couldn’t believe it. It broke my heart.”

As Connie’s senior year at Alcee Fortier High School came to a close, Hill desperately wanted her to attend Jackson State to keep his prized player happy. “I couldn’t have my players worried about love,” Hill said. “I had several players fall in love and I kicked them off the team because it messed them up. But I liked Connie and Walter together. The combination worked.” After checking with Walter, Hill said he marched into the office of John Peoples, Jackson State’s president, and insisted Connie Norwood be awarded a full four-year scholarship to the school. “All she had to do was walk up and give her name,” he said. “I told [Peoples] I needed that scholarship. Walter had to be happy. He
had
to be.” (When asked, Peoples said he had “no recollection, one way or the other, of being involved with this.”)

One year later, Connie was a Jackson State student.

And Walter Payton was happy.

Though Bob Hill could be a sentimental sort, he was first and foremost an obsessive winner. Loyalty was loyalty, but it only extended so far. As great as Payton had been over the course of his freshman and sophomore seasons, Hill would never turn down the opportunity to bring in another elite ball carrier.

That’s why, in the late summer weeks of 1973, Walter was dismayed to find that the incoming freshman class included a halfback with superior speed; a halfback the legendary Red Smith would later call “a greyhound with muscles.” As a product of Greenville High School in Greenville, Mississippi, Wilbert Montgomery faced the same barriers Payton had two years earlier—despite eye-opening statistics and abilities to rival any player in the South, the state’s white universities refused to pursue him. Hill, however, was smitten. “Man, I loved that kid,” he said. “[While I was recruiting him] I took him to a local sporting goods store where I had a credit and I said, ‘Get anything you want—get clothes, get shoes, get anything.’ Wilbert bought about three pairs of pants and a pair of shoes, and I thought, ‘That’s all he gets? What a kid! What a terrific kid!’ ”

In his first week of practice with the Tigers, Montgomery exceeded all expectations. He ran hard and he ran fast. Montgomery only lacked one component vital to Jackson State. “Toughness,” said Matthew Norman, a defensive back. “He passed out on the field one day from the heat. He just couldn’t handle it.”

“We were going through drills,” recalled Jackie Slater, the star offensive lineman, “and Wilbert was just a freshman, asking out loud, ‘Do I really want to go through this?’ ”

Payton, on the other hand, was as determined a player as most Tigers had ever seen. Much of his free time was spent at Memorial Stadium, running the mountainous steps until he could barely breathe. He would deliberately show up around noon, when the facility was empty and the moist air could be sliced like a piece of sponge cake. If the stadium was being used, he’d either run miles through the streets of downtown Jackson (“We’d jog to the movies, to the zoo, to get something to eat,” said Robert Brazile. “Walter just loved to jog.”) or retreat to a nearby high school. “You could look out the window in the women’s dorm at certain parts of the day and you’d see Walter working out by himself in the insane heat,” said Jo Ann Durham, a Jackson State student who briefly dated Walter. “Nobody else could hang with him.”

“His training was unparalleled,” said Vernon Perry, Jackson State’s safety. “He’d take me to the Pearl River and we’d run through the sand in our football cleats.
In our football cleats!
Who would even think to do that?”

Certainly not Montgomery. Hill was familiar with the new kid’s shortcomings, but figured he could beat toughness into him. Hill was also made aware that Abilene Christian, a small NAIA school in central Texas, had desperately craved his services and wasn’t giving up easily. According to Hill, Jackson was home to a wealthy Abilene booster with a private jet who had been snooping around campus, whispering sweet nothings to Montgomery. During one weekend in late August, Hill had to depart to Memphis for a meeting. Before leaving, Hill ordered assistant coach Sylvester Collins, a former Tigers quarterback, to babysit Montgomery. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” Hill said. “Wherever you go, he goes. Wherever he goes, you go.” Collins brought Montgomery to his home, but absentmindedly left him alone for an hour. During that time, the Abilene booster knocked on the door and told Montgomery his escape to paradise awaited. They returned to Montgomery’s Jackson State dorm room, packed his stuff, and flew off to Texas. “He snuck out because he couldn’t take it,” said Ricky Taylor, the Tigers quarterback. “But the guy couldn’t carry Walter’s water. I don’t care what anyone said.”

A mere three months later, Montgomery ran for 146 yards, caught nine passes for 74 yards and scored six touchdowns in Abilene’s win over Stephen F. Austin. He would lead the NAIA in scoring, and go on to a Pro Bowl career with the Philadelphia Eagles, rushing for 6,789 yards and scoring fifty-seven touchdowns. Had he remained at Jackson State, one can argue the Tigers would have boasted the finest running back tandem in the history of college football.

“I would have started Walter and Wilbert together,” Hill said. “Almost certainly. Then he left. That’s how recruiting was back then. It was dog-eatdog. Abilene ate my dog.”

By the time Jackson State kicked off its 1973 season with a September 8 visit to the University of Nebraska at Omaha, NFL scouts and executives were increasingly aware that the nation’s most talented collegiate halfback played for the Tigers. So, for that matter, was Jackson State’s rapidly expanding fan base. Just two years earlier most of the people who attended games at Memorial Stadium came to see the Sonic Boom of the South, the college’s extraordinary marching band. Now Payton was a marquee attraction. Blacks from across the state of Mississippi showed up to catch the action. The university’s sports information director, Sam Jefferson, began referring to the facility as “Payton Place,” and Tiger games rivaled those of Ole Miss and Mississippi State for fan-generated electricity. On the day of the season’s biggest games, sixty thousand spectators packed the stadium.

Ever since he first stole Payton from Kansas State, Hill had dreams of molding himself the perfect running back. Now, that vision was coming to fruition. At the start of the season, Hill implored Payton to refuse to run out of bounds. “Never die easy,” he told him. “If you’re going to die anyway, die hard.” Specifically, Hill meant that, 99 percent of the time, a defensive player was going to slam into a running back whether he was angling toward the sideline or charging straight ahead. “You’re red meat,” he told Payton, “and they’re hungry.” Hill had always been impressed with Payton’s stiff-arm, which he brought to Jackson State via Columbia High School. But he wanted his star to use it more often, and with even greater viciousness. Hill aspired for defensive backs to see Payton coming and wince. “When I was playing at Jackson State there was a game against Kentucky State, and on fourth and five I broke a tackle and stepped out of bounds, because I thought I had the first,” said Hill. “Well, I didn’t. I decided from then on that I’d never go out of bounds by choice. So I’d tell Walter, ‘Don’t be a coward. Initiate the contact. If they’re dumb enough to try and tackle you up high, break out the bone and throw it.’ ”

The Tigers traveled to Omaha for the opener, where Coach Al Caniglia and the Maverick players had little idea what they were in store for. “Our scouting report mentioned Walter Payton,” said Ted Sledge, an Omaha defensive tackle. “But we didn’t know very much.” The weather was in Nebraska-Omaha’s favor. Following three straight days of torrential rain, Rosenblatt Stadium’s surface was a platter of mud soufflé. Yet despite the sludge, and despite Omaha stuffing the line with six players, Payton broke loose, carrying the ball seventeen times for 120 yards and a touchdown, kicking a twenty-five-yard field goal and an extra point, and catching four passes for 72 yards. Jackson State won handily, 17–0.

Afterward, in an appalling act of poor sportsmanship, a gaggle of Jackson State’s players (not including Payton) surrounded the Mavericks’ bus and began shaking it, chanting, “Bring on the Big Red! Bring on the Big Red!”—a reference to the University of Nebraska’s powerful Cornhuskers. “They were good,” said Jim Sledge, Ted’s brother and a Mavericks defensive tackle who had transferred from the University of Nebraska, “but they would have been killed by the Huskers.”