Sweetness (2 page)

Although he had been retired for twelve years at the time we met, football players old and young still mythologized Payton’s Hill—an incline that once stood near his house in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It was just sixty yards long but rose at an angle of 75 degrees, with loose dirt and small rocks and pebbles making footing treacherous. All off-season long, Payton would be sprinting the hill, up and down, up and down, up and down. “He’d invite some of the guys to work with him,” said Vince Evans, a former Bears quarterback. “If you hadn’t been to the hill before he’d look at you and laugh, because Walter would just climb up that like a bobcat. And you’d follow in his dust. I was a pretty good athlete, so the first time I said, ‘This ain’t nothing.’ Well, halfway up I was sucking air. Once that one was over, he said we were going to do ten more.
Ten?
That was the real eye-opener to this guy’s power.”

So how the hell did this make sense, me fidgeting before a man who looked nothing like the five foot ten, 205-pound ball of iron from McMurrin’s memories? According to the public statements of his doctors, Payton needed a liver transplant to survive beyond two years. That was, it turns out, incorrect. By the time we met, Payton’s body was already ravaged by bile duct cancer—an awful byproduct of primary sclerosing cholangitis. His odds of survival? Infinitesimal.

I can only imagine what Payton must have been thinking, staring at a trembling
Sports Illustrated
reporter a mere four years removed from college. “I’m dying, and this is who you send?” He had that right. I was completely unqualified. I knew nothing about liver disease, little about suffering, and even less about death. In the entirety of my life, I had lost only two close relatives—both grandparents in their eighties.

“I’m dying, and this is who you send?”

The interview was mostly me looking down at a sheet of paper with a list of medical terms, reading a few words, then glancing Payton’s way and saying, “So, uh . . . eh . . . are you in a lot of pain?” He was polite enough, under the circumstances, but surely as anxious to end things as I was. When my father inquired later that evening what it was like meeting a football player whose poster once graced my bedroom wall, I didn’t hesitate. “Worst experience of my life.” I sighed. “Like watching a superhero die.”

More than a decade has passed since my visit to Hoffman Estates. In that span, I have gained a wife and two children. I’ve written four books, penned a slew of bylines, traveled a good chunk of the world. I have seen and lived and smelled and tasted and heard. It has been a mostly blissful ride, packed with enough highs to minimize the scattered lows.

Through the years, interviews have come and interviews have gone. I’ll occasionally dig through the yellowed scrapbooks, stumbling upon stories I’d completely forgotten about. Ronnie Duquette, the sneaker collector from Oregon. A Mahopac High School football player named Mark Dessi. Theo Ratliff, gangly 76ers center. On and on.

Never, however, have I forgotten my thirty minutes with Walter Payton.

I can still see the brightness of his jaundiced eyes. I can still feel the frailty of his handshake. Most important, I can still hear his voice from that day—a strained-yet-high-pitched blur of words and phrases. Throughout this process, I have used that voice as a guide.

This is the first time I have written a biography of the deceased, and as other writers warned, the process is incomparable. One doesn’t merely become obsessed with the subject. He chases it. Studies it. Craves it. Relentlessly obsesses over it. Dreams about it. Is haunted by it. Just two nights ago I was startled out of a deep sleep by yet another Walter Payton apparition. We were sitting in a vacant apartment. He was wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, with a rainbowcolored headband encircling his radiantly glistening Jheri curl. “Are you finding what you need?” he asked. “Do you get me yet?”

Then he vanished.

The truth is, Walter Payton has been extraordinarily hard to “get.” By nearly all accounts he was a giving and compassionate man; one who took pleasure in randomly stopping awestruck Chicagoans on the street to ask how their day was going. His ex-teammates, dating all the way back to the segregated John J. Jefferson High School in Columbia, Mississippi, tell one story after another of a gleeful prankster setting off M-80s in the locker room and using an effeminate-sounding voice to prank call wives with lines like, “Just tell Matt that Pookie called, and our baby needs new shoes.”

Yet Payton was also an emotional lockbox. He confided in precious few, and worked tirelessly to portray a certain happy-go-lucky image that belied his deep-seated emotional tumult. His cancer? Nobody’s business. His marriage? Nobody’s business. His post-NFL despondency that revealed itself in multiple cries for help (including several suicide threats)? Nobody’s business. In 2005 his widow, Connie, and the couple’s two children, Jarrett and Brittney, released a book,
Payton
, that was rife with inaccuracies—and the authors are three of the people who knew him best. Why, his own autobiography,
Never Die Easy
, is—by the estimates of his closest friends—40 percent fiction.

Just how enigmatic was Walter Payton? When he passed he was remembered at his own funeral for living forty-five productive, energetic years.

Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, he was forty-six.

He was a man whose life was cut tragically short, but who, in the words of Clyde Emrich, former Bears strength coach, “was given ninety years and . . . lived them all in [forty-six].” He trusted most everyone he met, and often paid for it. He never turned down a child’s autograph request, and was unconditionally loved for it. His nickname, “Sweetness,” was both perfect and misplaced.

“I lockered next to him for six or seven years,” said Jay Hilgenberg, the longtime Bears center, “and I got to know him very well. We were friends, and I really loved the man.”

Hilgenberg paused. He was sitting inside a golf clubhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He rubbed a chin layered with gray stubble. A perplexed look flashed across his face.

“But do I understand Walter Payton?” he said. Another pause. “No, I don’t. I’m not sure anyone does.”

PART ONE

COLUMBIA

Tommy Davis,
Columbia High School football coach

We were playing Franklin County and we were undefeated and rolling along. That afternoon the visiting team arrived and one of our equipment managers found one of their scouting reports. He brought it in, gave it to me, and they had Walter Payton, number twenty-two, identified as “Billy Joe Badass Himself.” I showed that to Walter privately. “Look what they’re saying about you,” I said. Well, he looked at that and he began to grit his teeth, and you could see the muscles tightening in his jaw. He handed it back to me without saying a word. We went out there and killed Franklin County, twenty-seven to zero, and he scored three touchdowns and kicked three extra points. You just didn’t mess with Walter.

CHAPTER 1

BUBBA

CHIP LOFTIN HAD A FESTIVE PARTY ON HIS FIFTH BIRTHDAY.

We know this because, on April 16, 1970, the editors of the
Columbian-Progress
—Columbia, Mississippi’s weekly newspaper of record—deemed the affair important enough to warrant a front-page story. There’s the headline, right below a black-and-white photograph of l’il Chip, smiling widely beneath an unruly mop of blond hair: CHIP LOFTIN HAS FESTIVE PARTY ON FIFTH BIRTHDAY.

The content of the article is nothing short of riveting. The party was thrown by Chip’s mother, Mrs. B. G. Loftin, and was held from three thirty to five P.M. at the city park. “Chip and his friends enjoyed the playground,” the piece read, “after which they assembled while he opened and displayed his birthday gifts.” Chip’s cake, baked by his mom and his aunt Shelby, depicted an automobile racetrack. Chocolate iced cupcakes, ice cream, and punch were also served, “from a picnic table covered with a birthday cloth.”

Not that Chip’s bash alone dominated the day’s news. There were other fascinating front-page stories in the
Progress
; pressing orders of business like LAMPTON HOME LUNCHEON SETTING FOR MISS BERRY and MAY HOMEMAKERS HOLD APRIL MEET. Inside the fourteen-page paper, one could read about the wedding nuptials of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Hulon Davis; about a lovely party at the Fausts’ house; about Columbia High School’s scrappy baseball team; and a thrilling yard sale one town over.

Founded in 1882 with the merging of two other publications, the newspaper’s name—
Progress
—had long dripped of cruel irony. Though in 1970 nearly 30 percent of Columbia’s population was black, Lester Williams, the longtime editor and publisher, deemed the happenings of his city’s minority denizens to be of little-to-no consequence. Forget covering the ongoing struggle of Mississippi’s black population to garner equal footing—the
Progress
refused to acknowledge there
was a struggle
; that, sixteen years after
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
deemed separate-but-equal to be illegal, nearly everything in Columbia remained separate and strikingly unequal.

The fact that the owner of Columbia’s lone roller rink, Royal Skating, denied blacks entrance? Not newsworthy. The fact that many of the town’s physicians refused to see black patients? Not a story. The fact that the town’s black high school, John J. Jefferson High, made due with tattered books and subpar materials and toilet seats that occasionally dangled off the rusted hinges? Hardly worthy for print. In the late 1960s, a black teacher named Fred Idom penned an unsolicited guest editorial for the
Progress
about the need for racial improvements within Columbia’s schools. Not only did Williams refuse to run the article, he telephoned Roosevelt Otis, Idom’s principal, to recommend he be disciplined. Were an outsider to visit Columbia and pick up most copies of the
Progress
, he would think the town was 100-percent white and as gosh-skippity-doo happy as a dimpled Chip Loftin at his fifth birthday celebration.

The truth was significantly more complicated.

Located in the heart of Marion County, Mississippi, a mere 112 miles north of New Orleans, Columbia (population: 7,500), was a town long ruled by expectations.
Met
expectations. If you were black, your house was situated on the north side of Church Street, in a section branded “The Quarters.” If you were white, your house was located on the south side of Church Street. If you were black, at one time or another you likely worked at the Columbia Country Club, either caddying, cleaning, or cooking. If you were white, you likely played golf at the Columbia Country Club. If you were black, you did all of your food and household shopping at Jeanette’s Grocery, a ragtag storefront on the corner of Owens Street. If you were white, you had the well-stocked, well-maintained Sunflower Food Store.

The unstated yet universally understood rule for the town’s blacks was simple: Deal with it. Sure, there’d be the occasional “nigger” or “boy” references. And yes, the Marion County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan took a certain pleasure in lighting crosses in the nearby woods. But as long as one didn’t complain, as long as one stayed on the right side of the street and walked with his eyes to the sidewalk and entered through the rear of a restaurant and enjoyed movies from up high in the balcony of the Marion Theatre, nobody from the white areas would pay you much mind.

So that’s what Alyne Sibley did.

She was born on January 14, 1926, one of seven children raised on a farm in the rural outpost of Expose, Mississippi. In 1937, Marion County’s Historical Society commissioned a detailed look at the region. The 187-page document spanned Columbia’s founding in 1812 to its temporary status as the Mississippi state capital in 1821 to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the reconstruction period (“the best and most honorable men in the community”), and it spared few words in disparaging blacks. Wrote Maggie Byrd, a Columbia-based historian: “By nature and adaptability, the Negroes are best suited to agriculture. Negroes have done very little along the lines of industry in Marion County except in the field of lumbering. They are better suited to the weather conditions and hard labor than the White neighbor who by nature, by rearing and training is far more sensitive. As skilled workmen, even in the lumber trade Negroes have not proven satisfactory in the past.”