Sweetness (26 page)

Was Payton genuinely interested in moving to Canada? “Not a chance,” said Holmes. “It was all a ploy.”

On February 2, a full five days following the draft, Payton arrived in Chicago, but not as the Bears had hoped. After ignoring dozens of calls and Western Union telegrams from the team, Holmes was contacted by Brent Musburger, at the time an up-and-coming sports reporter for the local CBS affiliate. The station asked Holmes if he’d be willing to bring his client to Chicago for a one-on-one sit-down interview. “We’ll send a plane for both of you,” Musburger said. “Then put you on the air.”

Holmes liked it. Payton liked it. Here was a way to set the agenda; to let the people of Chicago know that Walter Payton wanted to be a Bear, but the organization wasn’t making an effort to sign him (a complete lie—how could an offer be made if Holmes refused to pick up the telephone?). “It was a good strategy for them,” said Musburger. “At the time the Bears were thought of as a very cheap operation. The best thing Walter could do was make it sound like he was itching to come play here.” The agent and the football player boarded the turboprop jet at Jackson’s airport, and en route worked out a devilish plan. Told by Bob Hill that his new client owned a perverse sense of humor, Holmes thought it’d be fun to introduce themselves to the Windy City as a couple of small-town bumpkins. “Walter and I made up this big scenario,” Holmes said. “I was gonna be an ignorant lawyer, and Walter was going be an even more ignorant, dumb black who just barely got out of the fields and could barely read and write. Walter was all for it.”

The plane landed at Meigs Field. It was a typical winter day in Chicago, with fierce winds blowing off of Lake Michigan and several feet of snow covering the ground. By design, Payton was the last person to exit the aircraft. He stuck his head out the door, crinkled his nose, and screamed, “Uh-uh, no way. I ain’t playing in this mess. What is that stuff? Is that cotton?”

“No Walter,” Holmes said. “That’s snow.”

“Snow!” said Payton. “Well, I ain’t ever seen that before.”

“Boy,” bellowed Holmes, “get your ass off that airplane!”

“Uh-uh,” Payton replied. “I ain’t stepping into that mess. Mama told me I could come back to the house if I don’t like it here. I wanna to go on back home now, Mista Bud.”

Payton finally made his way from the plane to an airport hangar, where the interview would be conducted. Upon meeting Musburger, Payton repeatedly referred to him as “Mista Mooseburger.”

“Walter was cutting up, using ‘nigger’ every other word, just watching the shock cross people’s faces,” said Holmes. “They must have thought this guy from the woods of Mississippi was some idiot. He’d say, ‘Mister Bud, I just want to be a good little nigger and do what you tell me to do.’ ”

Roughly five minutes before Musburger was scheduled to conduct the live interview, he asked Payton to cease using any “ethnic words.”

Payton:
“Mista Mooseburger, what’s an ethnic word?”

Musburger:
“Well, you keep using that word.”

Payton:
“What word is that?”

Musburger:
“The word that describes black people in a negative light.”

Payton:
“I don’t understand, Mista Mooseburger.”

Musburger:
“Walter, you can’t say ‘nigger’ on TV.”

Payton:
“Oh, Mista Mooseburger, don’t you worry. I’m a good little nigger, Mista Mooseburger, I promise. Tell him, Mista Bud.

Tell Mista Mooseburger that I’m a good little nigger!”

With no time left, Musburger took a deep breath, stared into the camera, and began the segment. A handful of Jackson State highlights flashed across the screen, and Musburger opened by asking Payton—who calmly sipped from a glass of orange juice—how he felt about being drafted by the Bears.

“I’ll tell you, Brent, nothing thrills me more than the very idea of being able to play for a franchise as storied and legendary as the Chicago . . .”

“The interview was fantastic,” said Holmes, who later received a plaque from Payton that read HONORARY NIGGER. “And when it was over Brent came up to me laughing. He told me, ‘Goddamn, Walter
is
a smart ass, isn’t he?’ ”

The Bears were not happy. The interview was designed to make the organization look like a band of buffoons, and it worked. Later in the day, Finks called Holmes at his hotel. “Mr. Holmes,” he said, “do you think it would be all right if I were to meet my number one draft pick? It seems everyone else has.”

That night, Payton, Holmes, Finks, and Bill McGrane, an assistant to the general manager, met at a French restaurant in downtown Chicago. The two Mississippians had so enjoyed toying with Musburger that they kept the act going. Holmes wanted the Bears to believe they were dining with a backwoods agent and an even more backwoods football player. When the waiter passed out menus, Holmes noticed that one of the featured dishes was
pêcher le poisson
—fish. “Well look here, Walter!” he said. “They’ve got possum on the menu!”

“Mmmm!” yelped Payton. “I want me some of that there possum! I want it bad!”

“Walter,” said Finks, “that’s not possum. It’s fish.”

“Well, dang,” Payton said. “I wanted a mess of that possum so bad!”

“Walter, they ain’t got no grits, either,” Holmes said. “Lord, I don’t even see fried chicken or catfish.”

When the waiter came to take an order, Payton looked up with confused eyes. “Do you have anything that’s just kind of plain?” he said. “Like a piece of meat with nothin’ on it?”

Throughout the meal, Holmes watched Finks’ facial expressions morph from shocked to disgusted to dismayed to mystified. “At the start of dinner Jim Finks told us he hadn’t had a drink in two or three years,” said Holmes. “That night he had two double scotches.”

Over the next few weeks, Holmes and Finks exchanged contract proposals, but the Bears were negotiating from a position of weakness. Their two top returning running backs, Grandberry and Carl Garrett, were marginal players, and as Holmes was speaking with Finks he was also being propositioned by Eugene Pullano, president of the Chicago Winds of the second-year World Football League.

A multimillionaire whose family made its fortunes in the insurance business, Pullano took Holmes and Payton to dinner and offered the world. Join the Winds, he said, and you’ll make $150,000 annually, plus we’ll pay for your apartment, buy you a new Cadillac, and sign Rickey Young to be your blocking back. The WFL had already lured several players away from the NFL, supplying it with much-needed early credibility. “This guy had a great big gold bear ring that had two ruby eyes,” said Holmes. “Well, during dinner he took it off his finger and handed it to Walter. Just gave it to him.”

Payton was tempted. The money was great, the perks even greater. But, come day’s end, his dream wasn’t to play with the Chicago Winds. (This proved to be a good thing. Averaging approximately three thousand fans per game and wallowing in debt, the Winds went 1-4 before folding midway through the season.) No, Walter Payton aspired to rule the NFL.

On June 3, 1975, four months after the draft, Payton and the Bears agreed on a three-year contract that paid $150,000 annually. Including a $126,000 signing bonus, it was the richest deal in franchise history. (Holmes wanted Payton to receive the highest signing bonus ever for a player from Mississippi. In 1971, the New Orleans Saints gave Ole Miss quarterback Archie Manning $125,000.) Payton wasted little time putting the money to good use, buying his dream car, a new gold Datsun 280ZX. Contacted by the
Tribune
’s Ed Stone, Holmes could barely contain his giddiness. “The major deciding factor was that it has been his life’s ambition to play in the NFL,” Holmes said. “Either offer would have made him financially secure, but one gave him the opportunity to play where he could break established records. He’s got a history of breaking records wherever he goes.”

At long last, Walter Payton was a Chicago Bear.

CHAPTER 11

BIRTH OF SWEETNESS

IN THE DAYS AND WEEKS AFTER THE DRAFT, WALTER PAYTON HAD TO SWALLOW hard, put on his happiest face, and answer question after question about his new team. He talked of how, as a boy, he worshiped at the altar of Gale Sayers, the magical Chicago Bears halfback who, between the years of 1965 and 1968, was arguably the best player in the National Football League. “Gale Sayers has been my idol,” he said. “I used to follow him, watch him when I could, and see what he did in the papers.”

Payton was exaggerating about his admiration for Sayers; for a kid growing up in Columbia, Mississippi, in the 1960s, the Chicago Bears were all but invisible. The television in the Payton household was rarely on, and even if it was, Walter had little-to-no interest in following professional sports. He was an outdoor kid, best suited to running along trails and throwing balls and jumping through sprinklers.

In fact, were Payton better schooled on the recent history of the organization, perhaps he would have thought again and opted for Canada. Or the World Football League. Or a career in special education. Or joining a dance troop in Guam. With a 4-10 record, the Bears had finished last in the NFC Central in 1974, their sixth-straight losing mark. The team’s offense ranked twenty-fifth in a twenty-six-team league, and an unforgivable seventeenth in defense (the franchise had built and protected its reputation on defensive dominance). With Sayers having retired in 1971 and Dick Butkus, the legendarily vicious linebacker, hanging up his uniform two seasons later, Chicago’s roster was a starless collection of has-beens and never-will-bes. Their most noteworthy player was quarterback Bobby Douglass, a fabulous athlete with a cannon for a throwing arm, a club fighter’s toughness, and no idea how to play the game. “We were as bad as football can get,” said Bo Rather, a Bears receiver from 1974 to 1978. “We had a terrible offense, a terrible defense, and no running game to speak of. There was very little ability, and even Vince Lombardi wouldn’t have made much of a difference.”

Throughout the early 1970s, players who came to the Bears directly from Division I colleges were flabbergasted by the shoddy conditions and subpar attitudes. “It was terrible,” said Wayne Wheeler, a wide receiver who had been drafted out of Alabama in the third round in 1974. “It was like going from college back to high school. I actually wrote [Alabama coach] Bear Bryant a letter asking for equipment, and he sent me brand-new gear because the stuff they gave us in Chicago was so poor. Not only was it used, it didn’t even fit.”

Since 1944, the Bears had based their training camp at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, a decaying, bug-infested hellhole that, defensive lineman Gary Hrivnak recalled, “made us feel like we were in the army. We didn’t have air-conditioned dorms or a weight room, and the fields were terrible.” Once the season started, the conditions somehow worsened. The team held most of its practices at Soldier Field, its home stadium, which featured a rock-solid artificial turf surface that only hardened as the temperatures dropped. On the days Abe Gibron, the head coach, decided his team needed more space, he loaded the players on a couple of yellow school buses and drove them to nearby Grant Park. “That was the biggest joke,” said Rich Coady, a Bears center from 1970 to 1975. “We’d get off the bus and they’d be throwing the winos off the patch of grass where we were going to work. There were no lines or goalposts, and for conditioning we’d be told to run up a big hill at the park that kids used for sledding. The older guys would run it once or twice, then lay on top and wait until everyone was done. The whole thing was a circus.”

The ringleader was Gibron. A three-hundred-pound barrel of jelly, Chicago’s coach had been a Pro Bowl offensive lineman with the Cleveland Browns. His gritty reputation endeared him to George Halas, the Bears founder and owner. Yet in his three seasons guiding the team, Gibron’s claim to fame wasn’t winning (his teams went 11-30-1), but eating and drinking. It was once said that if Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Abe Gibron had the face that lunched on a thousand shrimps. While most players were uninspired by his coaching acumen, the barrel-bellied, watermelon-headed Gibron dazzled all with his consumption skills. “He was the first person I knew,” said Ernie Janet, a Bears offensive guard, “who could eat a hamburger in two bites.”