Sweetness (33 page)

Much like the Colts of ’75, Detroit’s roster was a mediocre collection of players coming off of a .500 season. Nevada oddsmakers listed the game as a toss-up, and they were right. The Lions were terrible. The Bears were terrible. The game was terrible. With the 54,125 spectators inside Soldier Field alternating boos with yawns, Chicago won 10–3.

Although Detroit stuffed the line on almost every down, Fred O’Connor, the team’s backfield coach who called plays from the press box, refused to throw. He had Payton run twenty-five times, down after down after down. The scene was redundant: Avellini takes the snap. Avellini turns and hands to Payton. Payton slams into the defensive line after gaining little ground. With the exception of a fifty-eight-yard pass from Avellini to Greg Latta, the offense was a bore. Payton, who gained seventy yards, loved running the football, but he also loved an exciting, diverse, wide-open, play-to-win game plan.

Afterward, the embarrassed running back stormed off without speaking to the media.

He was as frustrated as ever.

Back in the mid-1970s, the NFL was a wasteland of chemical addictions. A large number of players smoked cigarettes and drank to excess. On the Bears, the drugs of choice were marijuana and cocaine.

“There was one offensive player in particular who had a serious coke problem,” said one Bear. “Every night I would stand there and watch him blow his nose, and all these towels would be filled with blood. Sometimes I’d have to drive him places because he was so high. He wasn’t alone.”

Was Pardee aware of such goings-on? No. Was Finks? Probably not. But were you a member of the team, and were you interested in getting high, there were countless places to turn. Many of the players had their own personal dealers, and were more than willing to spread the word.

“Most of the guys on that team were smoking a whole lot of weed,” said Ron Cuie, a running back selected in the fourteenth round of the ’76 Draft. “There was a local bar near training camp, and all the guys would go there and get drunk and high. But not Walter. Never saw him.”

“A lot of guys got hooked on drugs beginning with their time in the NFL,” said Earl Douthitt, a former Bears defensive back. “That’s what happened to me—cocaine abuse started when I got to the Bears. And man, was it hard to break.”

Newly married and living with Connie in a small apartment in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling, Payton had nothing to do with the drug scene. Throughout his first twenty-three years of life, he’d drank fewer than ten beers total, and never took a hit from a joint. As for snorting lines of cocaine—not even a consideration.

Yet while Payton didn’t use, the argument can be made that he was a direct victim of those who did. According to several players, drug use made the Bears a sloppy, oft-disinterested group of ballplayers that focused mildly on football excellence and intently on partying after the game. Whereas elite teams like the Steelers and Vikings played with methodical, robotic excellence, Chicago was messy. Blocks were missed. Routes were botched. Easy balls slipped through fingers. Wins were greeted happily, but losses were greeted indifferently. To watch a highlight film of the ’76 Chicago Bears is to watch NFL football played not merely at its worst, but at its most inconsistent. “That,” said Douthitt, “is what makes so much of what Walter did so incredible.”

Payton was a man on an island, expected to deliver excellence, but lacking the necessary help to get him there. Except for Harper, the bruising fullback, Payton found few friends among his teammates. He laughed at their jokes and pulled colorful pranks and patted them on the rears in the aftermath of good plays, but for the most part the connection ended there. When Jerry Muckensturm, a Chicago linebacker, said, “I liked Walter, but I never felt like I got to know him,” he spoke for the majority of teammates. Walter was trying to find his footing in the Windy City, but the going was slow.

Following the listless victory over Detroit, the Bears flew to San Francisco to face the 49ers, another mediocre team coming off of a 5-9 record. Because it was being played on the West Coast, and because the 49ers and the Bears both appeared to stink, and because the snoozer of week one had placed many Chicago fans in a catatonic state, the pregame buildup generated the buzz of a librarian convention. The contest lacked a single marquee name—Payton was still an unproven curiosity, and at the moment the Niners’ best player was probably their kicker, Steve Mike-Mayer.

On the afternoon of September 19, 1976, everything changed.

With the skies clear, the Candlestick Park wind unusually still, and a crowd of 44,158 fans eagerly anticipating the home debut of head coach Monte Clark, Payton stepped onto the rocky brown-and-green field (still being used by baseball’s San Francisco Giants) and pummeled the 49ers. Behind a mediocre offensive line, with a mediocre quarterback and a mediocre scheme, Payton ran for 148 yards and two touchdowns, the best game of his career. “He was incredible . . . just incredible,” said Tommy Hart, a 49ers defensive end. “Before that game, the name Walter Payton meant very little to me. Afterward, I couldn’t forget it.”

Chicago received the opening kickoff, marched down the field, and scored on a twenty-yard Payton run that, more than thirty years later, Hart still struggled to comprehend. Immediately after taking the handoff, Payton was met head-on by Hart, San Francisco’s six-foot-four, 245-pound Pro Bowler. Frozen behind the line of scrimmage, Payton’s chest was smothered in Hart’s jersey. The lineman began the process of bringing the back down when—hips twisting, knees rising—Payton somehow spun away and galloped for a big gain.

The remainder of the game was Payton ducking beneath tacklers, slashing through the secondary, eluding men double his size, and buckling the knees of Jimmy Johnson and Bruce Taylor, San Francisco’s veteran defensive backs. On the 49ers sideline running back Delvin Williams, a future Pro Bowler, couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. “The hardest thing to do is run when everyone knows you’re getting the football,” said Williams. “In those situations, you have to know where the flow is coming from and where the weakness of your blockers will be. You have to slow a bit, wait to make a move, then let it unfold. You use your ability and hope your teammates don’t get in your way. It’s extremely hard, yet Walter was out there doing it perfectly. And he was just a kid.”

In the aftermath of the win, an incredulous pack of reporters listened as Payton pooh-poohed his performance. “I should have scored at least four touchdowns,” he said. “And a hundred and forty-eight yards, that still wasn’t good enough. A couple of times I got caught in the backfield and I shouldn’t have.”

Beginning at Jackson State, and throughout his years with Chicago, Payton habitually talked down his own efforts, bemoaning a yard left on the field or a phantom touchdown that should have been. The device was all Bob Hill: The less the hype, the lower the expectations. “I’d say part of that was an act,” Avellini said. “Walter enjoyed being the star.”

Now, in the heart of the ’76 season, he suddenly was. Payton cleared 100 yards in three of the next four games, ripping through the Redskins for 104, then the Vikings for 141 and the Rams for 145. His weapon of choice was the stiff-arm, which Payton originally mastered on the sandlots of Columbia. When most running backs faced oncoming defenders, they lowered their heads and barreled ahead. With ever-increasing frequency, Payton opted to stick out his arm, jab an enemy in the face mask or sternum, and send him flailing. The highlight reels were now filled with the technique, one player after another dropping like a damp sandbag. “Other backs used stiff-arms, but Walter’s recoiled, then exploded into you,” said Frank Reed, a safety with the Atlanta Falcons “I mean, the dang thing stung. Once he hit you with that, it was KO.” Don Wedge, an NFL official for twenty-four years, said Payton was the only offensive player to regularly reach out and grab for defenders’ face masks. “It’d start as a stiff-arm and turn into a mugging,” said Wedge. “It was, technically, a penalty, but it was so rare for an offensive player to do it that we never called it on Walter. He was ruthless.”

Perhaps the most telling sign of Payton’s greatness was that he was, in baseball lingo, tipping his pitches—giving the defense advance warning of what he was going to do. When a handoff was designed to head right, Payton’s stance appeared normal. When a handoff was called for the left, however, Payton inadvertently lifted his right foot and tiptoed it forward seconds before the snap. “Other teams were well aware of it,” said Johnny Roland, at the time an assistant coach with the Eagles. “You’d watch tape of the Bears and see the tendency. But even though we knew it, there wasn’t much we could do. He could cut back so fast, so crisply, that he’d be gone quicker than you adjusted.”

Though the Bears were barely average, winning three of their first four before dropping three straight, Payton emerged as the fresh young face of the NFL. In mid-October the
Los Angeles Times
sent Elizabeth Wheeler to write a lengthy profile, the first time a national publication took serious note. Shortly thereafter,
Sports Illustrated
requested a detailed file on Payton from Kevin Lamb, a writer for the
Chicago Daily News
. Lamb’s words painted the narrative that Bud Holmes, Payton’s attorney, wanted people to see. Holmes’ PR advice to his client was simple: Say little, accentuate the positive, keep negative opinions to yourself. Hence, the bundle received by
SI
’s Eleanore Milosovic was a glowing ode to Walter. He liked the drums and listening to music, once interned briefly at Jackson’s NBC affiliate, and was loved and respected by teammates. Wrote Lamb: “When Steve Schubert dropped a punt against Atlanta that set the Falcons up on the Bear fifteen in the fourth quarter of a scoreless tie, Payton was the first to talk to him on the sideline and console him. Last year a Lion player was running out-of-control toward a portable heater when Payton caught him.”

Was Payton the only Bear to console Schubert? Hardly. Were there NFL players who actually would have allowed the Lion to barrel into a heater? Probably not. Did veterans find Payton’s ongoing pranks obnoxious and irritating? Yes. But Chicago was a town crying for a hero, and Payton—handsome, talented, young—fit the suit.

With the mounting hoopla (Payton appeared on the cover of the November 22, 1976,
Sports Illustrated
, beneath the headline THE NFL’S NEW STARS), even
People
magazine joined the fray. Dennis Breo, a Chicago-based freelance writer, pitched the idea of a young, newly-married heartthrob who was tearing up the NFL—then was shocked when a lifestyle publication that rarely delved into sports actually bit. Breo spent ten days with Payton, and found himself neither liking nor hating the man. “Mostly, I was confused by him,” Breo said. “He was shy and very secretive. Most of the time I was trying to interview him he was wearing his headphones, bobbing to music coming from his hi-fi stereo. I literally had to pull them off his head to ask a question.”

At the time, one of the hot books in America was Erich von Daniken’s
Chariots of the Gods?
which hypothesized that the technologies and religions of many ancient civilizations were supplied by space travelers. Though generally mocked, von Daniken’s work had its supporters. Like Walter Payton. “Walter was a believer in it, which I found surprising,” Breo said. “He believed in life on other planets, and that aliens had been here before us. He said it was something that intrigued him.”

The story was published in the November 22, 1976, issue of
People
, and Payton—not one to express pleasure or scorn to the press—was livid. “The article is fine,” he told Breo. “But what you guys did with that picture was just wrong.”

That picture
depicted Walter and Connie, fully clothed, rolling around on their bed.

“He was a private guy,” said Breo, “and he didn’t want people thinking of him that way.”

What way is that?

“Good question,” said Breo. “I guess the kind of guy who sleeps on a bed.”

Long before the Hertz commercials. Long before
The Naked Gun
. Long before the
Monday Night Football
gig. Long before Nicole and Ronald, before the Ford Bronco, before the ill-fitting leather glove, before the acquittal heard around the world, before the thirty-three-year sentence for armed robbery.