Sweetness (46 page)

As usual, he braced for inevitable disappointment—then watched with glee as the Bears took quarterback Jim McMahon from Brigham Young. When Finks was running the team, quarterbacks were all but ignored. Finks was no longer running the team. “Taking Jim,” said Leslie Frazier, a defensive back, “was one of the most important decisions in turning the franchise around.”

• Third, the Bears held a follow-up mini-camp at Lake Forest in May. It was supposed to be voluntary. According to league rules, it
had to be
voluntary. Wide receiver Rickey Watts, a player as lazy as Payton was driven, made a token one-day appearance before departing unannounced. He was the team’s second-leading returning wide receiver, a player whose size-speed combination had been regularly praised by Armstrong.

“Clean out that fucker’s locker,” Ditka told Caito, the equipment manager. “He’s done, too.”

As ordered, Caito once again tossed all of Watts’ possessions into a plastic garbage bag and placed it by a curb. When asked by the assembled media whether Watts’ absence was excused, Ditka audibly snarled. “I don’t know where he is,” the coach said. “Wanna ask me if I care?”

“Do you care?” asked Kevin Lamb of the
Chicago Sun-Times
.

“Nope,” said Ditka.

He genuinely didn’t.

“Rickey Watts thought he was the greatest thing since sliced cheese,” Ditka said. “And he was, talent-wise. But sometimes the gain of adding talent isn’t worth what you lose. What you lose in the locker room isn’t worth what you gain on the field.”

Jack Childers, Watts’ agent, called his client later that day, urging him to return to camp. Watts did, and Ditka begrudgingly granted him a second chance. “You’re on a short fucking leash,” Ditka said. “Very short.”

Payton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was as if Bob Hill, his coach at Jackson State, had been reincarnated into a stumpy white man with a Brillo Pad mustache and crooked fingers. Many of the older Bears came to detest Ditka, what with his militaristic ways and crazed snarl. For the coach’s first morning workout, the players were told to dress in full pads. They began with a live, thirty-play eleven-on-eleven scrimmage and ended with ten forty-yard sprints. Noah Jackson, the overweight offensive lineman, turned to fans during a water break, sighed, and moaned, “See what y’all get for saying ‘Good-bye Neill Armstrong?’ ”

Payton, however, loved it. Maybe, at long last, winning was a priority in Chicago.

Or, maybe not.

Because Mike Ditka is a Bears icon, and because his team went on to eventually accomplish great things, people tend to forget that his first season as head coach was an unmitigated disaster.

Chicago kicked off its year with listless defeats to Detroit and New Orleans (Payton ran for forty-six total yards). Then a fifty-seven-day player strike threatened to wipe out the season. The impasse ended, but the bitter feelings did not. Payton, who lost nearly two hundred thousand dollars during the lockout, wondered aloud why the work stoppage even happened. Several Bears were furious over their star’s hesitancy to support the union. “At first they were asking me if I would walk out and I said I’d have to get legal counseling,” he said. “A lot of guys were disappointed with me then, but it was the only thing I could say. Now I look back on the agreement and the eight weeks I was out with them was a total waste for me.”

Though Payton embraced Ditka’s demands of excellence, the resumption of the season (seven more regular-season games would be played) reminded the Bears that, beneath his team-first verbiage, the running back possessed a selfish streak often obscured by statistics and smiles. For the bulk of his career, Payton had Ray Earley, the longtime equipment manager, keep him abreast of his rushing yardage totals during games. Payton would casually stroll past Earley, give him a look and hear, “You’re at seventy-three,” or “Eleven more and you’ve got a hundred.”

“That was kept quiet,” said Jay Hilgenberg, the offensive lineman. “But we knew.”

Had Chicago been winning, perhaps Payton would have ignored any urges to again mope and whine aloud. But with the team limping toward a 3-6 record, he felt compelled to speak out.

“I don’t know how long I can play here,” Payton said. “I like it. I like Chicago. I’ve had no problem with management. I’m just disappointed. I’d rather not say why, but I’m going to call a press conference after the season and tell everything. I know what’s wrong, I know why, but I can’t say. At Jackson State, if we went 7-3 it was like a losing season. It’s kind of hard to get here, where everyone is supposed to be professionals, and end up with the record we’ve got now.
¹²

“I still like playing football. What are you going to write? How’s this? ‘A rose in a dandelion garden.’ ”

Through the first four weeks of the season, Payton had averaged only fourteen carries per game—by far the lowest of his career (from 1975 to 1981, he averaged twenty-one carries per game). While the number alone served as an indictment of Ed Hughes, the team’s new offensive coordinator, it failed to convey the entire story. As opposed to his predecessors, Hughes, who knew Ditka from his time working as the backfield coach of the Cowboys, actually dedicated himself to establishing the pass. Even though he was but a raw rookie, McMahon was named the starter after the strike. Boasting a powerful arm, maneuverability in the pocket, and a feel for the position that Bob Avellini and Vince Evans (the two holdovers on the roster) lacked, McMahon’s presence offered the Bears legitimate offensive possibilities. “We were able to employ Walter as a blocker, which he was phenomenal at,” said Ted Plumb, the team’s receivers coach. “We’d sit in meetings and Walter would take more pride in a great block than a great run.” They could finally use Payton as a decoy and have opposing defenses bite. They could finally have Payton line up wide and not worry about the quarterback forgetting to look his way. They could finally throw deep.

Knowing how Payton had spent years stewing over his team’s dud quarterbacks, Ditka assumed the back would be elated. He wasn’t. “I feel like I’ve been on a free ride the last two weeks, getting paid for nothing,” he said after carrying twelve times for sixty-seven yards in a Week 4 loss at Minnesota. “I thought you go with what’s working.”

Having played alongside Sayers and having coached Tony Dorsett in Dallas, Ditka knew an unhappy halfback was a relatively useless one. Upon reading Payton’s words, he conferred with Hughes and insisted the Bears run more the following week, when they were scheduled to host the Patriots at Soldier Field.

The day began optimistically. Payton carried the ball on the first four offensive plays of the game, and the drive concluded when McMahon hit Ken Margerum for a seventeen-yard touchdown pass. From that point on, though, Payton—who missed a good chunk of the action with a leg injury—played a secondary role. He ran a mere thirteen times for seventy yards, and caught three more passes for twenty-four yards. The Bears, however, won big, 26–13, and afterward, euphoric teammates converged around McMahon, who passed for 192 yards and two touchdowns in the best showing of his early career.

One man sat alone at his locker, frowning.

Payton addressed the media, accusing New England linebacker Clayton Weishuhn of deliberately twisting his ankle at the end of a play. (Said Weishuhn: “That never happened. I was a rookie just happy to be starting. Do you think I’d deliberately hurt Walter Payton? No way.”) He questioned the wisdom in giving him only thirteen chances and, off the record, ripped into Hughes.

Question:
Are you happy with the victory?

Answer:
“I’m happy we won,” he said. “I’m always happy when we win.”

Q:
Are you happier getting the ball more this week?

A:
Yeah, I guess I am. [Long pause.] But I’m still upset.

Q:
What are you upset about?

A:
When I hurt my ankle it was on a draw play. Either number fifty-three (Weishuhn) or number fifty-seven (linebacker Steve Nelson) rolled over on my ankle, and I think it was intentional.

Q:
That’s why you’re upset?

A:
I can’t tell you. I’m a little disappointed. I’ll tell you at the end of the year.

Wrote Steve Daley of the
Tribune
in a scathing column titled, “Walter’s ‘Problem’ Has Bears on Run”:

Is there a conflict between Payton and the offense being designed by Ditka?

“I’m not going near that one,” an offensive starter said, lowering his voice. “No comment. That’s a pretty touchy subject around here.”

. . . Payton wants the burden, needs the burden. He complains about his teammates from time to time in a broad, sweeping kind of way, but what he wants from them is simply a little more effort. Work harder, the message seems to be, and I’ll do the rest.

If there is a change coming to the Bears’ offensive approach, a change that will be unwelcome to Payton, his method for dealing with it is a strange and private one. It is a kind of gamesmanship, a puzzle in which we are expected to guess the answer, whether Payton has an answer or not.

When he first accepted the Bears job, Ditka had been warned in private that Payton’s image didn’t always match reality. The toothy smile masked moodiness; the confident walk hid insecurity. “Walter went from energetic and peppy to dour and angry in a second,” said Al Harris. “Like a light switch.” Yet even with advance notice, Ditka was blindsided by his occasionally poor attitude. “If you spent enough time with Walter, you picked up that he wanted his vast modesty to be universally accepted,” said Daley, a
Tribune
columnist from 1981 to ’85. “But I remember talking to some players on how they worried about Walter, and how he never seemed fulfilled. He always seemed angry without usually whining about it, and he had a lot of resentment. He was resentful when McMahon came along and he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated, and he was resentful when other Bears got the credit and he didn’t. He was lionized and revered in Chicago, but it was never enough.

“Honestly I think Walter was unprepared for a team with other stars and a coach who was a star. He was the type of guy who said he was just part of the team, but who never fully believed it.”

When told of Payton’s harsh words after the Patriots win, Ditka—who had resisted taking any shots at his franchise player—could no longer hold back. “It’s unfortunate,” he said. “I can understand [the whining] if you play golf or tennis or billiards. You’re one-on-one with the world. But we’re a forty-nine-man sport.”

The following day, Ditka called Payton at his home to clear the air.

“There’s no problem at all,” Ditka told the
Tribune
afterward. “Everything gets blown out of proportion.”

Payton, who ended the shortened season ranked tenth in the NFL with 596 rushing yards, was asked for his take.

“No comment,” he said.

CHAPTER 18

POWER

IN THE SUMMER OF 1981, THE CHICAGO BEARS SIGNED A ROOKIE FREE AGENT wide receiver by the name of Mike Pinckney. In two seasons at Northern Illinois, Pinckney established himself as one of the better players in Huskies history. As a senior he earned second team all-Mid-American Conference honors by catching thirty passes for 392 yards and gaining another 563 yards on kickoff and punt returns. Always on the lookout for a hidden gem, the Bears gave the undrafted Pinckney a shot.