Authors: Jeff Pearlman
Now, at age fifty-two and in his first full year as New England’s head coach, Berry thought back to his father’s wisdom. “I knew the Chicago Bears were an incredible team,” he said. “But I honestly felt we’d win the game. We just had to make sure we did several things right.”
The game plan was relatively simple. On offense, the Patriots couldn’t turn over the ball, and quarterback Tony Eason had to get his passes off within three seconds of receiving the snap. “We had a new offensive scheme that year, so we didn’t do anything complex,” said Berry. “Simplicity got us to the Super Bowl. Do the basic things well.”
Berry handed all responsibilities for the other side of the ball to Rod Rust, the defensive coordinator. Fifty-seven years old and a well-regarded strategist, Rust was the anti–Buddy Ryan. He rarely bragged or boasted and never looked to undermine his head coach. “Buddy was too much of a selfpromoter to me,” said Rust. “Great at his job, but very cocky.”
Like Berry, Rust watched tapes of the Bears and considered them beatable. If Chicago’s defense was ferocious, its passing attack—ranked twentieth overall in the league—was merely average. McMahon was brittle; Willie Gault and Dennis McKinnon were OK receivers; and the tight end, Emery Moorehead, was a journeyman. “It was all about stopping the run,” said Rust. “Payton was the first guy we wanted to defend. He was the linchpin to their offense. You stopped him, you stopped the Chicago Bears from scoring.” New England’s veterans took strange comfort in Chicago’s cockiness. To them, the machismo reeked of insecurity—a nervousness over falling flat on the nation’s biggest stage. The more the Bear players flapped their lips, the more the Patriots believed they were destined for an upset of Namath-ian proportions. “We had no doubt about winning,” said Don Blackmon, a New England linebacker. “None.”
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Payton had spent the morning of the game relaxing at the hotel, and arrived at the Superdome in chipper spirits. While eating his regular pregame meal of a bowl of Raisin Bran with the raisins meticulously picked out, he turned to Gault and said, “I feel great about this. We’re gonna remember today forever.”
As a Chicago captain, Payton was in charge of calling the coin toss. He walked out to midfield alongside Jimbo Covert, Shaun Gayle, Gary Fencik, and Mike Singletary and watched Bart Starr—one of seventeen former Super Bowl MVPs being honored—flip a silver dollar into the air.
Payton mumbled something, and as the coin landed tails he said, loudly, “Tails, I called!”
“You called heads,” said Red Cashion, the referee.
“No,” said Fencik. “He said tails.”
The Patriots players began complaining. “Toss it again,” said Steve Grogan, New England’s backup quarterback.
Cashion laughed nervously. “He called tails,” he said. “He is the winner, and it’s [the Bears’] choice.”
Chicago opted to receive, and Gault returned the opening kickoff eleven yards to the Chicago eighteen-yard line. On the game’s first offensive play, McMahon tossed a pitch to Payton—“Who else!” said Dick Enberg, NBC’s play-by-play announcer—who swerved left and gained seven yards. He popped up and trotted back to the huddle. The next call was another handoff, this time straight into the teeth of New England’s defensive line. McMahon accepted the snap and gave the ball to a fast-approaching Payton, who took a step to his left and was immediately drilled by Garin Veris, the Patriots’ six-foot-four, 255-pound defensive end. Veris’ helmet dislodged the ball and Larry McGrew, a speedy linebacker, dove atop the loose object at the nineteen-yard line. New England was in business.
Payton, who fumbled six times during the regular season, had waited much of his life to play in a Super Bowl. He spent the night before the game tossing and turning in bed. TV on, TV off. Get up, get down. Light on, light off. A practitioner of positive visualization, he imagined himself slicing through New England’s defense en route to 150 yards, three touchdowns, and the game’s MVP trophy.
Instead, he fumbled.
Payton retreated to the sideline and spoke briefly with Matt Suhey, who implored him to shake off the blunder. Payton, however, was devastated. For two weeks, Chicago’s defense barked loudly about pitching the first shutout in Super Bowl history. Now, as Tony Franklin’s thirty-six-yard field goal soared through the uprights, the dream was dead.
19
“My fondest memory of that game is the Patriots taking a 3–0 lead,” said Gary Christenson, the Bears’ ticket manager. “I was sitting next to the Patriots’ ticket manager, and he had a grin from ear to ear. I thought to myself, ‘Just wait, buddy. Just you wait.’ ”
For the remainder of the game, Payton was a nonfactor. The man who overcame prejudice and small-school bias and injury and shoddy offensive lines couldn’t get the fumble out of his head. The mishap plagued him. Haunted him. He moped along the sideline, and though he was handed the ball twenty-two times, he ran for a meager sixty-one yards while failing to catch a single pass. Afterward, Chicago’s players and coaches rationalized his poor performance by insisting New England obsessed over him, and that Payton’s mere presence allowed McMahon to throw for 256 yards and run for two touchdowns. “The Patriots,” said Gault, “were dead-set on holding Walter down.”
Even with a cardboard Red Grange cutout starting in Payton’s place, nothing could have stopped the Bears. Chicago was too fast, too strong, too intimidating. The Bears led 23–3 at halftime, then scored twenty-one unanswered points in the third quarter. By the time the game ended, the 46–10 victory stood as the greatest rout in Super Bowl history.
As the final minutes ticked away, Chicago players and coaches walked up and down the sidelines, hugging, laughing, embracing. This was the end result of a glorious season, and the Bears were committed to enjoying it. Mike Singletary hugged Otis Wilson and Wilber Marshall. McMahon and Gault, hardly the best of friends, exchanged a demonstrative high-five. Suhey wrapped his arm around Thomas, who wrapped his arm around Dennis Gentry.
And what of Walter Payton?
He pouted.
The fumble kicked off the funk. What catapulted it to a new level, however, was the fact that, as the Bears rolled up forty-six points, Payton was never granted entrance into the end zone. When Suhey ran for an eleven-yard touchdown late in the first quarter, Payton was the lead blocker. When McMahon ran an option bootleg for a score early in the second quarter, Payton trailed him, waiting for a pitch that never arrived. When McMahon dove over the top from one yard out in the third quarter, Payton was sent wide right as a receiver.
With 3:22 remaining in the third quarter, Payton suffered the ultimate indignity. Chicago led 37–3, and again found itself positioned on New En
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gland’s one-yard line. Ditka sent Perry into the game and lined him up alongside Payton in the backfield. When McMahon took the snap, he handed the ball to the Fridge, who trampled over McGrew into the end zone. As Perry leapt to his feet to spike the football, Blackmon reached out to his fallen teammate. “’Grew, you OK?” he asked.
“Damn,” said McGrew. “I just made a highlight film for the next fifty years.”
McGrew smiled. Even in defeat, he could laugh at the insanity of a 325-pound defensive tackle rushing for a Super Bowl touchdown. Payton, however, wasn’t grinning. He returned to the sideline and took a seat on the bench. Early in the fourth quarter Jerry Vainisi, Chicago’s general manager, noticed that Payton had yet to score. He rushed down to the field from the press box and reminded Ditka. “I know . . . I know,” the coach responded. “We’re trying to get him one.”
It never happened.
“Those last two minutes of the game were agony for Walter,” said Covert. “You could see it on his face—he just wanted out of there.” When the final whistle sounded and the Chicago Bears were officially Super Bowl champions, Payton headed directly to the locker room. He entered, tore off his jersey, and slammed his shoulder pads to the floor.
“If you looked at Walter,” said Ken Valdiserri, the team’s director of media relations, “you would have thought we’d lost.”
“For the ten years I had played with him, Walter claimed it didn’t matter how many yards he got, how many touchdowns he scored—it was about winning,” said Brian Baschnagel, the veteran receiver who, because of a seasonending knee injury, watched the game from above in the coaches’ box. “That was the attitude I took, too. I didn’t care how many passes I caught, as long as the Bears won. And I always felt Walter felt the exact same way. But when he reacted the way he did . . . it was the exact opposite of what he had claimed to be as an athlete.”
As Chicago’s players and coaches reached the locker room, Payton was nowhere to be found. Teammates wanted to congratulate him. Ditka wanted to tell him the Bears couldn’t have done it without him. Members of the media, quickly stampeding into the room, wanted to know how it felt to finally fulfill a dream.
Valdiserri and Bill McGrane, the team’s marketing director, were the first to reach Payton. His eyes were red, and tears streamed down his cheeks. “He didn’t score and he didn’t feel as if he’d contributed to the win,” said Valdisseri. “I found it to be such an odd and awkward moment, because that’s not what he represented throughout his career. I never knew him to bask in his statistics. At least that’s not the way he made it seem. I thought it was a complete paradox.”
Valdisseri and McGrane begged Payton to come out of the broom closet. “Walter,” Valdisseri said, “how is it going to look if you don’t talk? Here we just won the first Super Bowl for the Bears, and this should be the highest point of your career. Don’t let your disappointment in your own performance bring down the moment.”
Payton wasn’t having it. “I ain’t no damned monkey on a string,” he snapped. “I don’t have to jump up and smile just because TV wants me to.”
He was livid at Ditka for ignoring him and livid at Perry and McMahon for hogging the spotlight and livid at himself for fumbling.
The highest point of his career?
Ha. It felt like 1975 all over again.
Around the time Valdisseri and McGrane were finishing with Payton, Bud Holmes entered the locker room. Ever since they first teamed up before the 1975 Draft, Holmes had paid special attention to his client’s image. He knew of Payton’s selfishness and insecurities (as well as his goodness and decency), and the last thing he wanted was for a nation of football fans to see it on display now, in the glow of victory.
Holmes stormed into the tiny closet, where he found Payton sitting on a box.
“What the hell is wrong you with?” Holmes screamed.
“You know what’s wrong,” Payton replied.
“Goddamn boy, one monkey does not stop the show,” Holmes said. “The show’s gotta go on. Look, Ditka was the one who didn’t get you a touchdown. If the press wants to gut him for it, let it be their call. But if you go out there and do anything but brag on him for getting you to a Super Bowl and brag on him for letting you achieve so much, your reputation as a good guy is dead, and you’ll be remembered as the selfish sack of shit who moped after a Super Bowl.”
“But,” Payton countered, “this isn’t the way you treat a star.”
“Bullshit,” Holmes said. “Right now there are hundreds of reporters out there with sharp, sharp pencils waiting for you to blast him. Maybe they even agree with you. But if you blast him now, they’ll come back in a few days and blast you even worse.
“So do me a favor and act like the happiest son of a bitch in the world. If I can find you a straw hat and a cane, you can come out and tap dance in front of everyone to prove it.”
Payton asked Holmes for a couple of minutes to gather himself. When he finally emerged from the closet, he was shirtless, with a white towel dangling over his right shoulder. He was stopped by NBC’s Bob Costas, who requested a live interview.
COSTAS:
Walter, was there ever a time during your long career, when you were performing so brilliantly and your team was at a level beneath that, that you felt this dream would never come true?
PAYTON:
Well, you try not to think about it. During the off-season when you see other people playing in the Super Bowl, you wonder and you say to yourself, ‘Are you ever gonna get there and see what it feels like?’ And it pushes you a little bit harder during that off-season to work to try to get there the following year. This team had their minds made up after losing to San Francisco last year that we were going to win the Super Bowl this year.
COSTAS:
Can you describe the feeling for you personally?
PAYTON:
Right now it really hasn’t sunk in. I don’t feel anything. It’s one of those things where when you have it in your mind for so long what it would be like, and then after the actual event happens, it tends to take away from it. Right now I’m still a little bumped and bruised from the game. It really hasn’t happened yet.
Standing to the side, Holmes was satisfied. Payton, however, remained petulant. Instead of making plans with teammates or family members, he retreated to the empty training room. “He and I left the Super Bowl together in a taxicab, after everyone was gone,” said Fred Caito, the veteran trainer. “By the time we left the training room it was quiet and dark. He never even took a shower—just sulked.” Upon reaching the hotel, Payton was greeted in the lobby by Lewis Pitzele, a Chicago-based music producer he had known via business dealings. Payton invited him to his room. “He started telling me why he wasn’t going out, and then he started crying,” said Pitzele. “I was answering the phone for him—ABC and CBS and
Good Morning America
were all calling the room, trying to book him for the next day. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. We eventually went downstairs to the banquet, but he was crushed.”