Sweetness (6 page)

And yet, as Walter Payton began his freshman year of high school in the fall of 1967, he showed little interest in organized football. He was a music guy; firmly entrenched as a drummer in both Jefferson’s concert and marching bands. When asked about the gridiron, he mostly shrugged dismissively and noted, “That’s Eddie’s world. Not mine.”

So what changed between his freshman and sophomore years? What pushed him toward organized football? In a word: Eddie. Or, to be more precise, Eddie’s departure. Walter’s older brother graduated from John J. Jefferson High in the spring of 1968, earning a prized football scholarship to Jackson State College, one of the best black schools in the nation. No longer, Walter believed, would he be measured against the Big Man on Campus. No longer would he have to meet the standards set by his sibling. “I followed an older brother who starred in my sport,” said Boston. “And I can tell you one thing—it’s thankless.”

In the waning days of summer, 1968, Walter took part in organized football workouts for the first time. With the stifling Mississippi sun beating down on his shoulders, he trudged out to Jefferson High’s practice field for the daily eleven A.M. gatherings. His shoulder pads were grayish and scuffed, likely hand-me-downs from Columbia High. There was a box of white jerseys in a large cardboard box, and each day the players would pick one randomly. Walter could be No. 2 one day, No. 23 the next. (Once the season started, he was assigned No. 22, which had belonged to Eddie. Whether he was happy about this or not, we’ll never know. But he didn’t complain.)

Out on the sandlots, the game had come easily to Walter—run fast, run hard, score. But now there were whistles blowing, coaches yelling, designated plays to follow. “The first time I got the ball in practice and heard all those footsteps coming, I panicked,” he wrote in his 1978 autobiography. “I had visions of getting ground into the turf under the weight of a half-dozen huge upperclassmen towering over me, so I scooted to daylight and ran for my life.” Walter, however, was running the wrong way. He scored for the opposing unit.

Boston stormed onto the field and lectured his new back. He demanded the play be run again. This time, Payton scooted through the wrong hole, where he was met by an oncoming linebacker. “I just stopped,” he wrote, “in embarrassment.” Despite the miscues, Boston had a soft spot for the green running back. Payton was physically gifted and eager to learn. He didn’t talk trash, wasn’t lazy, and never took a play off. “He was fun to have there,” Boston said. “You liked being around him.”

Even with a regal last name and an increasingly statuesque body, Walter was handed nothing. With Eddie’s departure, Boston made it clear that the number-one halfback would be Everett Farr, a modestly talented senior with limited moves but an energetic approach. None of Walter’s friends remember him complaining or being especially upset. Boston pulled him aside and assured him his day would come. In the meantime, he bided his time by starting at strong safety and checking in for Farr when the senior needed a breather.

In 1968 the Green Wave finished 7-3. Late in the season, in a game against Marion Central, Farr broke his foot, and Payton stepped into the starting lineup. His impact was minimal. According to memories, he scored four or five touchdowns and ran for anywhere between two hundred and four hundred yards. In his autobiography, Payton wrote of starting the first game of the season and being named to the league All-Star team. Neither recollection was real. “He was good,” said Moses, who also played running back. “But we all had to learn the game.”

Those in the know, however, couldn’t contain their excitement. In Walter, Boston saw a bigger (Walter was five foot six as a junior, Eddie had been five foot four), stronger version of his brother. He was also significantly more versatile. Walter punted the ball beyond forty yards. He could kick twenty-five- to thirty-yard field goals. He tackled well, and was a knockdown defensive back. In his coach’s mind, Payton had
It
—that certain undefined something that separates great from very good. “He was bursting with ability,” Boston said. “If you knew football, you knew that much.”

When Walter returned for his junior year at Jefferson, there was little ambiguity about the identification of the school’s star athlete. Along with continuing his drumming in the concert band (he had given up marching band for football), Walter ran the hundred-yard dash for the track team, and played forward in basketball and shortstop in baseball.

Carrying the football, however, was Payton’s gift. Boston favored the T-formation offense, and his junior class of players presented some titillating possibilities. The new quarterback was Archie Johnson, an honors student and future valedictorian who possessed a strong arm and quick feet. The left back was Moses, a small, spindly boy who happened to run like lightning. The right back was Michael Woodson, as quick as they came. And lining up directly behind Johnson, technically as the fullback, was Walter Payton.

“We were really frightening,” said Johnson.

Just how good was Payton as a high school junior? On October 30, 1969, the
Columbian-Progress
actually ran his portrait above the following paragraph:

Walter Payton, a Junior [
sic
] at John Jefferson High School was chosen Player of the Week for his performance in the Travillion game. Payton . . . scored three touchdowns in the Greenwaves [
sic
] 46 to 0 victory over Travillion. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Payton of 14010 [
sic
] Hendricks Street, Columbia.

The photograph, apparently taken in front of Jefferson High, shows a serious Payton. He is neither frowning nor smiling, but staring blankly into space, perhaps wondering whether this
Columbian-Progress
photo shoot is some sort of joke. In all his years at Jefferson, Eddie’s picture had never appeared in the
Progress
.

For the first time ever, the whites in Columbia were talking about Jefferson High’s football team. The innovative Jefferson offense combined blinding speed with sharp cuts, funky patterns, and innovative play calling. Payton and Moses even gave themselves their own nicknames—Payton was “Spider-Man,” Moses “Sugar Man.” The sobriquets stuck.

The two schools in town, the white and the black, usually played on back-to-back days at Gardner Stadium—Columbia High always first, Jefferson second, when the field was a mangled salad of dirt and grass chunks. As the season progressed, and talk of the Payton-Moses running tandem grew, an increasing number of fans either attended both games, or skipped out on Columbia High altogether.

Playing in something called the Tideland Conference, Jefferson’s team traveled across Mississippi aboard a pair of beat-up old yellow school buses, complete with torn green seats and the inexplicable scent of dead elk. Boston always strove to schedule the hardest possible competition, which meant the Green Wave trekked an hour and a half to Laurel to face Oak Park High, and nearly two hours to Picayune for a date with George Washington Carver High. The travels were joyless, back-road jaunts to nowhere, with bus drivers always keeping an eye out for redneck cops looking to make an easy collar.

Jefferson went 8-2 Payton’s junior year, routinely dismantling opponents. With a six-foot-six, 260-pound tackle named Bobby Price leading the way, Walter carried the football anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five times per game, emerging as Mississippi’s best black halfback. Boston had been around long enough to know Payton was destined to be different. So he worked tirelessly with him. Payton was stronger than most linemen and faster than most defensive backs, but he initially lacked the ruggedness his coach had insisted upon. Boston drilled into his head the idea of attacking defensive players; of slamming into the tacklers before the tacklers slammed into him. He instructed Payton to use body parts as weapons—a sharp elbow to the chest, a pulverizing forearm to the chin.

Wrote Payton in his autobiography:

He taught me that when I could no longer successfully elude a tackler, I should let the man have a memory of the tackle as vivid as my own. In other words, why should I be the one who gets clobbered? As long as there are two of us in on the play, and I have been slowed by others to the point of where I can’t break away from him, he ought to take half the blow. Then it won’t hurt me so much. I enjoyed that. It made sense.... More and more often, the second time a guy came at me, he remembered that first shot he’d taken from me. If he hesitated or rolled into his tackle instead of driving into it, I had the upper hand. I’d ram right through him or over him, and suddenly it was the scared little running back scoring rather than the big brute executing a crushing tackle.

Because Columbia and Jefferson never played each other, the school’s biggest rival was all-black Marion Central High, located three miles across town. Leading up to the meeting, Boston was more animated than usual. The Tigers were coached by Leslie Peters, a former Jefferson High star who was building an impressive program. “Here’s the deal,” Boston told his players the morning of the game. “If you score seventy points, I’ll throw a barbecue for the entire team.”

A barbecue? For everyone? Behind multiple Payton touchdowns and a big passing day from Johnson, the Green Wave jumped out to a 64–0 lead, but with less than two minutes remaining found themselves one score away from chicken-and-pork pay dirt. When a Jefferson defensive back named Herman Lee intercepted a Marion Central pass, the offense stormed back onto the field and took over ten yards away from the end zone. Michael “Dobie” Woodson, the fleet halfback/defensive back, was corralled from behind by Boston. “Dobie, you haven’t scored yet, right?” he asked.

“No,” Woodson replied. “Not yet.”

“Well go out there and line up at quarterback and call a sneak,” Boston said. “Get that seventy! Get it!”

Woodson jogged to the huddle and ordered Johnson to shift to receiver. He took the snap, cut left, and followed a guard. When he was but two yards from scoring, Woodson found himself bottled up. His legs were wrapped, and in front of him was a mass of prone bodies. “I had nowhere to go,” he said. “But then I felt this push—this incredibly strong push.” Woodson turned his head and saw Payton slamming into his back. “All thanks to Walter, I went over the pile and scored the seventieth point,” Woodson said. “And the ribs were great.”

With his mounting success and a bevy of hundred-yard games, Payton began to evolve from shy and soft-spoken to gregarious and engaging. He had always possessed a mischievous streak; always enjoyed yanking down someone’s pants or prank calling a neighbor. Yet, outside of his tight comfort zone, Payton had been reluctant to show his inner child. Now, for the first time, that was changing. The bus trips were often long and miserable, but they provided Payton with a chance to play. He would sneak up behind Johnson and flick his ears. He would grab Woodson by the nose and yank his head. Most memorably, he would make music. With his helmet wedged between two legs, Payton whipped out his drumsticks and banged out one song after another. Teammates clapped and sang along, and Boston—a man raised with the idea that the two hours before a game was a sacred time meant for prayer and introspection—had no choice but to go along for the ride. If his superstar wanted to bang his helmet, who was the coach to say no?

The week after scoring seventy against Marion County, Jefferson traveled to nearby Hattiesburg to take on Travillion High. By this point, word had leaked out that the Green Wave was awfully good, and that Payton was even better. As their bus pulled up to the field, Jefferson’s players and coaches found themselves surrounded by what looked to be the entire Travillion student body. The scowling faces and clenched fists were a classic attempt at pregame intimidation, at the time a regular part of the black high school football experience in Mississippi. If your team wasn’t threatened with death, it meant your team wasn’t especially good. “Came with the territory,” said Woodson. “Nothing noteworthy about it.” Led by Payton, the Green Wave filed off the bus. If Payton was even mildly scared by the surroundings, he wasn’t letting on. He walked with his chest puffed out, guiding his teammates through the mob without saying a word. Behind another three Payton scores, Jefferson took a 35–0 halftime lead, and won 46–0. In the closing minutes, as the heat rose and the tempers flared, a mob of fans made threatening gestures toward Jefferson’s sideline. “When the game is over,” Boston told the players, “we’re going to quickly walk to the bus as one group. Everyone stick together.”

Jefferson escaped, and did so the following week, too, when a Bassfield High loyalist tossed a brick through the rear window of the Green Wave bus after another big win.

For Payton, nothing could ruin what he would long consider to be one of the most joyful stretches of his life. He had developed as an athlete, and also as a person. Everyone at Jefferson High knew that the strapping kid from Hendricks Street was the real deal. That, if football offered bright futures to those who played it well, he was destined for greatness.