Sweetness (65 page)

On the road Payton had nothing to hide and no preestablished image to live up to. He wasn’t Sweetness, the larger-than-life Chicago icon. He was Walter, the mediocre driver and laid-back guy. Most of his peers didn’t even know he was married.

“He ran with great-looking women,” said Bobby Archer, a fellow racer. “That, I remember.”

“Gorgeous women accompanied him,” said Greg Pickett, another driver. “He was a magnet.”

Payton never wore a wedding ring, and the woman by his side at most (but not all) events was Lita Gonzalez, the Continental flight attendant. Thanks to her job, Gonzalez had free access to the nation. On her off days she’d fly from her home in New Jersey and meet Payton at points ranging from Nevada to Dallas to Wisconsin. “She was there regularly,” said Jim Derhaag, a competitor. “We all knew Lita and embraced her into our community.”

On occasion, Payton also brought his children along. They enjoyed the excitement of the racetrack. The sounds of the engines. The speed. The euphoria. The colors. On August 20, 1993, Walter had eight-year-old Brittney accompany him to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to watch a qualifying round at Road America. When Walter went off to drive he left his daughter in the company of the track officials. “We were on a golf cart,” she said. “Me and a bunch of people I didn’t know.”

Strapped into his blue Ford Mustang Cobra (No. 34 painted across the hood), Payton lined up with the other drivers, taking off with the wave of a flag. It was an otherwise normal qualifying run—Payton hanging back, waiting to make some sort of move, preparing to transition from a straightaway to a curve. Running directly in front of Payton was Dick Danielson, a Hartford, Wisconsin, native with twenty-three years of racing to his credit. As his Camaro steadied for the turn, Danielson shifted into fourth gear and lost all power.

“Walter is preparing to pass him, but it’s like following a car on the freeway and the car in front of you stops,” said Tom Gloy, owner of the Tom Gloy Racing Team. “Walter was pretty much helpless.” Payton’s Ford somehow eluded Danielson, but its front right tire nicked Danielson’s left rear tire.

At 130 mph, tiny collisions mean big trouble. Payton’s car swerved off to the side, hit the guardrail, somersaulted, flew thirty feet into the air, traveled a hundred feet, bounced four times, and finally, bounded off the guardrail and over a fence. “The fence!” said Jack Baldwin, a driver. “I’d never seen anyone clear that thing before.” The final impact cut open the rear of the vehicle and sliced through a fuel cell. The car was engulfed by fire. Payton, knocked unconscious for a brief spell, regained his senses and leapt from the damage. “When I finally stopped I was looking upside down and there were flames,” he said afterward. “All I could think of at that point was that I had to get out of there.”

Riding in the golf cart, Brittney heard the call over the radio from Donald Sak, a driver who had witnessed the crash. “Get someone out here!” he screamed. “We have a terrible situation!” She was rushed to a tent situated alongside an ambulance. Her father was lying on the table, his eyes bloodshot from gasoline, bandages covering the burns on his neck. Jerry Clinton, a fellow driver, described Payton as resembling, “a big frog with his eyes bugged out.” Brittney took one look and began to cry, which snapped Payton from his silence. “It’s OK, Britt,” he said. “It’s OK. Daddy’s fine. Daddy’s fine.”

“Oh, I was terrified,” she said. “I thought my dad was Superman. I never saw him hurt, never saw him sick. I don’t even remember him having a cold. Now here I was, without my mother or brother, and my father was on a stretcher. I can still remember the scent. The fuel or . . . whatever. The scent.”

Walter and Brittney were taken to the nearby Valley View Medical Center, where he was treated and released that night. Back at the American Club Hotel, Payton walked around as if in a trance. He had survived some of the hardest hits known to the NFL—but nothing like this.

“That was pretty much the end of his racing career,” Brittney said. “I don’t think any of us were disappointed to see him give it up.”

CHAPTER 23

A BOTTOMLESS VOID

TO THE WORLD, WALTER PAYTON INSISTED HE WAS DONE AS A FOOTBALL player. He was a busy man. Auto racing. Motivational speaking. Trying to buy a team. He had moved on. He had stopped paying attention. He had no interest in a comeback. Not even a slight interest.

“Well,” said Bud Holmes, Payton’s longtime agent. “That’s what people thought. Only it wasn’t entirely true.”

On the afternoon of September 24, 1989, a lightly regarded Miami Dolphins fullback named Tom Brown started the third game of his NFL career, against the New York Jets. Best known as Craig “Iron Head” Heyward’s lead blocker at the University of Pittsburgh, Brown was a six-foot-one, 223-pound bulldozer who featured no quickness, no speed, no maneuverability. He was in the league for one reason—to slam into people and open holes. Yet for someone so powerful, Brown was irritatingly brittle. Since being selected by Miami in the seventh round of the 1987 Draft, he had endured the majority of his days on the physically-unable-to-perform list, battling an endless string of knee injuries. “I’ve spent more time with our trainers than their wives have the last two years,” he said shortly before the 1989 opener. “It’s been very frustrating.”

Finally, though, Brown seemed to discover health. He had played well enough to wrestle the starting job away from veteran Ron Davenport, and was confidently knocking back Jets linebackers until an unbearable pain shot through Brown’s right knee, and he fell to the ground at Joe Robbie Stadium. Once again, he tore a ligament. Once again, he was headed for the injury list.

The malady kicked off an unparalleled string of miserable luck for Miami running backs. Shortly after Brown went down, halfback Troy Stradford was lost for the season with cartilage and ligament damage to his right knee. Halfback Lorenzo Hampton followed by also tearing cartilage in his right knee, and fullback Marc Logan wound up on crutches with ligament damage in his left knee. Even halfback Sammie Smith, the rookie standout from Florida State, suffered an Achilles tendon bruise that left him hobbling.

Finally, with his team carrying but two healthy ball carriers (Davenport and Nuu Faaola), Dolphins coach Don Shula told the media he was preparing to hold an open casting call for available running backs. Among the first to be auditioned would be George Swarn, a twenty-five-year-old Miami of Ohio standout, and Kerry Goode, a Buccaneer reject who had played at the University of Alabama. This was hardly Eric Dickerson and Marcus Allen.

Having stopped following the day-to-day goings-on of the NFL, Holmes had no inkling of Miami’s woes. So, when Payton called his home one evening, his high-pitched voice spitting out a hundred words a second, Holmes demanded his longtime client slow down and explain what in the world he was talking about.

“I want you to talk to Eddie Jones [Miami’s vice president of administration] and tell him I’m interested,” Payton said. “Tell him.”

“Interested in what?” Holmes replied.

“Interested in playing for the Dolphins,” he said. “They’re not that far off from being a Super Bowl team. Tell him I’ll come in and block, run—whatever they need.”

Holmes was at a loss. Ever since Payton had retired at the conclusion of the ’87 season, the two men worked tirelessly to make his post-football adjustment as smooth and seamless as possible. Though, years later, Payton blamed Holmes for encouraging him to hang up his uniform too early, the truth was he made the final decision on his own. “Nobody forced Walter to stop playing,” Holmes rightly said. “It was his call.”

Now, Payton was making the call to try a comeback. “Walter, here’s what we’ll do,” Holmes said. “Sleep on this, and let’s talk tomorrow morning. If you still want me to contact Eddie, I will.”

The night came.

The morning arrived.

Holmes called Payton. “Well?” he said. “Are you still interested?”

“Interested in what?” the legend responded.

“In the Dolphins,” Holmes said. “In returning to the league.”

“Oh, that,” said Payton. “Nah—forget it. I just got a little emotional. It’s probably a bad idea”

Holmes was relieved.

“There’s no way Miami would have taken Walter at age thirty-six,” he said. “And if they did, it would have been a disaster. He was meant to retire a Chicago Bear, not a Dolphin. The way he went out was the right way.”

At the same time Payton was thinking about Miami, he was also thinking about St. Louis. When he retired after the ’87 season, the prime motivating factor was life after football likely including his becoming the first minority owner in league history. That’s the way Holmes had phrased it—that while he would no longer enjoy the euphoria of crossing a goal line, Payton would know how it felt to become a legitimate trailblazer.

In the waning days of his career, Payton was told that the NFL badly wanted to return a team to St. Louis, which had been vacated when the Cardinals relocated to Arizona after the 1987 season. Not only was St. Louis the nation’s eighteenth largest television market, and not only was it centrally located, and not only was it home to a good number of Fortune 500 companies, but it was a genuine sports hotbed. When Bill Bidwill, the Cardinals’ owner, moved his franchise west, it wasn’t because St. Louis was incapable of supporting football. No, he moved because the city—loathe to support a man considered to be miserly and not civic-minded—refused to fork over the two hundred million dollars necessary to build him a stadium.

Before Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s legendary commissioner, retired in November 1989, he spoke with Payton on numerous occasions about St. Louis. It was, the commissioner believed, a perfect match: Here was a market in need of a team. Here was a league in need of diversity. Here was an iconic figure—beloved, intelligent, African-American—who had nobly represented the NFL and who excelled at bringing disparate people together. Plus, Chicago and St. Louis were separated by a mere three hundred miles. Though not exactly a local, Payton was close enough to travel back and forth with little hassle. “I always felt that Walter was one of the half-dozen real class players during my time in the league,” Rozelle explained. “I have a great deal of respect for him. I think he would be a valued asset to any group.”

Payton was interested, but skeptical. While he had earned a good amount of money throughout his thirteen-year career, he could hardly be classified as wealthy. His highest single-season salary was only one million dollars, and, thanks to a high number of dubious investments, he was not sitting on a major war chest. Payton had laid down hundreds of thousands of dollars into Studebaker’s, as well as four other nightclubs, only later to learn that he had made a tremendous mistake. Those athletes who excelled financially at the conclusion of their careers did so not by relying on their finances, but their names. When an Arnold Palmer or Joe DiMaggio was approached about opening an establishment, they would listen as long as the endeavor did not involve forking over any dough. So while Payton was indeed titillated by the idea of calling an owner’s box home, he wasn’t willing to go broke in pursuit of it.

Which is where Jerry Clinton came in.

Raised in a housing project on the south side of St. Louis, Clinton was a former Golden Gloves boxer who, against all odds, worked his way up from lugging cases of beer to, in 1977, becoming the president of Grey Eagle Distributors, the Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship in St. Louis County. Clinton had initially purchased 5 percent equity in the company, then turned that into 50 percent and, eventually, 100 percent. Under his watch, Grey Eagle’s market share went from 30 percent to 70 percent, and throughout St. Louis he became known as something of a financial Houdini. “Jerry was an incredibly successful businessman who came to represent our city in a lot of ways,” said Walter Metcalfe, an attorney who represented Clinton and Grey Eagle for more than twenty years. “He had been very generous with local charities, and people loved him for that.”

Unlike Bidwill, Clinton was civic-minded, and when he first caught wind that the NFL was looking to return to his city, he wanted in. “Jerry was a huge football fan,” said Jim Otis, a friend and former Cardinals running back. “When he used to have the distributorship he’d come out to our practices and give all the players beers to crack open. I think he liked being around the game.”

In the late 1980s, the main financial player in the expansion effort was Francis W. Murray, a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur who at one point had owned a minority share of the New England Patriots. Murray was the sort of man who people wanted to believe in, because the words that oozed from his mouth were usually appealing and complimentary. He made enticing promises, offered heaps of praise, spewed visions of grandeur that were ultimately more fantasy than reality. Growing up in Philly, he sold sodas and hot dogs at neighborhood bingo games to make money, and the stories he told about those days were uproarious and uplifting. When Fran Murray talked, people listened. “It was hard not to like Fran,” said Clinton. “He was engaging.” Rozelle approved of Murray’s involvement, especially after his option to buy a controlling share of the Patriots from Billy Sullivan had failed to pan out.