Sweetness (9 page)

In one of the first postintegration drills, Rickey Joe Graves, a hard-hitting white linebacker, knew Payton would be coming straight toward him. The play was designed as such—halfback takes the handoff, bursts directly through the hole and toward the middle of the field. Graves, itching to prove himself to the blacks, licked his chops. “I got to the spot right when he did,” said Graves, “and I thought to myself, ‘I’m gonna lay it on this guy.’ ” Graves’ feet left the ground and his arms reached out, only to have Payton’s knees explode into the bottom of his chin. “Walter was gone,” said Graves. “He made believers out of everyone.”

Walter’s senior year of high school began on September 7, 1970. Now that Columbia High was officially integrated, there were no more picketers or threats of defection to Columbia Academy. For the first time, the black and white students were mixed into one classroom. Any past physical divisions were over.

It was a new era in the town’s race relations, and to the chagrin of many white parents, their children seemed to like it. In the aftermath of all the warnings and hysterics, the black kids were, by and large (gasp!) nice. They weren’t tail-dragging mutants, out to bring down the genteel Southern society whites had strived to create. They were respectful and decent and shockingly friendly.

Oh, and they could play football.

Not all of them, obviously. But as the Wildcats prepared for their September 4th opener against Prentiss High at Gardner Stadium, there was a renewed sense of optimism. It had been years since Columbia High brought much suspense to the gridiron. Under Wilkerson, the Wildcats generally wound up as a solid-yet-predictable team, bogged down with a dull offense and so-so overall talent. Now, thanks to desegregation, one couldn’t deny a refreshing energy throughout the town. The fascination was genuine: How would this play out?

Located twenty-five miles to the north of Columbia, Prentiss’ Bulldogs had dominated the Wildcats, winning twenty-one straight games against their conference rivals. Like Columbia, the school was in the midst of fullfledge integration, and also like Columbia, the process had gone relatively smoothly. “It was easy,” said Larry Fike, the Bulldogs’ star halfback/linebacker. “We were about fifty percent white, fifty percent black, and I don’t remember any fights at all.” If anything, Prentiss’ white players utilized their new teammates as informants to the ways of opposing blacks. “All week leading up to the game, we kept hearing, ‘Watch out, they have this stud running back,’ ” said Fike. “But when you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, you think you’re a stud, too. So we went over there believing Walter was just another good running back who we’d easily stop.”

The opening game of the season began at seven thirty P.M., on a warm Mississippi night perfect for September football. With the sun setting over the stadium, the sky was an orange-pink canvas. The scent of popcorn filled the air. The squeals of young children running beneath the stands provided a familiar soundtrack. A sellout crowd of nineteen hundred spectators paid three dollars per ticket, there as much for the curious spectacle as for the sport itself. Those who couldn’t attend gathered by their radios, listening to the game on WCJU, Columbia’s AM station. Davis was the new coach, and he brought with him a pro set offense. Johnson was the quarterback, with Payton and Moses starting in the backfield. Lining up split to the right was Lee Bullock, a white—and deaf—wideout who learned to read Johnson’s lips as he called the plays. “It was a wonderful moment,” said Graves. “We had had the offensive linemen to be a good team, but we lacked running backs and a quarterback. At Jefferson, their linemen were OK, but they had great skill position players. You merged us together, and it was beautiful.”

Along the sideline Columbia High’s seven cheerleaders—all white, with green skirts and white pom-poms—kicked their legs and shouted their encouragement. In a small section of the bleachers, black and white members of the school’s integrated marching band sat side by side.

As is often the case, the game failed to meet the hype. At least early on. Through one and a half quarters of play, neither team scored. The Prentiss defense, geared up to stop Columbia’s one-two rushing tandem of Payton and Moses, stuffed the line of scrimmage with eight men, daring the Wildcats to pass. The Bulldogs, meanwhile, mustered little offense of their own. “You could see that Columbia had talent,” said Butch Nobles, Prentiss’ center and linebacker. “We were waiting for something to happen, hoping like heck it wouldn’t.”

Late in the second quarter, with no score and the crowd quiet, the Wildcats took over at their own thirty-yard line. From the sideline, Davis called 22 Sweep Right—a pitch to Payton. The play had already been run four or five times for little gain, but Davis felt Prentiss was about to break. Columbia’s offensive line—four whites, one black—was bigger and faster than the Prentiss defense. They just needed to create a hole. Johnson took the snap from Quin Breland, his center, pivoted his hips, and gently tossed the ball to No. 22, his longtime friend and classmate. Payton tiptoed a couple of steps behind his right tackle, then—
whoosh!
—burst outside. “He was coming right toward me, and I remember thinking, ‘Here I go! I’ve got him!’ ” recalled Fike. “I go to make my tackle, I man up, and I’m grabbing nothing but air. So I start giving chase, thinking I’ll certainly chase him down, because I’m a very fast runner. Well, he pulls away from me.
He pulls away!
” Payton dashed down the field untouched, a green-and-white blur of power and speed. By the time he reached the Bulldogs’ twenty-yard line, Payton spun around, raised the football above his head, and waved to the defenders. He jogged into the end zone backward.

It was an act of unheard-of cockiness; an act that, in ordinary Mississippi circumstances, would have resulted in whites branding him an “uppity nigger.” A mere fifteen years earlier Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman. And now, 190 miles to the south, here was Walter Payton, taunting his white pursuers.

In one corner of the stands, a handful of college football coaches watched in disbelief. In attendance were assistants from Ole Miss and Mississippi State, as well as Barney Poole, an assistant coach at the nearby University of Southern Mississippi. As soon as Payton held the ball aloft, the men began complaining aloud. One was more vocal than the others. “Can you believe the nerve of this kid?” said Bob Hill, an assistant coach at Jackson State College, Mississippi’s largest historically black school. “To have that little respect for an opponent is inexcusable. I would never sign someone like that.” Hill, of course, wanted Payton in the worst possible way. “I hoped the other coaches would buy my bluff,” he said. “They tended to think in packs.”

Poole, a former all-American end at Ole Miss who played professionally for six seasons, was visibly disgusted. Upon returning to his school’s Hattiesburg campus, Poole filed a scouting report that read: “Tremendous athlete, but we don’t need a smart-alecky nigger on our team.”

Payton was far from “smart-alecky.” He was humble and soft-spoken, but he had been taught to play sports with emotion and flavor. Throughout black high schools in the South, mild trash talking was not merely accepted, but encouraged. So was taunting. Midway through the season Boston had to explain to Davis that the way some of the black players behaved on the bus rides to road games—talking and laughing and busting chops—was nothing to get upset over. “He didn’t understand,” said Boston. “I said, ‘Tommy, they’ll be ready. Just let them be.’ ”

Columbia led Prentiss 7–0 at halftime, but with the exception of Payton’s long run the team looked out of sorts. At the beginning of the third quarter, Payton struck again. On a second down and ten from the Columbia twelve-yard line, Johnson grabbed the snap, spun hard, and presented the ball to his charging fullback, who ran straight toward Keith Brenson, the Bulldogs’ 240-pound nose tackle, cut left, and burst into the guts of the defense. The second Bulldog to have a shot at the tackle was Nobles. “I was playing strong side linebacker, and I was supposed to key on Walter,” said Nobles. “On the bright side, I can honestly say he didn’t run over me. But that’s only because he didn’t need to—he was so fast, I never came close to catching him. He left me in the dust.” It was Walter’s second touchdown of the game. Remarkably, the play had been mishandled—Walter was supposed to head outside, not stay behind the center and guards. No matter.

The Bulldogs scored late to make the final score 14–6, and when the final gun was fired the noise in the stadium was deafening. White fans and black fans, forever separated by societal rules, cheered together. Afterward, few in Columbia were discussing the snapping of the twenty-one-game losing streak, or Davis’ new offense, or the play of the poised black quarterback.

“Walter was the story,” said Forrest Dantin, a white lineman. “He was beyond belief.”

If you listen to many of Columbia’s white denizens, this is the point when peace and understanding commenced.
Thanks to Walter Payton’s athletic brilliance,
the narrative goes,
whites and blacks merged as one, bound together over the beautiful game of football and the Wildcats’ newfound success. For the first time ever, they cheered together, laughed together, cried together. All because of high school football. All because of Walter Payton.

“Walter came along and started setting all these records,” said Hugh Dickens, the superintendent of Columbia schools. “And suddenly whites found themselves applauding the blacks. That made the black community feel proud because it was finally getting recognition, and it made the white community feel proud, too. Our success in football resulted in our success as a whole.”

Is this true? Much depends on who’s asked. On the one hand, Columbia’s whites were now infatuated with Walter Payton—slapping him high fives, shaking his hand, singing his praises, and bragging about “our” star. When he drove to school in his green Chevrolet pickup truck, people—black and white—honked and waved. The change of heart was remarkable, if not sadly predictable. The
Progress
, a newspaper that, for its first eighty-eight years refused to cover seemingly any event involving blacks, started hailing the senior back as a gridiron savior and claiming him as one of Columbia’s own.

Yet the majority of the town’s blacks surely saw through the façade. Now that the school was integrated, it cancelled all of the previously held dances and the senior play for the 1970–71 academic year. Just a few months earlier Columbia extemporaneously closed its town pool after an increasing number of blacks began to use it. “That shows what some thought of us,” said Michael Woodson, a black player. “We were second-class.” Walter Payton had been a marvelous kid long before integration. He was polite, intelligent, well-spoken, engaging. “After they saw Walter could run the football,” said Eli Payton, “everyone was
yee-haw!
and happy.” This was hardly a phenomenon unique to Columbia. As towns throughout the South experienced the positive athletic impacts of their new black stars, white Mississippians even came up with a phrase—“
Give the ball to LeRoy”
—to surmise their philosophy. As long as the black boy could play football, he was perfectly welcome. “White Mississippians said it all the time, thinking they were being funny,” said Charles Martin, a civil rights expert and the author of
Benching Jim Crow
. “ ‘LeRoy’ was a term, like darkie, like coon, like nigger. Only it had a little less sting.”

Thanks largely to Payton’s heroics, the integrated Wildcats were the kings of Columbia. They followed the opener with a 20–0 victory over Hazelhurst that included the most spectacular touchdown of Payton’s high school career. “It was a long [run], and I was hit three or four times,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The first guy that hit me nearly knocked me over. I spun around and put my hand out to keep from going down, but when I recovered my balance and straightened up I ran over another guy who tripped me up. As I started to fall forward a defender grabbed me from behind, which was just enough to keep me from falling. When I shook loose of him, I was gone.” (Recalled Emmett Smith, Hazelhurst’s head coach: “We spent our entire week working out a way to stop Walter Payton, and on Friday we learned we couldn’t stop Walter Payton.”)