by Rich Cohen
The rumors that spread around the city—Payton is gay, Payton has AIDS—convinced him to go public with his disease. He appeared on Oprah and Larry King. He needed help finding a liver. He broke down at a press conference, hugging his son as the tears flowed. When a reporter asked if he was scared, Payton said, “Hell yes, I’m scared.” A follow-up appointment at the Mayo Clinic found cancer. It had spread to Walter’s liver, making him ineligible for a transplant.
Payton had always liked fullback Matt Suhey, but the illness made them even closer. “It’s like the movie Brian’s Song,” said Payton, “only, in this version, it’s the brother that dies.” Suhey took Walter to the doctor, gave him medicine, drove him around. Payton was a joker. “Two weeks before he died, he told me he wanted me to take him to Mike Singletary’s house,” Suhey said. “We were driving around and Walter would say, ‘That’s his house.’ So I’d go to the door and it would be someone who never heard of Mike Singletary. I’d look back and there was Walter sitting in the car laughing at me.” Payton fought with Singletary when they played but wanted to see him before he died. He respected Singletary and needed his blessing. “I went in and got on my knees and began to pray as I held his hand,” Singletary wrote. “When I finished praying, I got up … and looked at him and I couldn’t believe the peace on his face. There was such peace, it was unbelievable. I didn’t know that was the last time I would see him alive.”
Payton died on November 1, 1999. He was forty-five years old. “He must have weighed 90 pounds,” McMahon said. “Here’s a guy that did everything to his body, he couldn’t break it in thirteen years on the field. It was devastating. It sucks. Life’s unfair sometimes, you know?”
“I will always remember Walter the great football player and Walter the champion for life,” said Singletary, “but there’s something that I realized, and something that I always knew but I had never really seen—a man who is created by God and was given a message to deliver. All of us are vulnerable at any moment, and as I looked at Walter in those final days, the glory of God was never more apparent to me. When I say that Walter was courageous, I mean courageous in coming to a realization that life is more than touchdowns. Life is more than all the great runs and everything. Life is to be lived at every moment, and you have to be courageous in life and death and he was. He made a difference. We all should be so lucky.”
Speaking at the memorial a few weeks later, Singletary said, “Walter made one last great run. Fourth down, no time-outs, and he looked across the line of scrimmage and they were all there. He didn’t have any blocking whatsoever. And as he looked, he saw they were there to take him out. Hate, fear, unforgiveness, selfishness, everything else you can imagine, they were there. And Walter was asking the question, How do I get past this? And as he looked forward, he just looked up and Christ was there saying, Walter touch my hand. Grace is yours today. And Walter took His hand. He didn’t have to run, he didn’t have to jump, he didn’t have to earn it. It was free.”
Ditka spoke next: “I think Coach Halas has finally got the greatest Bear of them all on his heavenly team. You know, when you think about all the guys who have gone before us, Nagurski, Luckman, Piccolo, Stydahar, Galimore, Farrington, Osmanski, George, Lee, Marconi, Dave Whitsell … all those great Bears have joined George Halas. He’s saying, Hey, I’ve finally got the last piece of the puzzle, I’ve got the greatest Bear of all.
“Now, the Bible tells us very simply that all men are like grass and their deeds are like the wildflowers. Now, the grass will wither and the flowers will fall, but the word of the Lord will live forever. And I believe this in the bottom of my heart, I really do, and I’ve believed it for a long time. I know the two great commandments we are given. I know that Walter loved God. He honored God with his whole heart … and soul. He always kept God in front of him.
“The game is greater than the athletes who play it. It always has been that way and it always will be. Walter knew it, too. So when they make a mark against his name, it’s not going to be whether he won or lost, but how did he play that game, and man, did he play that game. Walter Payton really played the game.”
* * *
For most veterans, retirement is the story of their bodies: surgeries and pain; the saga of knees, the hymn of shoulders.
Wilber Marshall is bad knees and bad back and paying for every big hit. William Perry is stay-at-home, a man who got everything from the game, then had most of it taken away. But Dave Duerson’s story is the most tragic of all.
Duerson was a great player, one of the All-Pros the Bears let walk away. He played for the Giants, then ended his career in Arizona in 1993. He made the reentry into civilian life look easy. He succeeded in business, worked for the players’ union. He was a family man. He was loved by many people. Then, as he got into his forties, something changed. He began to forget, got lost in his own neighborhood. His mind became disordered. He had trouble making decisions. He had headaches. He was beset by inexplicable rage. His mood turned dark. He was sad. He was mean to the people he loved. He was confused, and sick, and hurt, and angry, and tired.
On February 17, 2011, Duerson was found dead in his house in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. He’d shot himself in the chest. He had sent a text to his family saying he was going to shoot himself in the chest because he wanted his brain preserved and studied by the doctors at the Brain Bank in Boston. “It took everybody by surprise ’cause we’d seen him a month before that happened,” McMahon told me. “He was a little quieter than usual but you couldn’t have told me he was going to shoot himself. I wouldn’t have believed that. I guess in his note he said he was tired of not being able to make a decision. He was always a bright guy. At the end, he couldn’t find his way home and stuff like that. And when you have a guy with that kind of pride, it was like, well, what else can I do?”
Duerson was convinced he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an Alzheimer’s-like disease that’s been found in an increasing number of dead football players. CTE, which results from repeated head trauma, causes memory loss, mood swings, depression. It can be diagnosed only in an autopsy. After the Brain Bank issued its Duerson report—he was indeed suffering from CTE—his death, along with the deaths of, among others, Mike Webster of the Steelers, Andre Waters of the Eagles, and Junior Seau of the Chargers, fueled a crisis that is threatening the future of football. Does the game give its own players brain damage? When you cheer a big hit, are you cheering the onset of a disease that will eventually rob a person of everything?
I interviewed Chris Nowinski, who, according to his website, is “the co-founder and president of the Sports Legacy Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to solve the sports concussion crisis, and serves as a co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University School of Medicine.” At the center, also known as the Brain Bank, doctors study deceased athletes who’d been showing symptoms of the disease. It’s usually Nowinski who gets in touch with the families, asks them to tell their stories and donate the brains of their loved ones. He grew up in Chicagoland, where he was a standout high school football player. He went on to play at Harvard, before becoming a pro wrestler. He was the WWE’s first Harvard alum, but his career was cut short by a concussion. He grew alarmed when his symptoms—dizziness, nausea—did not go away. He began talking to doctors, asking questions. He eventually published his findings in the book Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis. It’s this work that led him to the Brain Bank.
When I asked about the symptoms of CTE, he said, “We know it must start while you’re still an active athlete, so the deterioration is happening from the teens or twenties or even earlier, but there’s no defined time when symptoms appear. It depends on a number of factors, from genetics to trauma to how concussions were treated. The most common symptoms include cognitive disorders, short-term memory problems, depression. These behavior disorders are often highlighted by impulse control problems, which appears to have been a problem fo
r Mr. Duerson.”
When Nowinski was seventeen, he won an award honoring the best high school linebacker in the Chicago area. It was presented by Duerson, who was twenty-nine. They chatted on stage, posed for a picture. The next time Nowinski saw Duerson was on a surgical table in Boston, where his brain was being removed from his skull.
“How bad was Duerson’s disease?” I asked.
“Dr. Ann McKee described it as moderately severe,” he told me. “In other words, it wasn’t in an early stage.”
“How many pro football players do you think have it?”
“We ran the numbers on NFL players who died over a one-year period. We had gotten fifteen or so of those brains and they all had it. That meant three or four percent. But it’s only that low if every person we did not look at did not have it, and that’s unlikely. I believe we’re going to find an actual number eventually and it’s going to be very significant.”
“Should parents let their kids play football?”
“I’m uncomfortable with children playing football the way it’s played today,” he said. “We’ve proven that we have this in teenagers who are getting it in high school football or youth football. The day we can diagnose it while people are still alive will be the day we’ll have to ask the world, ‘What percentage of kids is allowable to have this disease from playing a sport?’ I challenge anyone to make that number higher than zero.”
* * *
I sometimes wonder about the legacy of big hits—not just the damage they do to the body and brain but the way they affect the psyche. Once, in a hockey game, when I was about sixteen, I got caught behind the net with my head down and a kid named Oscar hit me so hard it did not even hurt. I found myself a few seconds later sitting ten feet from the puck, thinking about a spiderweb I had seen the previous summer in Eagle River, Wisconsin. I was in a daze and I stayed that way for a week. I kept playing hockey but never again played the same way. I had realized that I could break.
“I recently had the opportunity to meet a player that I forced out of the National Football League,” Doug Plank said as we drank coffee beneath an acacia tree. “And I have to tell you, it isn’t a good memory. This was a receiver running a deep end route, a dig route—he dashes fifteen or twenty yards down the field and crosses the middle. I remember this once—don’t ask me why—I made a decision to hit him low. I tore his cartilage, his ACL, his MCL. It was over for him in an instant. He lay on the ground in agonizing pain. And I could hear this groan—it came from the deepest part of his person. I remember not feeling good about that. Then, about two months ago, I ran into that person. Here, in town. It was so hard. It would have been easy to duck in a corner. I knew he was there. But I thought, You know what? I want him to know how I felt that day. I never hit a person low again. If I hit a guy from waist up, okay, they might get a hip pointer, break a rib, get knocked out. But they’re coming back. You’re not tearing up their career. I walked over to him and said, ‘I want to tell you how sorry I am.’ Well, I got to tell you, two grown men broke out in tears right there. He goes, ‘You don’t know how much I thought about you over the years, wondered who you were, what kind of person, and why you did this to me.’ And I told him I felt the same way and often thought of him. It’s not one-sided. You do something, you walk away and forget it. It’s not like that. You live with these things for a very long time.”
19
ROAD TRIP TO CANTON
Last summer, I got in my car and drove west. I had been working on nothing but the Bears for a year, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by the desire to see some of the places that gave birth to professional football, the coal towns that, once upon a time, turned out quarterbacks as they had also turned out car parts and steel.
Starting in Connecticut, I followed Interstate 87 across the Tappan Zee Bridge, then headed into New Jersey, Springsteen country, warehouses and weeds. If you listen to early, then middle Springsteen, you will notice how the amusement parks of youth turn into the factories where you spend the rest of your life; how, like a trick in an old movie, the Ferris wheel dissolves into “the machines and the spires,” the foundry’s fiery dynamo. You might imagine sports being developed on farms or in country towns, but pro football was popular in big towns from the start, its field following the contours of two things that define modern life: the city block and the TV screen.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike goes right by Carlisle, but the tollbooth lady had never heard of Jim Thorpe or the school he made famous early last century. Thorpe was sixteen when he enrolled at the Indian Industrial School, a Dickensian institution meant to prepare Native Americans for a life in the machine trades. It’s where Thorpe carried his first football. Many consider him the best athlete the United States has ever produced. The school is a military base now. At the entrance to the gym, I stood before a statue of Thorpe, Greek in style, the athlete holding a discus as a lesser man might hold a remote control. He was ruddy, with a pocked face and coarse hair and a body that went to seed in his middle years, but pictures at Carlisle show him in his youth: dark eyed and strong. The stadium where Thorpe played survives, the field overlooked by an old-fashioned grandstand—you half expect to see a rubber tycoon in spats sitting by the rail. White men filled the bleachers on Saturdays, excited to watch Indian teams fight, a spectacle that, a few decades before, could have been enjoyed only at a Wild West Show. As the star of the first great professional team and the NFL’s first commissioner, Thorpe gave football its uniquely American identity.
The road to Pittsburgh leads through tunnels and past towns, through Appalachian Mountain hollers where the sons of miners have yet to hear of George Halas’s modern T-formation. The city appears all at once, a scrim of bridges and buildings stained to a deep mottled rust. The first pro leagues began around here, in sooty towns that stud the bituminous mountains, first as a recreation for workers, a diversion between shift whistles, then as a real competition with paid ringers playing under assumed names. The Packers, who joined the NFL in its second season, are the last of the factory town teams, preserved as a reminder of origins. In this sense, the NFL is not unlike Don Quixote: a parody of a library of romantic literature that’s ceased to exist. The books are gone, but the joke remains.
I made two stops on my way out of Pittsburgh: Beaver Falls, the birthplace of Joe Namath, and Aliquippa, the hometown of Mike Ditka. Johnny Unitas worked on a road crew in Aliquippa. It might be the bleakest place I’ve ever been. Once the booming home of J & L Steel, it began its decline when the mill closed in the 1980s. Just about every store on Main Street was boarded. The people who remain appear trapped. The high school is on a hill above town. The football field is in a valley, ratty, rocky, surrounded by row houses built for workers who died a generation ago. In such places, it can seem the people have just one thing to offer: their bodies, which they fed to the factories as they feed to the game.
What happens to such a place when the world changes? When an economy that had been about bodies and brains gives way to an economy about brains alone? In Aliquippa, you realize that violence was a crucial aspect of the game from the beginning, the hitting a cure for every kind of mood, the way that, when you are so low you have to reach up to touch bottom, nothing beats getting drunk, going to town, and picking a fight with a man twice your size. For some, pro football’s appeal is the aerial assault, the ballet of receivers getting both feet inbounds, but for others it’s the Stone Age pleasure of watching large men battle to the point of exhaustion. There are moments when the game is able to capture what it’s like to be alive in a world filled with friends and enemies, and some help you, and some hurt you, and there is a place for teamwork and intelligence, but the winner is usually the person who can stand the most and take it the longest and get back on his feet just once more than he’s been knocked down.
The country opens up as you cross into Ohio, the gloomy mill towns giving way to corn and silos, farms that stretch to the horizon. The Pro Football Hall of Fame had my car in its tr
actor beam. Why Canton? Because that’s where the league was founded, in Ralph Hay’s Hupmobile showroom. The exhibit begins with a statue of Thorpe and continues through displays of old equipment: cleats, jerseys, football pants, and, most tellingly, helmets, which evolved from none at all to leather, plastic, then whatever space-age material they’re made of now. The museum’s holy of holies is a dimly lit circular room lined with busts of the anointed, starting with George Halas and Curly Lambeau and ending, for now, with Cortez Kennedy and Curtis Martin. I compare the mood in this room, where grown men, in their jerseys, wander among iron heads, somber, serious, even a little sad, to the mood at national memorials, where we bear witness to some crucial American moment. Football is a religion, a shared history of victories and defeats.
When I talked to old gridiron men like Dick Stanfel, an offensive lineman who went All-Pro for the Washington Redskins in 1952 and 1953, or Bill Tobin, who played running back for the Houston Oilers in 1963, they spoke of football as “already gone,” the sport having evolved from the ball control game of their youth into a kind of “basketball on grass.” According to these men, football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills; dirt, struggle, blood, grime; the division of labor; the all-importance of the clock. Football was not a reprieve from working life, it was that life translated into another language.