Walter & Me

by Eddie Payton

  But I hadn’t forgotten what I was trying to teach Walter about Coach Hill. That is, you just don’t mess with him. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said. It went in one of Ely’s ears and out the other.

  “We’ll go to the health center,” he continued, “and we’ll tell them our backs are hurting, and they’ll give us some stuff to take, and we’ll take three days off, go back to practice on Friday, and play on Saturday. They can’t win without us.” I was totally freaked by what he was saying. No way was I gonna do that. No way.

  “You know how Coach Hill is,” I tried to reason. “He’ll come up to the health center and pull us out and make us practice. And if we’re lucky, that’s all he’ll do. So, no thanks, man, you can go ahead if you want to, but I’m going to practice.”

  Ely dismissed my warning and rode off into the sunset like the Lone Ranger. He thought he had it all figured out, so he set off to the health center to carry out his plan. He told them his back was hurting, and they put a heating pad on it, just like he thought they would. They gave him some pain medication, just like he thought they would. They told him to take it easy for a few days, just like he thought they would. But he came back on Friday to find out things weren’t going to go exactly like he thought they would. Coach Hill’s “if you don’t practice, you don’t play; if you’re too hurt to practice, you’re too hurt to play” policy was for everybody. It applied even to the “can’t win without ’em” guys. There were no exceptions. So, on that Saturday, Walter got his first start. Ely never played again. You don’t mess with Coach Hill.

  Though I didn’t mess with him, Coach must’ve seen the starters as a unit because I didn’t start either. Guilt by association, I guess. That’s what I’m blaming it on, anyway. Coach didn’t like Ely at the moment, and I started with Ely, so he didn’t like me none either. He probably figured I must’ve known about Ely’s little plan (which I did) and wasn’t too happy that I didn’t let him know about it. So, I sat, and Walter and Ricky were the lead guys for that next game. They ran up and down the field like rabbits. We were playing some directional division NAIA school from Texas, and they didn’t even know what hit them. Though I didn’t start because of my link to Ely, Coach Hill eventually let me up from “time out” and onto the field for a little mop-up duty in the third quarter.

  Thinking back on it and breaking it down, the way Coach Hill handled all that “too hurt to practice, too hurt to play” stuff was actually sort of brilliant. For those guys who were really hurt, well, they were really hurt and had no business playing. For those guys trying to pull one over on Coach or who just couldn’t cut it, well, they had no business playing either. Coach came out with the better team no matter what. So, you see, brilliant. Of course, there was a downside to it as well. Did this old-school approach to coaching cause us players at Jackson State to play with injuries that should’ve had us in the clinic instead of the huddle? Sure. But really, nobody knew any better back then. With all the discussions about concussions on top of the sports section these days, coaches are changing the way they teach technique and the way they treat injuries (more on that later as it relates to the way Walter played the game), but back when we played, if you got knocked down, you just had to get back up or you may never get back in. And if you got knocked down without even getting hit like that shit Ely tried to pull, well, you were definitely not getting back in.

  Though Ely’s move even landed me in the doghouse for a game, I’m kind of glad he did it. It’s what set into motion the pieces that would end up bringing Walter and me onto the field at the same time—for the first time ever. I’m glad Ely did it, because when it finally happened, when Walter and I were finally in the same backfield, well, it was exactly like we’d planned all along. Bad-ass on the grass.

  Let me tell you, when it comes to the running back position, there’s nothing like blocking for your brother or having your brother blocking for you. If you’re the one running the ball, it’s almost like blocking for yourself, but without having to actually do the blocking. When we were out there together, Walter saw the same things I saw in the same way I saw them. It was like having two of me or, from his point of view, two of him. I knew what Walter liked to do, and he knew what I liked to do. I knew exactly what he was good at doing, and he knew the same about me. If I was blocking and hit the outside linebacker straight up—BAM—and he didn’t move, I would just stick him there, and I knew Walter would want to bounce it outside, so I’d grab the outside part of the linebacker’s jersey, then I’d kinda turn him inside just enough so that Walter could jump out there and run. When the roles were reversed, he knew I’d want to go inside, so he’d try to move his ass around and lead his man to the outside, and then I could take off up the middle. It was that easy. It was that simple.

  Jackson State ran a pro set and split backfields. And when I say that’s what we ran, I mean that was all we ran. It didn’t really matter much, either, because we executed the crap out of that simplicity. With Walter and me, we could run a sweep either way, quick pitch either way, trap off the quick pitch, and lead off the tackle. All those years of waiting were worth it. Payton & Payton was a thing of beauty.

  Walter didn’t really find his groove as a starter right away, though. Maybe he should’ve retained the nickname “Spider-Man” from his high school days rather than switching to “Sweetness.” I mean, the kid was a little high-strung at times. He wanted to be a starter, of course, but when he became the starter, he’d get all worked up before a game. We all got butterflies from time to time, but Walter seemed to have something closer to pterodactyls flying around in his stomach. We’d always have to figure out some way to calm him down. The coaches knew he wasn’t quite ready at first to carry the ball, so they put him out there to block for me.

  In the first game we started together, Walter didn’t get a whole lot of carries. Or I should say he didn’t get a whole lot of carries until the game was well in hand. I scored five touchdowns before the beginning of the fourth quarter, so we were rolling. That’s when Walter got his first shot as the primary ball carrier. And it was a shot in the arm to me. I got a chance to watch him from the sideline in that final quarter, and it was like, Wow. They ran the basic off-tackle stuff, but I’ll never forget it. I just stood there and watched as my little brother gave me a blast from the past and a glimpse into the future all at the same time. He was breaking tackles, running through guys, cutting on a dime, and just doing his thing like he did on the playground and like he’d later do at Soldier Field. He was just making fools of those kids all over again, looking like a future NFL star. I was like, Damn, and I beamed with pride. That was my baby brother out there.

  Despite his amazing display of talent during that fourth quarter, Walter still mostly blocked for me in the games that followed. As that first season progressed, he really turned out to be an outstanding blocker. He’d stick his head in there and rip through those guys, opening holes for me that guys twice my size could have run through. He didn’t mind not getting the carries, either, because he just wanted to be on the field and play. And he wanted to win above all. In the meantime, I was benefiting from his blocking, leading the conference in rushing and scoring. I did so much of that during Walter’s freshman year that now people say there just ain’t no telling how many yards and touchdowns my kid brother would’ve gotten during his college career if I hadn’t stolen so many while I was there. They think he could’ve had the best college career ever if it hadn’t been for me.

  But here’s the thing…I was there. That’s the way it played out. For one season, Walter and I played together. That can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t ever be taken from us. People can say this or that or whatever about “What if Eddie hadn’t played and stolen those yards and touchdowns from Walter?” But I can say this: that season Walter and I played together wasn’t for those people. That season was for the Payton brothers. At the time, we were dubbed the best running back combi
nation in the South by the Atlanta Constitution (this was before the paper merged with the Atlanta Journal). They said that it was impossible to defend us because we lined up in the pro set, and when you tried to take something away from one, you would give something to the other.

  People don’t seem to realize that we were just brothers playing a game the best we knew how. We didn’t have a crystal ball. We didn’t know there would one day be sports nerds looking back and drooling over what might’ve been instead of reveling in what was. We were just living in the moment, having fun, and winning games. That’s it, and that’s all.

  Still, I get blamed for single-handedly screwing up the fairy tale. To a lot of people, I was the reason Walter didn’t break every rushing and scoring record in NCAA history, because he was mostly blocking for me as a freshman while I lead the SWAC in rushing and scoring as a senior. They give me my first three seasons, but they say my final season should’ve belonged to Walter. Now, Walter, of course, ended up smashing all the stuff I did anyway (it didn’t take him long), but that wasn’t what it was about when we were together. Whether you get that or not, Walter sure did. He understood that the Jackson State Tigers were a team.

  As good a back as Walter was in high school, and even in light of what he was able to do throughout the rest of his college career, there were other good players on that Jackson State team when he showed up. It wasn’t “Walter and the Jackson 10” from day one. It was the Jackson State Tigers. Like I said earlier, Walter arrived with little fanfare. He was a Tiger, not a superstar. He was just another great member of a great team.

  When Walter and I were both running backs at Jackson State, we had three of the best receivers in the country: Jerome Barkum, Alfred Clanton, and Jimmy Ellis. They were ballers and a big part of what we did at Jackson State. They kept defenses honest and spread the field like nobody’s business, making it easy for Walter and me to do our thing out there. It wasn’t just “Give Walter the ball because he’s our offense and the rest of y’all are gonna watch.” It was “Walter’s a part of this offense just like everyone else.” Now, he was a big and productive part of the offense for sure, but what I’m saying is that he wasn’t the whole offense like you might think. Coach Hill wasn’t going to have that. He demanded team over individual and preached that all day, every day. No one was thinking at the time how many yards one guy was going to get. Nobody tried to figure out which cat was a future Hall of Famer, so he could get the ball and all the stats and break all the records and get all the glory. We all only cared about one thing and one thing only: winning. That was it. That was everything. Well, it was everything right up until Walter’s senior season, anyway.

  Walter’s senior year became the first time, as far as I know, that he was even concerned about the numbers. In fairness, at that point in his career, after having done what he’d done, the numbers were kind of hard to ignore. He was a candidate for the Heisman Trophy, and let’s face it, you gotta chase that if it’s right there in front of you. Jackson State started pushing him to get it and they focused on getting him the ball. But really, even that was about the team, with all the attention the trophy could bring to the program. That’s what made Jackson State so successful. That’s what made us so great. No one guy was bigger than the team. And to me, that highlights Walter’s exceptional accomplishments all the more. Nowadays they try to put kids in situations that will make them shine as individuals, but Walter made it happen in a system and within an offensive framework that was all about the team. That’s the mark of a true champion right there. A truly great player can do what Walter did without being the only great player on a team. In fact, he had plenty of great players around him.

  Despite what you might think, Walter wasn’t the fastest player on the field at Jackson State, although he certainly wasn’t slow. He ran a 4.43 40-yard dash as compared to my 4.39. Still, the real trouble Walter had wasn’t his speed, it was his stamina. Walter had exceptional quickness and front-end speed for sure. He could go from zero to 100 in a hurry. His problem was that after about 50 yards or so, he started to fizzle out a bit. A lot of the other guys on the team, after about 50 yards, well, we were just taking off. I used to pick on him about that, too, even when he got to the NFL. Walter led the NFL his rookie year in kickoff returns, but his longest ones were like 65 yards, and the defensive backs always seemed to run him down. I once said to him, “Shit, I ain’t never been ran down, dawg. What’s up with that?” So, if that’s what I thought even when he was in the NFL, imagine how it was that first year at Jackson State.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, okay? Walter was awesome at Jackson State, even as a freshman. It’s just that the standards for him coming in there were so high. He was great, but he started out as part of something even greater. You may only know about Walter, but he wasn’t the only guy from that era of Jackson State football to go to the next level. We just had so many great athletes there during those years, and I’ve got proof. There was, of course, Walter, who had more success at the next level than any of us (round 1, pick 4, 13 NFL seasons, Hall of Fame), but we also had guys like Jackie Slater (round 3, pick 86, 20 NFL seasons, Hall of Fame), Jerome Barkum (round 1, pick 9, 12 NFL seasons), Robert Brazile (round 1, pick 6, 10 NFL seasons), Don Reese (round 1, pick 26, 6 NFL seasons), Roscoe Word (round 3, pick 74, 3 NFL seasons), Leon Gray (round 3, pick 78, 11 NFL seasons), Rickey Young (round 7, pick 164, 9 NFL seasons), Ed Hardy (round 7, pick 175, 1 NFL season), John Tate (round 8, pick 183, 1 NFL season), Bill Houston (1 NFL season), Ernie Richardson (1 NFL season), Rod Phillips (6 NFL seasons), Emanuel Zanders (8 NFL seasons), and finally, that other Payton guy, me (5 NFL seasons). Did you know that we had all those great players who went on to the NFL? Take a look at that list again. Yep, that’s what Walter stepped into. And now think about how none of the SEC teams had recruited any of those guys, even when they were right under their noses.

  How about Oxford, Mississippi, native, Bill Houston? Could he have helped his hometown Ole Miss Rebels win a couple more games and gotten them to a bowl game? Something to ponder. But that’s okay. It all worked out for the best at Jackson State. I loved my college experience and my teammates, and so did Walter. Coach Hill’s tactics were tough at times, but we still wouldn’t have changed a thing. Walter and I knew how much talent we had as a team, and we loved the way Coach kept it simple. With guys like we had, Coach knew to just let us go.

  Coach Hill didn’t see any use in making things complicated for all of his talented guys. To him, football was a simplistic game anyway, so why not just keep it that way? It’s sort of like all those basketball players who get interviewed after a game. The reporter might ask, “So, how’d you guys get the victory tonight?” The player might say, “Well, we were better than them tonight, we brought our ‘A’ game, we ran when we could and got baskets when we needed them.” You hear that kind of stuff over and over from the winning team, and it’s really not any more complicated than that. The easiest way to become a millionaire is to get a million dollars, and the easiest way to win a game is to score more points than the other guys. You just have to figure out the best way to do that. For us, the best way was usually our running game.

  Coach Hill thought that if we would run, block, and tackle, we were going to beat the bad guys every time. If we were better at it than them, we’d beat them. Coach Hill had a very basic philosophy that football is a game of runs, blocks, and tackles. That’s it. And he figured the best way to get good at runs, blocks, and tackles was to run, block, and tackle every day. So, practice was pretty simple, too, even if it was a little hard. Every single day we went out there and scrimmaged, blocking and running and tackling. We did it over and over. Practice makes perfect, as they say, but it also perfects the team. It brings the best to the top. All those who were left after the hard push of practice were the real players. Those who got hurt or quit, they were the weaker ones. When it was all said and done, we had the guys who were gonna give us the best shot
at winning each game. Like I said, simple. Coach Hill even liked to refer to our program as KISS (the Keep It Simple School). But with all that weeding out of the weaklings, the guys who remained were more like the kiss of death for anyone who faced us. And I think it would’ve been the same for all the teams we never got to face.

  Take Ole Miss, for example. They were a big time program, right? Everyone just knew they were the best team in the area. Well, the Jackson State team with Walter and me would’ve beaten Ole Miss easily. For all you Rebels fans out there, I’m sorry if that upsets you, but it’s the truth. Back when Walter and I were playing together, Ole Miss was a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust team. They’d line up with two tight ends, and we’d have known exactly what they were going to do. And when we knew what a team was going to do, we were going to win. It didn’t even matter that the Rebels would’ve probably known what we were going to do, too. They would’ve likely known we were just going to run it down their throats, but they would’ve been defenseless against it anyway. We had the superior fire power. With us, it was lights, cameras, JACKSON (STATE)! Compared to the wave of the future we were bringing, calling them “Ole Miss” would’ve been right in more ways than one. We had men; they had ladies.

  The SEC teams like Ole Miss didn’t have receivers of the caliber we had in our league. There’s no question we had better runners, but we also had receivers who could flat-out fly and catch anything delivered anywhere close to them. The SEC had a bunch of possession receivers, so they couldn’t spread the field for their runners like our receivers could spread the field for Walter and me. The SEC schools didn’t throw to the tight ends, either, like we did, so they didn’t have as many threats in the passing game to account for. We threw to our tight ends a lot, probably eight or 10 times a game. The SEC teams would’ve had to adjust to that while also trying to cover our elite wideouts. You can imagine the room we runners would’ve had. It would’ve been like that all day long, too. And, without being able to stack the box on us, they just wouldn’t have had the speed to match up with ours. Not a single team in the SEC could match up with our speed, period. They had the “better” programs in the eyes of many, but we had the better players. I don’t care whose eyes were doing the looking.