Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Gil Brandt, the team’s vice president of player personnel, visited Jackson State multiple times, and he considered Payton to be a can’t-miss ballplayer. So, for that matter, did the Cowboys’ receivers coach, a thirty-five-year-old former tight end named Mike Ditka. “I remember the debate of whether we draft Walter or Randy White,” said Ditka. “And I can remember we always had a staff meeting and talked about those things and [head coach Tom Landry] kind of took a vote and all the offensive coaches for sure voted for Walter, and of course, the defensive coaches voted for Randy.”

  Though Landry’s background was in offense, the legendary head coach thought his team needed to plug a hole in the defensive line. Plus, Dallas would be investing a great deal of money in the selection, and wanted the player to last. “What really swayed our mind was that, at the time, [Buffalo’s] O. J. Simpson and [Pittsburgh’s] Rocky Bleier were the only two running backs to start in the league for over five years,” said Brandt. “But even knowing that, it was the only time in the history of our drafts that within an hour of the pick we were still trying to decide who to take. It simply came down to longevity—we thought Randy would last longer than Walter. So we got Randy White.”

  With the third pick, the Baltimore Colts selected Ken Huff, a six-foot-four, 252-pound offensive guard out of the University of North Carolina. Like Payton, Huff didn’t see it coming. In college he had been an all-American who bench-pressed in excess of five hundred pounds and projected into an excellent NFL prospect. “Without question, the best offensive lineman in this year’s draft,” raved Joe Thomas, the Colts GM (who bypassed Dennis Harrah and Doug France, two future All-Pro linemen). But he was far from a franchise changer. “I was floored,” Huff said. “I thought I’d go in the first couple of rounds, but I had no idea and no expectations. I was going out that morning to grab breakfast with my girlfriend when my agent called to tell me I’d been drafted. I said, ‘Really? Are you sure?’ ”

  The fourth selection belonged to Chicago, an organization Payton equated with the bubonic plague. In 1975 the NFL was comprised of twenty-six franchises, and none held less intrigue for Payton than the Bears. To begin with, the team was bad. They had finished last in the NFC Central in 1974 with a 4-10 mark, and hadn’t posted a winning record since 1967. Secondly, while Payton had never been to the Windy City, he imagined its denizens plowing through ten feet of snow and enduring tundralike temperatures. Yes, he wanted to leave Mississippi. But not for the North Pole.

  Doug Shanks, Jackson’s city commissioner and a diehard Jackson State supporter, visited Payton and Brazile during the early stages of the draft. He was standing in the doorway when Hill telephoned the room. Walter’s college coach had received a call from Jim Finks, Chicago’s general manager. “Walter,” Hill said. “Congratulations! You were chosen fourth in the first round by the Chicago Bears!”

  Shanks has never forgotten what he witnessed. “Walter was crying like a baby, absolutely devastated,” Shanks said. “He had dreams of playing for the Dallas Cowboys, not the Bears. That was the last thing he wanted.” Twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. The Houston Oilers, selecting sixth, plucked Brazile. The linebacker was euphoric. The running back was crushed. He, too, wanted to go to Houston. Or Dallas. Or Miami, San Diego, San Francisco.

  Anywhere but Chicago.

  Under the strict order of Holmes, Payton put on a happy face for the press. When Ponto Downing of the Clarion-Ledger arrived at Sampson Hall, Payton and Brazile borrowed a pair of Suzuki motor scooters and gleefully cruised campus, accepting congratulatory hugs from friends and classmates.

  Wrote Downing in the next day’s paper, beneath the headline J-STATE PAIR “BUZZING” AFTER HEARING DRAFT NEWS:

  Making like a black Butch and Sundance, the pair cavorted on their bikes about the J-State campus and the downtown area, stopping occasionally to greet well-wishers and recite their feelings. “Chicago will be in the Super Bowl,” exclaimed Payton while a more subdued Brazile stated, “If Houston has a first team, I’ll be on it.”

  Perhaps the zany antics of the touted twosome could be attributed to the unseasonably warm weather Tuesday and the hint of spring in the air but more likely it could be construed as one last fling. An attempt, for the moment, to shove aside the idea that fun and games were over, for as the draft most certainly means sudden fortune, it is also the realization to the end of collegiate careers.... Payton, who expresses a desire to go to New York, said Chicago was his second choice and joked, “They’ll love me in Chicago!”

  Just how elated was Payton? More than two hours after he was selected, Tom Siler of The Sporting News called Alyne, Walter’s mother, to get her reaction. “I didn’t know about it,” she said. “Walter hasn’t called me, but I guess he will later in the day.”

  Unlike their number one pick, the Bears were giddy. As soon as the Colts took Huff, a roar emerged from the team’s draft room at the La Salle Hotel in downtown Chicago. “We’ve been sweating it out all night,” Jack Pardee, the team’s new coach, told the Chicago Tribune. “What happened is what we were hoping for.” Ever since Gale Sayers retired after the 1971 season, the team had been desperately seeking a running back to carry the offense. In 1974, Chicago’s leading rusher was Ken Grandberry, an eighthround draft pick out of Washington State who gained 475 yards and scored two touchdowns.

  The Bears had recently fired Abe Gibron, their head coach for three seasons, and replaced him with Pardee, a former All-Pro linebacker. Within a few days of being hired, Pardee met with Finks, the general manager, and Jim Parmer, a scout. The new coach had played collegiately at Texas A&M, and was partial to his state’s brand of steel-jawed, hardnosed football. His first instinct was to focus on Don Hardeman, a powerful runner from Texas A&I. Parmer, however, was adamant about Payton. “We can’t make a mistake on this kid,” he told Pardee and Finks. “He’s too good to pass up.” Bill Tobin, a newly hired scout with the club, had visited Jackson State twice while working for the Green Bay Packers. He was equally enthusiastic. Payton from the stands was a blur. Payton up close was even better. Strong. Fast. Rugged. Powerful. Exceptionally large thighs. Elbows the size of bread boxes. And his fingers—long and thick like ripe plantains. “He could put a baseball in the palm of his hand,” said Bob Bowser, a longtime football executive, “and his fingers would touch.”

  “He was easy to find on film,” Tobin said. “The small-school question was ‘Could he handle the big lights?’ ”

  Pardee remained unconvinced until he traveled to Mobile for the Senior Bowl. Sitting along the sidelines during practices, Pardee couldn’t believe what he was watching. The little back from Jackson State was slamming into bigger, stronger, more powerful defensive players from Division I schools and causing serious damage. “You didn’t have to be any type of high-powered sleuth to see that the kid had some talent,” said Pardee. “Talk about a thoroughbred. He had great body control, great eye-hand coordination, great ability to change direction. I was sold.”

  Bud Holmes, however, wasn’t sold.

  He wasn’t sold on Payton as a person, and he wasn’t sold on Payton as a client. Midway through the Clarion-Ledger story from the day of the draft, Payton was quoted as saying, “I still do not have an agent.” Holmes was taken aback. Hadn’t Payton said to him, “You’re my agent,” several days earlier? Hadn’t they shook hands?

  Over the course of the next few days, Holmes never heard from Payton. Then, on a late Friday evening, the phone rang. It was Walter. “Bud, I’m confused,” he said in a panic. “I’m at the airport and I have to go up to Chicago for a press conference, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Holmes was furious. “OK, Walter, do you have something to write with?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Payton said. “I’ve got a pen.”

  “Here’s what you do,” Holmes said. “You get on an airplane and you fly to Chicago. As soon as you get off the plane, go to a phone booth.”

  “OK,” Payton said. “Got it.”

  “
Good,” Holmes said. “Now, in that phone booth they’ll have the newest Yellow Pages. Open the book and look under ‘Attorneys.’ It’s spelled A-T-T-O-R-N-E-Y-S. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” said Payton. “I got it.”

  “Great,” Holmes said. “Get yourself one, because you’re gonna need a crazy son of a bitch to represent you. I don’t fool with crazy bastards like you.”

  Payton stuttered and stammered. Holmes didn’t. “I ain’t heard a word from you, and I do not beg,” he said. “To hell with your flight. If you’re not here in my office at ten o’clock tomorrow morning—and I don’t mean ten-ohone—you can get someone else to represent you. Because I’m not putting up with this bullshit.”

  Never mind that the Bears had planned an entire trip in his honor—Payton left the airport in Jackson. “The team sent me to pick him up at the terminal in Chicago,” said Pat McCaskey, a public relations assistant with the team and the grandson of George Halas, the Bears’ owner. “I waited and waited at the gate. No Walter.” The following morning, Holmes arrived at his Hattiesburg-based office at seven o’clock, and found Payton standing by the entrance. Holmes brushed past him without saying a word. His secretary rang him moments later. “Walter Payton is here,” she said. “He said he has an appointment.”

  “He does,” Holmes replied. “But it’s at ten. Tell him to come back then.”

  When Payton returned, Holmes gave him one of the great tonguelashings of his young life. “Walter,” he said, “we can start over or we can just put an end to this thing. If you can’t communicate better than that, we have no future together, because I don’t put up with bullshit. And what you did to me was pure bullshit.”

  Payton apologized, and promised Holmes he was done acting like a juvenile. “You’re my agent,” he said. “I trust you. You tell me what to do, I’ll do it.”

  Holmes nodded. The problem was, he wasn’t quite sure what his client should do. Payton had already skipped his introductory press conference, a transgression that left Finks, Pardee, and the legendary Halas furious. Two days later, Payton was still missing in action. Under Holmes’ directive, he returned none of the Bears’ calls, leaving the organization to look hapless and, to a certain degree, pathetic. It was all part of a plan: Halas had publicly called the Bears’ draft “our team’s best in a decade,” which served to excite a habitually disappointed fan base. In other words, the Bears had to hammer out a contract with Payton. They absolutely had to. When a Jackson-based NBC reporter tracked down Payton, the running back followed Holmes’ script to a tee. “There are other leagues, and I have to give them consideration, too,” he said. “I’ve already been contacted by the Canadian Football League. If an offer comes up that I can’t resist, that’s part of life, because I’m in it not only for the love of the game but for the money.”

  Was Payton genuinely interested in moving to Canada? “Not a chance,” said Holmes. “It was all a ploy.”

  On February 2, a full five days following the draft, Payton arrived in Chicago, but not as the Bears had hoped. After ignoring dozens of calls and Western Union telegrams from the team, Holmes was contacted by Brent Musburger, at the time an up-and-coming sports reporter for the local CBS affiliate. The station asked Holmes if he’d be willing to bring his client to Chicago for a one-on-one sit-down interview. “We’ll send a plane for both of you,” Musburger said. “Then put you on the air.”

  Holmes liked it. Payton liked it. Here was a way to set the agenda; to let the people of Chicago know that Walter Payton wanted to be a Bear, but the organization wasn’t making an effort to sign him (a complete lie—how could an offer be made if Holmes refused to pick up the telephone?). “It was a good strategy for them,” said Musburger. “At the time the Bears were thought of as a very cheap operation. The best thing Walter could do was make it sound like he was itching to come play here.” The agent and the football player boarded the turboprop jet at Jackson’s airport, and en route worked out a devilish plan. Told by Bob Hill that his new client owned a perverse sense of humor, Holmes thought it’d be fun to introduce themselves to the Windy City as a couple of small-town bumpkins. “Walter and I made up this big scenario,” Holmes said. “I was gonna be an ignorant lawyer, and Walter was going be an even more ignorant, dumb black who just barely got out of the fields and could barely read and write. Walter was all for it.”

  The plane landed at Meigs Field. It was a typical winter day in Chicago, with fierce winds blowing off of Lake Michigan and several feet of snow covering the ground. By design, Payton was the last person to exit the aircraft. He stuck his head out the door, crinkled his nose, and screamed, “Uh-uh, no way. I ain’t playing in this mess. What is that stuff? Is that cotton?”

  “No Walter,” Holmes said. “That’s snow.”

  “Snow!” said Payton. “Well, I ain’t ever seen that before.”

  “Boy,” bellowed Holmes, “get your ass off that airplane!”

  “Uh-uh,” Payton replied. “I ain’t stepping into that mess. Mama told me I could come back to the house if I don’t like it here. I wanna to go on back home now, Mista Bud.”

  Payton finally made his way from the plane to an airport hangar, where the interview would be conducted. Upon meeting Musburger, Payton repeatedly referred to him as “Mista Mooseburger.”

  “Walter was cutting up, using ‘nigger’ every other word, just watching the shock cross people’s faces,” said Holmes. “They must have thought this guy from the woods of Mississippi was some idiot. He’d say, ‘Mister Bud, I just want to be a good little nigger and do what you tell me to do.’ ”

  Roughly five minutes before Musburger was scheduled to conduct the live interview, he asked Payton to cease using any “ethnic words.”

  Payton: “Mista Mooseburger, what’s an ethnic word?”

  Musburger: “Well, you keep using that word.”

  Payton: “What word is that?”

  Musburger: “The word that describes black people in a negative light.”

  Payton: “I don’t understand, Mista Mooseburger.”

  Musburger: “Walter, you can’t say ‘nigger’ on TV.”

  Payton: “Oh, Mista Mooseburger, don’t you worry. I’m a good little nigger, Mista Mooseburger, I promise. Tell him, Mista Bud.

  Tell Mista Mooseburger that I’m a good little nigger!”

  With no time left, Musburger took a deep breath, stared into the camera, and began the segment. A handful of Jackson State highlights flashed across the screen, and Musburger opened by asking Payton—who calmly sipped from a glass of orange juice—how he felt about being drafted by the Bears.

  “I’ll tell you, Brent, nothing thrills me more than the very idea of being able to play for a franchise as storied and legendary as the Chicago . . .”

  “The interview was fantastic,” said Holmes, who later received a plaque from Payton that read HONORARY NIGGER. “And when it was over Brent came up to me laughing. He told me, ‘Goddamn, Walter is a smart ass, isn’t he?’ ”

  The Bears were not happy. The interview was designed to make the organization look like a band of buffoons, and it worked. Later in the day, Finks called Holmes at his hotel. “Mr. Holmes,” he said, “do you think it would be all right if I were to meet my number one draft pick? It seems everyone else has.”

  That night, Payton, Holmes, Finks, and Bill McGrane, an assistant to the general manager, met at a French restaurant in downtown Chicago. The two Mississippians had so enjoyed toying with Musburger that they kept the act going. Holmes wanted the Bears to believe they were dining with a backwoods agent and an even more backwoods football player. When the waiter passed out menus, Holmes noticed that one of the featured dishes was pêcher le poisson—fish. “Well look here, Walter!” he said. “They’ve got possum on the menu!”

  “Mmmm!” yelped Payton. “I want me some of that there possum! I want it bad!”

  “Walter,” said Finks, “that’s not possum. It’s fish.”

  “Well, dang,” Payton said. “I wan
ted a mess of that possum so bad!”

  “Walter, they ain’t got no grits, either,” Holmes said. “Lord, I don’t even see fried chicken or catfish.”

  When the waiter came to take an order, Payton looked up with confused eyes. “Do you have anything that’s just kind of plain?” he said. “Like a piece of meat with nothin’ on it?”

  Throughout the meal, Holmes watched Finks’ facial expressions morph from shocked to disgusted to dismayed to mystified. “At the start of dinner Jim Finks told us he hadn’t had a drink in two or three years,” said Holmes. “That night he had two double scotches.”

  Over the next few weeks, Holmes and Finks exchanged contract proposals, but the Bears were negotiating from a position of weakness. Their two top returning running backs, Grandberry and Carl Garrett, were marginal players, and as Holmes was speaking with Finks he was also being propositioned by Eugene Pullano, president of the Chicago Winds of the second-year World Football League.

  A multimillionaire whose family made its fortunes in the insurance business, Pullano took Holmes and Payton to dinner and offered the world. Join the Winds, he said, and you’ll make $150,000 annually, plus we’ll pay for your apartment, buy you a new Cadillac, and sign Rickey Young to be your blocking back. The WFL had already lured several players away from the NFL, supplying it with much-needed early credibility. “This guy had a great big gold bear ring that had two ruby eyes,” said Holmes. “Well, during dinner he took it off his finger and handed it to Walter. Just gave it to him.”

  Payton was tempted. The money was great, the perks even greater. But, come day’s end, his dream wasn’t to play with the Chicago Winds. (This proved to be a good thing. Averaging approximately three thousand fans per game and wallowing in debt, the Winds went 1-4 before folding midway through the season.) No, Walter Payton aspired to rule the NFL.