Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  The days following the Kansas City game had been rough on Payton. Still learning how to handle Chicago’s bitter winters, he came down with the flu, and was stuck in bed with a 104-degree temperature. Fed a steady diet of soup and tea by Connie, Walter made every effort to recover quickly. He tried practicing, but was largely useless. He tried attending practice as a spectator, but was even more useless. “We sent Walter home,” Pardee said on Thursday. “I still hope he’ll be ready to play on Sunday.”

  In normal circumstances, the Bears might have deactivated Payton. They were 4-5 and, despite the thrilling victory over the Chiefs, apparently going nowhere fast once again. Yet Vikings-Bears was more than a game. Finks, the Bears GM, had held the same position for ten years in Minnesota, and if there were one matchup that mattered to him, this was it. Finks wanted to show that his success with the Vikings was no fluke. Do something once, you might have gotten lucky. Do something twice, you’re a proven commodity.

  With a 6-3 record, the Vikings once again led the division. They were coached by Bud Grant, the icy legend Finks had hired in 1966. Five weeks earlier, the Vikings downed the Bears at home, 22–16. The game had gone into overtime, but that was considered to be a fluke. Asked now to assess the Bears, Grant had little positive to contribute publicly. “One more loss,” he said coldly, “and they’re out of the play-offs.”

  A couple of days before the game, Bob Holloway, the Minnesota defensive coordinator, told Bobby Bryant, a starting cornerback who specialized in pass coverage, that most of the playing time would go to the younger, stronger Nate Allen. “They wanted the focus to be on bringing down Walter,” said Bryant. “We knew he was all they had.” Moments before his club took the field, Grant warned of an imminent tornado. Dressed in their road whites with purple trim, the players quietly sat at their stalls. “The Bears as a team are not very good,” he said. “You’re better. But I hope you guys are prepared for this, because you’re about to face one of the best football players I’ve ever seen play the game. He has raised the level and standard of play. And if you don’t come up and meet him at that level, he will destroy you.”

  Even in the seconds leading up to his first carry, Payton felt queasy. He had prayed throughout the week for health, asking God and Jesus and anyone listening to bring power to his legs and speed to his feet. Instead, as he prepared for the noon kickoff, his body was besieged by hot and cold flashes. “When I left the dressing room,” he later said, “I didn’t think I could put on a Walter Payton performance.”

  It was a typical November day in Chicago—cold, brisk, unpleasant. Save for his ubiquitous white elbow pads, Payton wore nothing but a jersey to protect his upper body from the elements. Having blocked out Gillman and his pass-pass-pass game plans, Pardee’s offensive strategy was simple: Payton. “We had three plays to run against Minnesota,” said Fred O’Connor, the backfield coach. “One was a power run off tackle. One was an outside sweep to the strong side. And the last one was a run right down the middle, where we isolated on the middle linebacker.”

  The Bears began the game with the ball on their own twenty-six. On first down and ten, O’Connor signaled a play called Ride 38 Bob Odd 0—both guards, along with the tight end, pull, leading Payton around the corner. “My guy to block was Paul Krause, their safety,” said Earl, the fullback. “We had a moat alongside the field, and I drove Paul so hard that I got under his pads and dumped him into the moat. I looked down at him and said, ‘All day, Paul. All day.’ ” Payton gained twenty-nine yards, and the fans cheered in delight.

  Avellini was Chicago’s quarterback in name only. He waited for O’Connor to call a pass play, but to little avail. His line for the day: four completions, six attempts, thirty-three yards. “If your running back is gaining ten yards a clip,” said Pardee, “why would you ever throw the football? We wanted to run to the left side of their defense, and the Vikings kept lining up perfectly. So we ran it down their throats.”

  By the time the first quarter was over, Payton had carried thirteen times for seventy-seven yards. He broke a hundred yards on his twenty-second carry, and by halftime was up to 144 yards on twenty-six attempts. As was the case against the Chiefs, Chicago’s blockers—largely inspired by Payton’s determination—were beating up the overwhelmed Vikings. (“We’re the only line you’ll see running forty yards downfield, looking for someone else to block,” a giddy Sorey said afterward.) Yet the story was Payton. Though often credited for brute strength and a hawk’s sense of vision, Payton’s greatest gift might have been his balance. As other running backs spent their off-seasons lifting weights and sprinting down a rubberized track, much of Payton’s time was devoted to either running through the muddy banks of the Pearl River or finding the sandiest dunes and clawing up their slopes. As far as he was concerned, the man who could bolt through mud and muck and sand without falling was the man who could take a hit and keep going. “His balance was unmatched,” said Brent McClanahan, a Vikings running back. “There were so many times I would have fallen down if I were him. But he bounced off people like a rubber ball.”

  “I remember watching Walter from the sideline,” said Bryant, the benched Viking cornerback. “All I could think was one thing—‘I sure am glad I’m not out there.’ ”

  Despite the awe-inspiring performance, Chicago was struggling to break through. Payton’s one-yard touchdown run in the second quarter gave his team a 7–0 lead, and a thirty-seven-yard field goal from Bob Thomas with forty-three seconds remaining in the half made it 10–0. Having been reduced to a well-paid spectator, Gillman could be seen pacing the sideline, cursing audibly and casting dirty looks toward Pardee. Of all the events he had witnessed through his forty-six years in collegiate and professional football, nothing infuriated Gillman more than the day Payton tore up the Vikings. Where, he wondered, were the passes? The play-action fakes? The draw plays? The varied formations? “Someone told me Sid wanted to quit after that game, because any plays he called were changed to handoffs to Walter,” said Terry Schmidt, a Bears cornerback. “Jack was old school, so we were old school. But it’s a fair question—how does a guy run for that many yards and his team doesn’t win big?”

  At the end of the third quarter, the Bears led 10–7, and Payton was up to 192 yards on thirty-four carries. One year earlier O. J. Simpson had set the single-game rushing record with 273 yards against Detroit. Payton knew he was having one hell of a game, but there was no mention of Simpson’s mark along Chicago’s sideline. “It never came up,” he said afterward. “I don’t like people telling me stuff like that when the game’s on the line.”

  With five minutes remaining, Payton needed sixty-three yards to top Simpson. Were this any other team operating any other offense, the cause would have been a lost one. But Pardee was unbending, Avellini untrusted, and Gillman uninvolved. The ball would be handed to Walter until his arms and legs fell to the ground. “When an opposing defense is told what is about to happen, they usually find a way to stop it,” said John Hilton, the Bears’ special teams coach. “But not that day. I found myself watching like a fan. All day he would fake like he was about to go out of bounds, then come back and knock someone in the keister.”

  With less than four minutes on the clock, Payton took a handoff from Avellini on the Bears’ thirty-three, charged over right tackle, slashed right, and motored down the sideline. He stiff-armed two Vikings, ran over two more, and finally stepped out of bounds at the Minnesota nine. He was five yards away from tying the Juice. “We had to get it for him,” said Don Rives, a Bears linebacker. “To be that close . . .”

  After gaining three yards on a sweep around left end, Payton’s fortieth and final carry of the day was another sweep, this time to the right. The run was unexceptional but also magical. Payton picked up four yards, good enough for 275.

  The Bears held on to win, 10–7—“Ugly and beautiful,” said Steve Schubert, a Bears receiver. “Ugly because we scored ten points with Walter running for 275. Beautiful because Walter was amazing
.”

  Afterward, an exhausted Payton sat on his stool and took questions. His miniature Afro was tussled. His shoulders were slumped. Four hours earlier, he was unsure whether he was even going to play.

  Can you do it again? he was asked.

  “Nobody knows that far ahead,” he said. “Nobody knows what can happen. Only God knows.”

  Is a three-hundred-yard game possible?

  “I don’t know. You have to call Him up.”

  When the pack cleared, Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood approached. “One question,” he said. “How would you defend Walter Payton?”

  For the first time all day, the running back seemed stumped.

  “Well,” he finally said, “the night before the game I’d kidnap him.”

  Following the wins against the Chiefs and Vikings, the Bears were 5-5 and, for the first time in more than a decade, a hot team.

  Their star was even hotter.

  Wrote Phil Elderkin of The Christian Science Monitor: “Nobody would ever confuse running back Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears with an expensive sports car, although he often corners as well. Actually, Payton is a mini-tank, almost as apt to run over people as he is to run around them. He has the torso of a Soviet weight lifter, but the legs of Secretariat.”

  Payton appeared on The Today Show. He was asked to take part in the wildly popular ABC television program Superstars, in which athletes from different sports compete against each other (it taped at season’s end). He held a conference call with seventeen national writers and laughed as two Windy City newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times—provided subscribers with free Walter Payton iron-ons. WORLD RUNS TO PAYTON, read a headline in the November 22 Tribune, and it was hardly an exaggeration. Wrote Pierson: “Payton’s record rushing brought out a symphony Monday and he conducted it with a maturity that is growing off the field as well as on.”

  Was Payton still a juvenile pain in the ass? Yes—rolled-up socks continued to soar through the air and pants were regularly pulled down from behind. He ceaselessly mocked Robin Earl for his enormous rear end (Earl: “Walter would line up behind me and scream, ‘I can’t see! I can’t see!’ ”) and delighted in sneaking up on Len Walterscheid, a rookie defensive back, and strangling him with a deathly bear hug. During a trip to Tampa, Albrecht was convinced by veteran teammates to dump a bucket of ice water atop an unsuspecting Payton as he lounged by the pool. “Walter stood up, all wet, and screamed, ‘OK, let the games begin!’ ” Hours later, when he returned to his room after dinner, Albrecht found his bed covered in ice. The next morning, Albrecht’s shoulder pads were glued to a wood beam in the locker room.

  The one Bear who seemed most irked by Payton was Avellini, the prickly quarterback who resented the excessive praise accrued by his teammate. Avellini, according to one of his offensive linemen, “thought he was better than everyone else. I don’t know what he did in college at Maryland, but he thought he was God’s gift to quarterbacking. The linemen—all of us—hated him.” During a luncheon appearance at Chicago’s Playboy Club, Avellini answered a guest’s question by insisting he would throw more to Payton as soon as the halfback started running proper pass patterns. At practice the following day, Avellini spotted Joe Lapointe, the Chicago Sun-Times writer who used the quote. Avellini launched a pass that nearly slammed into the scribe’s head. Walking by, an amused Payton picked up the ball, flipped it to Lapointe, and in his high-pitched cackle, said, “Here, fight back.”

  “Maybe Walter was annoying at times,” said Doug Plank, the longtime safety. “But you had to love his spirit.”

  The kid whose effort and heart were once questioned by Pardee and Finks was suddenly the toughest Bear of them all. Less than twenty-four hours after his historic showing against the Vikings, Payton could be found at the team’s Lake Forest practice facility, jogging back and forth through the chilling winds alongside his teammates. “He was running scout plays to get us ready for Detroit,” said Pardee. “He has his head on straight.”

  With success and fame, Payton noticed teammates beginning to look his way for leadership. While he was hardly one to give a rousing pep talk, his dedication spoke volumes. Payton was usually the first on the field for practice and the last to leave the facility come day’s end. He finished off every run with a forty-yard sprint, and could often be found in a dark corner, completing hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups.

  Whereas others walked through the locker room in either sneakers or sandals, Payton wore shoes without heels or insoles. At practice. At home. On a trip to the movies. Driving his van. “He thought it built up leg strength,” said Plank. “And if Walter thought something could help him, he’d be 100 percent dedicated to the idea. He was always pushing himself and challenging himself to get better. And if you see Walter Payton, a man gifted with so much talent, pushing himself, you want to push yourself, too.”

  Though the offensive linemen didn’t always get along with one another, they came to love Payton. He offered regular credit and encouragement, and following the 1976 season bought each one a gold watch with the inscription THANKS FOR 1,000 YARDS. WALTER PAYTON.

  Blocking for Payton was, in the words of Peiffer, “ joyous . . . easy.”

  “Give him half a hole and he would hit it and be gone,” Peiffer said. “If you did anything at all to block your guy, Walter was going to hit the hole and be past the line of scrimmage.”

  When he was scheduled to appear on national television, Payton showed up with his entire line in tow. “Talk to them,” he told prospective interviewers. “They make me.” While the sentiment was hogwash (if anyone was being “made,” it was his mediocre linemen), it was from the heart. Late in the season, he was especially gleeful when Phyllis George, one of the cohosts of CBS’s NFL Today, came to Lake Forest, ignored Payton, and focused an entire segment on his linemen.

  “You need a nickname,” George told the men.

  “I think we’ll be the Beehive,” Sorey laughed, “because we protect the Sweetness.”

  The red-hot Bears traveled to Detroit to face the Lions on Thanksgiving Day, and Payton was held to twenty yards on seven carries in the first half. At the start of the third quarter, the words WALTER WHO? flashed across the Silverdome scoreboard. Payton’s first handoff of the second half was a forty-three-yard burst around right end. By the time the game had ended, Payton’s statistical line read 137 yards on twenty rushes (he also caught four balls for 107 yards), and Chicago won, 31–14. The Bears were now 6-5 and in the thick of the play-off race.

  With three games left, Payton’s 1,541 rushing yards left him 462 behind Simpson’s single-season NFL record. In the time that had passed between the final week of the 1976 season and now, Payton’s opinion of Simpson underwent a change. Though he harbored no animosity toward Buffalo’s halfback, Payton wondered why, after the 275-yard showing, Simpson had neither called nor offered a public congratulatory word.

  As a running back, Payton liked to think of himself as everything Simpson was not. The Juice was fast and sleek, but about as rugged as a Chanel handbag. He rarely ran through the guts of defenses; footage of Simpson confronting a linebacker or defensive lineman was rare. While Payton shunned the limelight, Simpson was the Reggie Jackson of football—were there a television camera within a hundred yards, he was the one speeding toward it, hair perfectly coiffed, teeth aglow.

  “I was good friends with [49ers wide receiver] Dwight Clark,” said Steve Fuller, who played quarterback for the Bears in the mid-1980s. “He told me that when O.J. was traded to San Francisco [in 1978] the team practiced on one field and O.J. practiced on the other, stretching on his own. The idea of Walter ever behaving like that was ludicrous.”

  When asked about Simpson’s 2,003 yards, Payton hemmed and hawed and acted as if it were insignificant. But the record was significant—to him, to the offensive line, to the coaching staff. “If I don’t catch any passes I feel worthless,” said James Scott, the team’s top wide receiver and a notoriously self
ish player. “[But] I love Walter, and I’d like to see him break O.J.’s record. I’ll do as much blocking as I can.” Chicago won its next two games. With one Sunday remaining, the Bears were the talk of the NFL. Should he exceed 198 yards against the New York Giants, Payton would surpass Simpson. Were the Bears to travel to New Jersey and beat the 5-8 Giants, the team would qualify for the play-offs for the first time since 1963.

  Football storylines have rarely been better.

  They woke up at the Sheraton in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, on the morning of Sunday, December 18, and saw freezing rain.

  Generally speaking, such weather didn’t overwhelm the forty-three members of the Chicago Bears. When one signs a contract agreeing to make Soldier Field his home, he’s well aware of the inclement conditions. “You never fully adjust, you just accept,” said Waymond Bryant, the Bears linebacker. “When it was particularly snowy and cold, I used to try and think about a warm place. It worked until someone hit you and you fell across the snow.”

  In the course of one of the greatest individual seasons in National Football League annals, Walter Payton had run over, around, and through every conceivable obstacle. Frozen rain, though, was the most brutal opponent of all. Especially at Giants Stadium, which featured an unforgiving green Astroturf that made Soldier Field’s cement slab feel like a bed of feathers. As soon as he spotted the rain outside his window, Payton knew hopes of eclipsing O.J. Simpson’s 2,003 yards were diminished.