Chicago followed up the Cardinals triumph with wins over the 49ers and Lions, then dropped a nail-biter to the rival Vikings, 24–20. Throughout the city, fans were elated by a 3-1 start that had the Bears looking like contenders. Payton, however, was miserable, and needed to let everyone know how he felt. Through the first four games, Payton ran for 298 yards—164 less than the previous season. Usually jovial and upbeat around teammates, he now could regularly be found sitting alone at his locker, a pair of enormous black headphones blocking out the world. Like most of his peers, Payton gave constant lip service to the importance of winning. Football, he repeatedly said in good times, was a team game. “If the team wins, I’m happy.” But now the team, led by a rugged defense, was winning, and he wasn’t happy. To friends and family members, Payton whined about Armstrong’s boring, predictable offense; about Avellini’s limited ability at quarterback; about a line that seemed to take plays off and contribute to his pummeling. Following the Vikings defeat, Payton noticed a golf ball-sized lump on his forearm that was filled with puss and blood. “Walter was poking it, and he looked like he wanted to throw up,” said John Skibinski, a fullback. “His body was thrashed week after week.”
Most of his complaints were valid, but the team was 3-1. “People at Walter’s level of performance are often moody and guarded, and Walter was no exception,” said Caito, the longtime Bears trainer. “There were times when you just left him alone and walked away.”
“When Walter got all quiet, all bets were off the table,” said Ted Albrecht. “It wouldn’t last for long, but when it did, well, you stayed away. Far away.”
This was the first time many teammates were exposed to their superstar’s underbelly, and they didn’t much care for it. Through his first three years in the league, hundreds of adjectives had been used to describe Payton, but never “selfish.” He played hard, he played hurt, he stayed in games until the very end. Yet perhaps winning wasn’t quite as singularly important to Payton as he’d initially let on. Even Harper, his blocker and best friend, was at a loss. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone,” Harper said. “He’d get in his own world, put those headphones over his ears, and ignore everything.”
Never great with the media, Payton was now avoiding the press altogether. He would agree to interviews, then fail to show up. Or he’d respond to lengthy questions with dismissive one- or two-word answers. Yes. No. Maybe. Don’t care. No comment. Pierson, thirty-four years old and the best of Bears beat writers, wasn’t one to let an athlete walk all over him. In the September 29, 1978, Tribune, he teed off. “Payton is acting like a very hollow person these days,” he wrote. “Writers and even some teammates are thinking of changing his nickname to ‘Sourness.’ Or at least to ‘Sweet and Sour,’ befitting his moodiness. Some wondered if he really did sign a new contract.”
“Walter didn’t like dealing with the press, and he let it show,” said Pierson. “You had to ask him the same question three or four times before you got an answer, and it usually wasn’t a good one. I think he took pride in being an opposite sort of guy—you ask him to do something, he takes the opposite route.”
Had Pardee still been coach, Payton surely would have been called into the office for a talking-to. “Just so I get this straight, Walter,” he’d likely say. “We’re three-one, and you’re moping. Really?” Armstrong, however, was no Pardee. He wanted to win, but he wanted to win with happy players. “Neill had great credentials, but he was too nice,” said Dan Neal, the Bears center. “Discipline fell off, because not as much was asked of us. Football coaches can’t please everyone, and Neill probably tried too hard.”
Chicago was the least-happy 3-1 club anyone had ever seen, and the outlook only worsened as the losses began to mount. Following the setback to the Vikings, the Bears dropped seven straight games, including humiliating showings against the lowly Buccaneers and Seahawks.
For Payton, there was a series of troubling incidents:
• In the days leading up to a matchup at Green Bay, Payton told a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal that the Packers were overrated and unworthy of their 4-1 record. Green Bay’s Steve Luke, the starting strong safety, was incensed. “I made a point that week of shutting down Walter and shutting down their sweeps,” said Luke. “Every player has one game from their career that sticks out. That’s mine.”
Though Payton ran for eighty-two yards on nineteen carries, he was merely an afterthought in the Packers’ 24–14 victory. Luke, meanwhile, returned an interception sixty-three yards for a touchdown. Whenever he tackled Payton, he made sure to remind him of his words. “It became a matter of pride,” Luke said afterward. “Pride is all-important.”
• On October 10, two days after the Green Bay loss, police arrested Ronald Schons, a twenty-six-year-old Arlington Heights resident who had been making threatening calls to Payton and the Bears. Law enforcement officials nabbed Schons only after Payton noticed his car slowly circling his home.
Schons’ initial threat came on October 1, when he called sportscaster Johnny Morris and said that unless he received one hundred thousand dollars, he would kill Payton. When the demand wasn’t met, Schons telephoned the Chicago Park District’s central switchboard and promised he would shoot Payton during the next game at Soldier Field.
Schons told police that he was a frustrated football player who had “applied with the Bears to become a member of the team.”
• Following a 16–7 Monday Night Football loss at Denver, Payton was asked by Morris in an interview with WBBM-TV to assess Armstrong’s coaching. “I kind of liked Jack Pardee’s philosophy when he was here,” Payton said. “He was the type of guy . . . he did everything and used every resource he had to win that particular game, even if it was overlooking running one extra player or using three plays more than the average, he did it. And that was the difference, I guess. Because when you get in a close situation, you put yourself where you stop thinking about your players. With Pardee, he was thinking about his players as well, but he was thinking about winning that game at the time at all costs.”
Payton apologized a day later, but the mea culpa was unwarranted. His take on Armstrong was 100 percent correct.
• Back in 1978, two years before they became parents, Walter and Connie purchased a giant Airedale terrier. They named it Sweetness, and took the animal everywhere. Having always desired a pet of his own, Walter was enamored by Sweetness, who possessed the hulking stature of a medium-sized house.
Although the Bears had a strict no-pet policy inside their locker room in Lake Forest, who was going to tell Walter Payton that Sweetness wasn’t welcome? On most mornings Payton strolled into the locker room accompanied by Sweetness. The dog snarled, Payton laughed. The dog jumped up on teammates, Payton laughed. The dog defecated on the carpet, Payton laughed. While a couple of Bears players liked Sweetness, the majority thought the dog would be better served elsewhere. Like in a casket.
“Why would anyone want a dog in a locker room?” said Bob Parsons, Chicago’s punter. “Especially that dog.”
Three days before the Denver game, Parsons was standing in front of his locker, lifting his shoulder pads over his head. A handful of players had been messing with Sweetness, taunting the dog with food, pulling his tail, barking wildly. “Well, the dog walks up from behind me, grabs my ass, and bites me right in the butt,” said Parsons. “He broke skin. I mean, he literally punctured my skin. Boy, was I pissed off. What was Walter thinking? Why is your dog in there?”
Parsons’ mood only darkened when Payton responded to the attack by laughing. “I get home that night and the phone rings,” said Parsons. “I pick it up and it’s someone barking like a dog. It was Walter.
“I wasn’t amused.”11
• The Bears traveled to Tampa Bay on October 22, only to be humiliated by the lowly Bucs, 33–19. Payton ran for a paltry thirty-four yards on fifteen carries, but most of the blame belonged to Armstrong and Meyer. Following the game, Dewey Selmon, a Tampa linebacker, said his team knew what
was coming. “When Payton lines up at fullback, ninety-five percent of the time he’s going to run,” Selmon said. “It didn’t work every time, but whenever he did that we put [linebacker Richard] Wood on him.”
Although the offense had been predictable under Pardee, it had never been this predictable. “When I was up in the press box getting ready for the game, I’d write down the number twenty-five and put a circle around it,” said Meyer. “That was my reminder that Walter needed to have the ball at least twenty-five times if we were to have any chance of winning.”
Through the first eight games, the Bears had opened with a run 88 percent of the time, and started every possession with a run 82 percent of the time. They scored touchdowns or field goals on 40 percent of the series that began with passes, but only on 20 percent of the series that started with runs. “One statistic is indisputable,” Pierson wrote. “The Bears have lost five in a row.”
Walter Payton’s father died on December 11. Five days later, in the name of pride and professionalism and whatever else one chooses to call it, Peter Payton’s youngest son took the field, a member of a bad team playing a meaningless game to cap a nightmarish season.
The Bears beat the Washington Redskins 14–10, with Payton’s forty-four-yard touchdown run on the first series setting the tone for a victorious day. His 1,395 yards for the year would rank second in the league, behind a Houston Oiler rookie named Earl Campbell. Yet those who followed Chicago football knew numbers were meaningless. The 1978 season had been a disappointing one for Payton and a disappointing campaign for the 7-9 Bears.
Even the glow from the win extinguished quickly. With forty-eight seconds remaining in the game and the Bears’ offense on the field, Roland Harper found himself eight yards short of one thousand rushing yards for the season. One month earlier the New York Giants were leading the Philadelphia Eagles, 17–12, with thirty-one seconds left. Instead of taking a knee, Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik turned to hand off to fullback Larry Csonka. The ball was fumbled, and Eagles safety Herm Edwards picked it up and ran twenty-six yards for the game-winning score.
With that image fresh in his mind, Armstrong had quarterback Mike Phipps fall on the ball until the clock ran out. Harper spoke indifferently. (“Neill was a Christian, and I loved that about him,” said Harper. “Did I want the thousand yards? Of course. But I was a team player first and foremost.”) Payton, however, fumed. For all his greatness as a runner, Payton took immense pride in the crushing blocks he set to spring his dear friend. “Walter was actually a better blocker than runner,” said Hank Kuhlmann, the running backs coach. “Without him, Roland isn’t close to that many yards.” In the history of the NFL, only two pairs of teammates had run for one thousand yards in a season. Now here they were, at the end of an insignificant game, and Armstrong couldn’t even reward the team’s most selfless, most beloved player with a couple of carries? Was this some sort of cruel joke?
“We were all pissed off after that,” said Avellini. “There were plenty of times that season when Roland was supposed to get the ball on a trap play, but when we’d get to the line Walter would say, ‘Do you mind if we switch—you block and I run?’ I’d turn to Roland and ask if that was OK. And he never complained—never. He would switch. He was just a wonderful teammate. The perfect teammate. You’d do anything for him.
“Against Washington, everyone on the bench knew how close to one thousand yards Roland was, and if Neill didn’t, well, shame on him.”
Harper wound up with 992 yards and with that, the Bears’ disastrous 1978 season came to an end.
Payton did his best to forget the whole year.
CHAPTER 16
THE UNBEARABLE BEARS
WAY BACK IN JANUARY 1975, A COUPLE OF WEEKS BEFORE WALTER PAYTON was drafted by the Chicago Bears, Bud Holmes received a call from Charles Burch, the father of a member of the football team at Petal High School in Petal, Mississippi.
“Bud,” Burch said, “I have a small favor to ask.”
At the time, Holmes was best known as the agent of Ray Guy, the splendid Oakland Raiders punter who had starred at Southern Miss. Petal High was planning on holding a barbecue for its graduating seniors, and Burch wanted to know if Holmes—a big Petal High supporter who was hosting the event on his spacious lawn—could have Guy stop by and say a few words.
“Ray’s busy,” Holmes replied. “I’m sorry.”
He was then asked if perhaps Bobby Collins, the soon-to-be-named head football coach at Southern Miss, was available. Holmes checked, to no avail.
“Bobby’s busy, too,” he said.
Was there anyone, Burch wondered, who might serve as a capable speaker?
“Well,” said Holmes, “I have this one kid who’s about to be drafted into the NFL. I can bring him.”
“Great,” said Burch. “We’ll see you there.”
Four days later, Walter Payton pulled up to Holmes’ house, only to be greeted by two hundred or so high school seniors, all white, all dumbfounded by the sight of their black marquee guest. “So they’re assembled, eating their hot dogs and hamburgers,” Holmes said. “And Walter got up there and started talking, and he told a joke or two and they didn’t laugh. And the more he talked, the more silent they were. I was like, ‘Damn, these sons of bitches sitting here are being rude to Walter because he’s black.’ I was ready to run each and every one of them out of there. They come and eat my food at my place and they act like that? It was terrible.”
Just when Holmes was about to snap, an amazing turn of events took place. Instead of cowering or slinking off, Payton talked smack. The Steelers and Vikings were scheduled to meet in the upcoming Super Bowl, and he was rooting for Pittsburgh. “One thing I know,” Payton told the crowd, “is those Steelers are gonna rip apart the Vikes.”
The kids started hooting.
“No?” Payton said. “You don’t agree? Who here says Pittsburgh’s gonna kick some ass?”
A bunch of hands went up.
“Well, who thinks the Vikings are gonna kill ’em?”
More hands.
“Within five minutes of him finishing that talk, those kids—all white—were shaking his hand, asking for his autograph,” said Holmes. “I sat right there and said, ‘I don’t know how well this boy can run a football, but he has a unique charisma about him that you don’t teach.’ Just like you don’t teach someone to run a football, you can’t teach that skill of reading people. You might show them a little bit, but you can’t teach it. I recognized right there that Walter had a certain gift from the Lord for communicating and reading people.”
Over the ensuing four years, Holmes watched as his client blossomed socially. The same man who would be moody and shy and awkward and dismissive when placed in an undesirable setting (talking with the press, accepting criticism from a coach or teammate, being told by Connie what to do) morphed into a bolt of lightning when the spirit moved him. It was almost as if Payton were two different people—the one who brooded at the most insignificant slight vs. the one whose goal was to make everybody feel wanted. Charlie Waters, the standout safety for the Dallas Cowboys, never forgot meeting Payton for the first time at the 1976 Pro Bowl in New Orleans. “We’re at practice, and nobody really knows each other that well so the conversations are sort of stilted,” Waters said. “Well, after practice ended Walter wanted to play a game of touch football, so he rounded up a bunch of the athletes and we played touch. He was the Ernie Banks of football. All fun, all joy.”
Following the 1978 season, Payton—momentarily interested in becoming a commodities broker—interned at Heinold Commodities, Inc., in Chicago. The company’s employees expected a dumb, disinterested jock going through the motions. Instead, Payton was the life of the party—taking coworkers out for lunch; telling loud, rollicking stories; laughing uproariously. “He lit up many a room,” said Holmes. “That was Walter.”
When it comes to describing Payton’s persona, the word “complicated” is frequently evoked. Jerry B. Jenkins, Payton�
�s coauthor on his 1978 autobiography, recalled meeting Walter for the first time at the half back’s home. “He was wearing a skimpy pair of dark green Speedos,” said Jenkins. “I thought he had just gotten out of the shower, but later I realized he did this kind of thing all the time just for shock value.” A couple of weeks later, Jenkins scheduled to meet Walter for a prearranged interview. Nobody was home when Jenkins arrived at the house, and after sitting in the driveway for ninety minutes he left. That night, when he called the Payton household, Walter’s mother answered the phone. “Walter feels bad about what happened,” she said. “He wants you to come tomorrow at the same time.”
When Jenkins knocked on the door the following day, Payton made amends. “He apologized,” Jenkins said, “and as we were talking the phone rings. He picks it up and exaggerates the falsetto quality of his already high voice and said, ‘Hello. No, this is his mother. May I take a message?’ When he gets off the phone he winks at me and said, ‘Sorry about yesterday. I forgot.’
“That,” said Jenkins, “was just the way Walter was.”
Though not officially diagnosed until later in his life, when Payton first learned of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) he knew he was one of the afflicted. Payton lacked the ability to sit still for more than a minute or two. His mind raced, his fingers twitched, his knees bounced. He could pace incessantly, and when he spoke his hands moved at 100 mph. He alternated between being a great listener and a terrible one. In 1977 Jenkins spent sixty hours interviewing Payton for the book. “While we talked he played pinball, prehistoric video games, watched TV, and painted his trophy room,” said Jenkins. “I sat asking questions in the middle of the room while he painted one wall.” Patience wasn’t a virtue. He usually slept only two or three hours per night, and not by choice. “Were it possible,” said Roland Harper, “he wouldn’t have slept at all. There was too much to do and too little time.”
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