Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  “That,” said Quirk, “is what Walter was experiencing.”

  Quirk and Tucker came to expect Payton’s manic mood swings—giddy one second, despondent the next. He kept a tub of painkillers inside a desk drawer and popped them regularly. He ate greasy fast foods and gorged on fettuccine carbonara (his favorite dish) and dumped ten sugar packs into each cup of coffee and dunked pork rinds into hot sauce. Though a fast metabolism prevented Payton from gaining excessive weight, they worried how it all impacted his psyche. “He ate junk,” said Conley. “Fettuccine Alfredo with crumbled bacon. Chili dogs. Corn dogs. And fried pork chops, and I mean fried hard.” Never an imbiber as a player, Payton now drank his fair share of beer. He behaved erratically and was prone to strange and confounding moments. Holmes vividly recalled visiting the office for a meeting. “Walter came in and he was bouncing off the walls,” he said. “He was totally incoherent, all hopped up on these painkillers. I remember he turned on his computer and he wanted to show some old porn crap. His eyes were all weird. I said, ‘Walter, what the hell?’ He drank a couple of beers and I couldn’t believe it. Who was this person?”

  By this point in his life Payton was convinced that he suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and began taking the Ritalin tablets prescribed to a friend’s son. Quirk and Tucker encouraged him to resume exercising—Walter, go to the gym; Walter, take a jog. Nothing. They took his calls at all hours, wondering what odd or exciting or devastating words would emerge from his lips. Payton berated. Payton praised. Payton laughed. Payton cried. He hated his wife—“Why won’t she just fucking leave me?” He hated Gonzalez—“What the fuck is wrong with this bitch?” He wanted Choy back. He wanted Choy dead. What appointments were scheduled for the next day? Cancel them. Don’t cancel them. Let’s do lunch. No, let’s not. I have an amazing idea. I have a terrible idea. Like many Americans, Payton turned especially forlorn during the holiday season. He felt the pressure of having to be everywhere at once—with Lita in New Jersey; with his kids in Arlington Heights; with his mother in Jackson, Mississippi. He said he hoped something bad would happen to him, just so he had an excuse to stay home and hide. “No matter what I do,” he said, “I can’t win.”

  Payton made spur-of-the-moment decisions that baffled those around him. He accepted an invitation from the World Wrestling Federation to serve as Razor Ramon’s guest manager for something called SummerSlam. Despite being petrified of deep water, he teamed up with Chuck Norris to try and break the Chicago-to-Detroit 605-mile powerboat record (they failed). He became founding director of the First Northwest Bank of Arlington Heights. He hinted at a run for mayor of Chicago (this from a man who often failed to vote). He tested Quirk and Tucker’s loyalty with insults and threats and, literally, thirty to fifty phone calls per day. Walter on his cell. Walter from his apartment. Walter in the house. Flowers one minute, taunts the next. “It was like having a husband,” said Tucker, “without the intimacy. He was terribly lonely. People loved Walter. People were drawn to him. But he never had the love of a partner who filled him up. It was tragic.”

  “He was so manic,” said Quirk. “The flux in his moods was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

  On multiple occasions Payton threatened to commit suicide. Usually following a fight with Connie or Lita. Or after being reminded that, even with such a legendary high-profile career, he still had to worry about finances. Payton looked in the mirror and hated the reflection. He was supposed to be happy and secure, and yet he was anything but. The love he received from fans was wonderful and great, but it wasn’t real. The diehard Bear loyalist wearing the No. 34 jersey knew Walter Payton as a halfback, but he didn’t know Walter Payton. Everything was surface and superficial. What would they think, Walter wondered, if they saw him away from the field, cheating incessantly and failing as a businessman?

  Once, during a particularly down period, he entered the house at 34 Mudhank with his gun drawn, telephoned a friend, and crying, uttered, “I’m going to end it now.”

  “Walter would call me all the time, saying he was about to kill himself,” said Holmes. “He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead.” The first time such a threat was made, Holmes dropped what he was doing and flew from Mississippi to Illinois to console his client. By the time he arrived, Payton’s mood had swung positive. Holmes never again took his threats seriously.

  Despite the urging of those around him, Payton refused to see a psychologist or social worker. What would that say about his strength and fortitude? He was supposed to be a hero. Heroes didn’t do therapy.

  On one particularly dark day, Payton wrote a friend a letter, saying that he needed to get his life in order and that he was afraid of doing “something” he’d regret. In the note, Payton admitted that he regularly contemplated committing suicide. Thinking about “the people I put into this fucked-up situation,” he wrote, “maybe it would be better if I just disappear.” Payton said he imagined picking up his gun, murdering those around him, then turning the weapon on himself. “Every day something like this comes into my head,” he wrote. He was distraught over these persistent thoughts about wanting to “hurt so many others” and not thinking “it is wrong.” Payton ended the letter by admitting that he needed help—but that he had nowhere to turn.

  Payton often called Quirk late at night, his voice soft and emotionless. Quirk could usually tell what was coming. Doom. Gloom. “You won’t see me when you get to the office tomorrow,” he’d say. “Enjoy life without me.”

  On one occasion, Quirk picked up the phone and heard this: “I’m ending it. I’m no longer going to exist. And if you think I’m not taking you with me, you’re wrong.”

  “I usually chose to ignore those threats,” said Quirk. “I never fully believed him. But it was definitely a cry for help.”

  Quirk and Tucker often considered leaving. There were certainly other job opportunities out there that didn’t involve this sort of drama. But the women found themselves bonded by a confounding sense of loyalty toward Payton. They saw him at his best, and believed his goodness outweighed the negatives.

  “When you love someone,” said Quirk, “you don’t simply throw them away.”

  Along with Studebaker’s, Payton was an investor/owner in four other establishments. Those who asked were told that Payton relished the business; that there was nothing he’d rather do than show up at the Pacific Club in Lombard or the Acapulco Bar in the Holiday Inn–Elk Grove to shake hands, sign autographs, and mingle with his customers. The claim was nonsense—Payton hated having to worry about money, and resented that so many past investments had fallen flat. Were it not for Payton Power, the profitable power equipment company he owned with Mike Lanigan, Payton’s business track record would be uniquely terrible. “It ate him up,” said Tucker. “The instability of it all.”

  In 1993, Payton was in the midst of opening America’s Bar, a downtown Chicago club that would feature Top 40 music and the city’s only one-dollar all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. With the establishment set to debut in ten days, three building inspectors stopped in, conducted an evaluation, and told Gary Wallem, the general contractor, that the opening would have to be delayed until a proper permit was acquired. Payton requested a meeting with the men the following day, and showed up carrying a large gym bag. He looked at the first inspector and said, “What’s your name?”

  John Doe.

  “Walter pulled out a football and a pen and wrote, ‘To John Doe—your good friend, Walter Payton,’ ” said Wallem. “Then he did it for the other two inspectors as well.”

  At the conclusion of the ritual, Payton said, “So, about that permit . . .”

  “What permit?” replied the first inspector. “Your permit is fine with us.”

  The story is funny, and Wallem tells it with gusto. Yet Payton detested this sort of thing. He had always scoffed at celebrities trading in their fame for perks and business favors, and now Payton was trading in his fame for perks and business favo
rs. This wasn’t how he had envisioned his life after football. It was beneath him. Beneath his image of Sweetness.

  On many nights Payton refused to sleep, instead staying up to drink bottles of Coca-Cola, gorge banana-flavored Laffy Taffys, and watch old movies. He would slump down on his couch, his eyes gazing longingly toward the escape of the large screen before him. When a Roger Ebert–esque thought entered his head, he had to share it.

  “Ginny, quick, turn to channel seven. Scaramouche is on.”

  Walter, it’s four thirty A.M.

  On multiple occasions Walter would excitedly call one of the women from a clothing store or jewelry kiosk or shopping mall. “I want to buy something, but I need an opinion first,” he’d say. “Drop everything and get over here now.”

  “We had no choice,” said Quirk. “We dropped everything. We were possessions to Walter. People were like puppets on a string to him. He tested you and tested you. Did Kimm and I have healthy relationships with him? No.”

  The women hated Payton. The women cherished Payton. At his absolute best, when the darkness subsided and the sun shone brightly, Payton could be spectacular. “He was,” said Tucker, “addicted to laughter. When he was happy, all he wanted to do was laugh and laugh and laugh. He had many flaws. But Walter had a genuine desire to make people happy.” If fans approached him with footballs to sign, Payton first insisted on a quick game of catch. If they wanted him to shake a child’s hand, Payton knelt down and engaged the youngster in a conversation about school. When John Gamauf, his friend and business partner, told him about the passing of his father, John, Sr., Payton asked for the phone number of his mother, Irma. “Walter called her regularly for the next six months,” Gamauf said. “Just to say hello.”

  While traveling to Orlando for a vacation, Payton—sitting in first class—was told that a ten-year-old boy named Billy Kohler was on the plane, heading to Disney World courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. In need of both liver and kidney transplants, Billy’s odds of survival were long. “We’re on the plane and a stewardess comes up and says, ‘There’s someone who would like to meet you in first class,’ ” said Jim Kohler, Billy’s father. “We go up front and who’s standing there—Walter Payton.”

  Payton introduced himself and knelt down to Billy’s level. “You’ve been facing a lot of adversity,” he told the boy. “You will come through this. No matter what follows, you need to keep your head up, you need to keep fighting forward, and you need to believe. You’ve gone through more in your short life than most of us have in a lifetime.”

  Overcome by the moment, Billy began sobbing. Payton tickled him beneath the chin. “You’re a hero,” he said. “Just know that—you’re a hero.”21

  After retiring from the Bears, Payton traveled most places with a pair of bodyguards, David Robinson and Tony Frencher. They were big men—both in excess of three hundred pounds, with muscles and scowls to match. Payton, however, never wanted them to intimidate or keep people at bay. “We were there mainly to help him out,” said Robinson. “Walter was a man of the people.” In the early 1990s Frencher coached a Pop Warner team in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook. Though loathe to make requests of his employers, Frencher asked Payton to appear at the year-end banquet. “Walter told me he’d try his best and that he’d call to get directions,” Frencher said. “Well, he never called, and on the night of the event I was worried he wasn’t coming. I’m sitting at the banquet when a kid walks in and says, ‘Coach Tony, someone is outside looking for you.’ ” Frencher exited and was greeted by a breathtaking sight: Walter Payton surrounded by the entire Bolingbrook Police force. “He had called the cops to ask for directions,” said Frencher, “and every officer in the city came to get pictures with him.” Payton’s talk, Frencher recalled, was “amazing,” as was the ensuing hour, during which he posed for individual photographs with every Pop Warner player. “The kids were between nine and eleven,” he said. “And their year was made that night.”

  A part of Payton actually looked forward to giving speeches, for which he earned anywhere from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars a pop. He would pick up the microphone, pace the stage, feed off the energy. It mattered not whether he was addressing a convention of Cub Scouts or American Express executives. He never relied on notes or any sort of script. “Walter would always say, ‘If you have to speak, speak from the heart,’ ” said Conley. “He said that if you speak from the heart, you can’t go wrong.” Those who expected stories of Mike Singletary and Jim McMahon found themselves surprised, but not disappointed. Payton talked mainly of life—“If you go somewhere, always have pictures of your children on you,” he would say. “They’re the meaning to it all. The real meaning.”

  With the message guiding his way, and with nowhere else to turn, Payton seemed to devote more time to his two children with Connie. Though never an overwhelmingly bad father to Jarrett and Brittney, Payton was too often an absentee one. There was always somewhere else to be and someone else to attend to. Football. Racing. Business. Women. “Do you think Walter made any sort of effort to be home for dinner with the kids every night?” said Conley. “Do you think Jarrett and Brittney had a genuinely happy home life with their father? Of course not.” Now confronting his own personal struggles, Payton tried harder. He committed himself to teaching his offspring right from wrong. Especially Jarrett. Having grown up in rural Mississippi, loading mounds of dirt onto a wheelbarrow and spending summers spreading it across his yard, Walter feared his son’s corruption via money and celebrity. The boy had enjoyed countless perks because of his father’s fame—a weekend at Camp David with President George H. W. Bush, a spot at the impossible-to-get-into Michael Jordan Basketball Camp, appearances in television commercials. Walter often complained to friends about his son’s apparent softness (“He didn’t understand why Jarrett didn’t run more, why he didn’t lift more,” said Dan Davis, a fellow coach at Hoffman Estates High. “He didn’t think he had much desire.”), and he wanted him to know grit and grasp dedication and appreciate the virtues of an honest day’s work. Throughout the bulk of his teenage years, Jarrett spent summers employed at Payton Power, a company Walter co-owned that supplied heavy equipment. “People might have thought he’d go easy on me,” Jarrett said. “No way. I made minimum wage, and I did every hard task there was. I’d cut grass, pick up machines and bring them back to the shop, hose them down, make sure they were OK. I was lunch boy—every day I was the guy sent to get everyone lunch. He didn’t have to do that . . . he could have let me stay home and play video games. But my dad felt like something needed to be instilled in me.”

  When it came to his son, Walter was all about lessons. Right vs. wrong, noble vs. selfish, wise vs. inane. During his eighth-grade year at Barrington Middle School, Jarrett was caught with alcohol on his breath—a byproduct of the screwdrivers he and a friend had shared the night before. When Walter found out, he brought his son downstairs, sat him at the basement bar, poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s and said, “If you wanna drink, Jarrett, drink this.”

  “No,” the boy cried from beneath his hangover. “I don’t want to drink. I don’t want anything.”

  “No, no, no,” his father replied. “You said you wanted to drink. Drink this.”

  “Dad, please,” Jarrett said. “Please, no.”

  “Look,” Walter said, “you have many decades ahead of you to have drinks whenever you want. Right now is just not the time.”

  That same year one of Jarrett’s fellow students, a girl named Becky Glance, was slapped by a male student. Jarrett challenged the boy to a fight, and wound up breaking his nose and causing a blood clot in his eye. After picking her son up, Connie called Walter to fill him in. He asked to speak to Jarrett. “So you got in a fight, huh?” Walter said.

  “Yeah,” Jarrett replied.

  “Well,” said Walter, “I’ve got something to give you tonight.”

  Jarrett knew he was in trouble. When Walter entered the house later that evening, though, he
removed his wallet from his pocket and handed his son three hundred-dollar bills. “That was the right thing you did,” he said. “You stand up for women. I’m proud of you.”

  Long a lover of video games (he was a master of Ms. Pac-Man), Payton delighted in visiting arcades with his son and challenging him to marathon competitions of Terminator 2 or Street Fighter. “People would gather around,” Jarrett said, “ just to watch my dad.” In 1997, Payton purchased a new Porsche 911 Turbo. The car was black, and sleek as a leopard. One night, at two A.M., Walter entered the house on 34 Mudhank, snuck into Jarrett’s room, and shook him awake. “Get up, kid!” he said. “Come on . . . get up!” He proceeded to lead Jarrett out of the house and into the Porsche. “We drive out to [Interstate] 90, and there are no cars on the highway,” Jarrett said. “He says, ‘Get your seat belt on.’ I’m like, ‘What?’

  “I got my seat belt on and he just let that baby loose, man. I still remember my head going back. The speedometer had the little red numbers, and we hit almost one-eighty. How cool was that? How many dads do that type of thing?”

  Unlike his father, Jarrett wasn’t an otherworldly athlete, destined for unquestionable superstardom. He refused to play football until his junior year at St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, choosing to make a name for himself as an all-state soccer player (he spent several years as a member of the Chicago Pegasus Soccer Club, one of the top amateur clubs in the country). Though he had little interest in or knowledge of the intricacies of the sport, Walter attended most of Jarrett’s soccer games, cheering from the sidelines alongside all the other parents. When, as a junior, Jarrett decided to give football a shot, Walter’s emotions were mixed. On the one hand, he could now offer his son valuable advice. On the other, Jarrett Payton would inevitably be compared with Walter Payton—and that wasn’t fair. “I call it the gift and the curse,” said Jarrett. “It’s great having a name, but it can hold you back, too.”