Jeff Pearlman - Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton

Table of Contents

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Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, October 2011

Copyright 2011 by Jeff Pearlman

All rights reserved

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ISBN : 978-1-101-54463-1

1. Payton, Walter, 19541999. 2. Football playersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
GV939.P39P43 2011
796.332092dc22
[B]

2011011466

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A NOTE ON SOURCING

The identifications of four sources are protected by pseudonyms through this book. They are: Lita Gonzalez, Nigel Smythe, Angelina Smythe, and Judy Choy.

As an author, this is not something I relish. However, the contributions of the individuals were deemed more valuable than the names themselves.

To Cathy Lieberman
The embodiment of strength and compassion

PROLOGUE

THE OLD MAN ANSWERED THE DOOR. I DIDNT SHUDDER OR TAKE A STEP BACK or cringe or gasp or stammer. I simply looked him over, hunched and shriveled inside a fleece jacket, a blue taxi drivers cap pulled low atop his head.

I had been told ahead of time that Walter Paytons administrative assistant would likely greet me at his Hoffman Estates, Illinois, office on this arctic February morning in 1999, and while I didnt picture the person to be a senior citizen, it wasnt beyond the realm of possibilities that Paytonlong known for his big heart and common-man sensibilitieswould give a seventy-year-old the job.

And who are you? the man asked.

Hi, I said. Im Jeff Pearlman with Sports Illustrated . I have an appointment.

Uh... yeah, he said. I suppose you do.

Yes, I said. Im here to see...

Then I stopped.

And gasped.

With a tilt of his head, I noticed something jarring: The old mans eyes were yellow. Not light yellow, either. It appeared as if all the white had been drained from the sclera, replaced by the bright hue of a YIELD sign. That wasnt all. Upon closer inspection, his cheeks were sunken, his shoulders coat-hanger thin, his forearms mere pencils.

He was not old. He was sick.

Nice to see you, the man said, nodding wearily before extending a hand. Im Walter Payton.

That was the first time I met him.

That was the last time I met him.

We spoke for no more than thirty minutes. He sitting behind a desk, metwenty-six years old and nervous as all hellfiddling with my pen and notepad. A couple of days earlier, Payton had announced in a press conference that he was suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare disease in which the ducts that drain bile from the liver become inflamed and blocked. It was flabbergasting newsnot merely because, at age forty-five, Payton was still relatively young, but because he was the last person you would ever think this could happen to.

Forget that Payton was the NFLs all-time rushing leader, or that he is arguably the leagues best-ever all-around football player, or that he missed but a single game over thirteen seasons. In the course of researching this book, Ive heard five hundred different descriptions of Paytons unparalleled physicalityof the weights he lifted; of the linebackers he pulverized; of the cocksure muscleheads he arm-wrestled to submission; of the grip that, according to an old Bears fullback named John Skibinski, took hold of you like a vise, until your hand turned blue and numb. My favorite analogy came from one Richard McMurrin, a building superintendent at the Chicago Bears training complex in Lake Forest, Illinois, and a man not drawn toward exaggeration. Walter, McMurrin told me, was like a cannonball with skin stretched over it.

Although he had been retired for twelve years at the time we met, football players old and young still mythologized Paytons Hillan incline that once stood near his house in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It was just sixty yards long but rose at an angle of 75 degrees, with loose dirt and small rocks and pebbles making footing treacherous. All off-season long, Payton would be sprinting the hill, up and down, up and down, up and down. Hed invite some of the guys to work with him, said Vince Evans, a former Bears quarterback. If you hadnt been to the hill before hed look at you and laugh, because Walter would just climb up that like a bobcat. And youd follow in his dust. I was a pretty good athlete, so the first time I said, This aint nothing. Well, halfway up I was sucking air. Once that one was over, he said we were going to do ten more. Ten? That was the real eye-opener to this guys power.

So how the hell did this make sense, me fidgeting before a man who looked nothing like the five foot ten, 205-pound ball of iron from McMurrins memories? According to the public statements of his doctors, Payton needed a liver transplant to survive beyond two years. That was, it turns out, incorrect. By the time we met, Paytons body was already ravaged by bile duct canceran awful byproduct of primary sclerosing cholangitis. His odds of survival? Infinitesimal.