Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [101]
As soon as the Bears returned to Chicago, Payton packed up his apartment, loaded the Datsun, and headed back to Mississippi. He longed for warm weather and familiar smiles and some time away from the NFL grind. He spent his days fishing, napping, seeing old friends, and hanging out in old haunts.
Five months later, when he prepared to return to Chicago for summer training camp, Payton turned grumpy and dark. He dreaded going back. He asked Connie about moving with him to the Windy City—a proposition she found most unappealing. “If you want me to be there with you,” she said, “then we need to be together the right way.”
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “If I don’t marry you, you really aren’t going to come to Chicago?”
Connie nodded.
A day later Walter presented Connie with a ring and assured her he would take care of the wedding arrangements. He called a pastor at Mount Cathray Baptist Church in Jackson and roped in two friends to serve as witnesses. Just how meaningful was July 7, 1976, the day they were to be wed? Connie forgot all about it. “I was out at the mall wandering around with some friends,” she wrote. “I came home that evening with some shopping bags, only to find him sitting in my living room, pouting.” With a furrowed brow, Walter glanced toward his future wife. “How dare you forget this day,” he said. “First, you’re going to make me marry you, and then you forget the day?”
“No, I’m ready,” Connie said. “Let’s go now.”
The two headed for the church. No family members were invited or, for that matter, informed. The service was unremarkable. Afterward, Connie called her mother to explain. “You and Daddy work so hard every day, and to even give me the wedding you would feel I wanted would have been a financial burden,” she said. “I don’t want you to feel like this is something you have to do for me.”
Oh, one more thing. Their daughter was dropping out of college to move to Chicago.
CHAPTER 13
THE WAKE-UP CALL
THE MESSAGE WAS FAR FROM SUBTLE. BUT, THEN AGAIN, NEITHER WERE JIM Finks and Jack Pardee, the two men responsible for turning around football’s most woeful franchise.
On February 21, 1976, right around the time Walter Payton was fishing along the Pearl River, the Bears announced that the winner of the Brian Piccolo Award as the team’s rookie of the year was—drum roll—Roland Harper.
Roland Harper?
From afar, it made little sense. Sure, Harper was a punishing blocker who started ten games and ran for 453 yards. But even when the holes didn’t exist and defenses were stuffing the line with eight men, Payton was routinely spectacular. Many of his 679 yards materialized from nothingness, and his twisting, spinning dashes for daylight reminded one of a butterfly evading a net. “He could jump through the smallest hole,” said Bob Avellini, the Bears quarterback. “And even if that hole became stuffed, he’d still find a way to get four yards. When Walter didn’t gain yards, he still gained yards.”
But as the Bears prepared for the 1976 season Finks and Pardee continued to question the half back’s drive, work ethic, and durability. Almost immediately after the players reported to Lake Forest—a college town twenty-five miles north of Chicago—for training camp in July, Payton began complaining of nausea and dizzy spells. On July 14, the third straight day of two-a-day workouts, he twice had to be helped off the field, much to the chagrin of his head coach. “I hope he’s all right,” Pardee told reporters. “I don’t know what it is. He feels good and wants to go out and then he has dizziness and feels weak. He has a sinus condition which can affect the inner ear and cause nausea. But we’re not going to work him out when he’s sick.”
Pardee, a man who survived Bear Bryant’s ten-day summer football camp in Junction, Texas, as well as