Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [118]
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 selfish 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.
“There was no way I was going to run for 199 yards on that surface,” he wrote, “so I could just forget about that. The sole concern now was to figure out how to beat the Giants in their own stadium on a terrible day.”
The words come straight from Payton’s 1978 autobiography, and while they read nicely, the sentiment is untrue. Dogged to the end, Payton wanted the record, and his linemen really wanted the record. “The Giants hadn’t played by the rules,” said Albrecht, the rookie left tackle. “They didn’t sweep the field beforehand, which would have been the right thing to do. But before the game our locker room was very emotional. We needed to win. But we also needed to get Walter what we thought was his.”
“All of our linemen felt very loyal to Walter, and they probably felt like that record was also their record,” said Pardee. “But we got to the stadium and there was ten inches of snow on the field. We were a running team. We had a running philosophy. Our running back was the best in the NFL. But ten inches of snow is ten inches of snow.