Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [119]
When the Bears players stepped onto the field for warm-ups, they were shocked. To hell with running—it was hard enough to stand without falling. Ray Earley, the team’s longtime equipment manager, had packed everyone’s turf shoes for the trip, an enormous error in judgment. As the weather forecasters had predicted, this wasn’t a field, so much as the East Rutherford municipal skating rink. “It was a joke,” said Peiffer, the center. “The worst surface I’ve ever seen.”
Shortly before kickoff, Bob Markus, a writer for the Tribune, called a friend who ran a sporting goods store in New Jersey. The man said he had a couple of dozen pairs of spiked shoes available, if the Bears so desired. Earley bolted the stadium, picked up the footwear, then rushed back. “It was kind of a leathery sneaker with a grip,” said Jeff Davis, who was working the game for NBC. “They were better than nothing.” By they time the shoes reached the locker room, however, it was halftime, and everything that could have gone wrong for the tennis shoe–clad Bears had gone wrong. The score was 3–3. Chicago fumbled the ball twice, while gaining a mere twenty-one yards on the ground. Half the players were suffering from frostbite, and Payton was shivering by his locker. Snot dripped from his nose. He was coughing. “It was miserable,” said Joe Lapointe, who covered the game for the Chicago Sun-Times. “There were thirty-five thousand no-shows wisely missing a game nobody wanted to watch.”
With the 5-8 Giants playing for pride and a paycheck (“Our organization was a complete mess,” said Gordon Gravelle, an offensive tackle. “Dysfunctional inside and outside the locker room.”), the host team’s primary focus was keeping Payton’s name out of the record book. New York excelled in few areas, but it boasted a stout run defense that ranked eighth in the league by allowing just 126.6 yards per game. “The only thing we did well was shut down running backs,” said Clyde Powers, a New York defensive back. “We had Brad Van Pelt, who was a strong tackler, and Harry Carson was emerging. That gave us a chance against someone like Walter.”
Both teams failed to score in the third quarter, but the Giants took a 6–3 lead early in the fourth when Joe Danelo kicked a nineteen-yard field goal. The Bears responded by marching down the field behind Avellini, whose twenty-six-yard pass to Scott set up Earl’s four-yard touchdown run. Bob Thomas’ extra point attempt was blocked, however, and Danelo’s twenty-seven-yard field goal with thirty-eight seconds left in regulation tied things at nine.
The game was heading into overtime.
“There has never been a worse day to play football, so while I really, really wanted to win, I also really, really wanted the game to end so I could go inside,” said Peiffer. “I remember on one play the Giants had an interception on us and I was cutting across field, completely uninvolved. The defensive tackle had an angle on me, and he hit me hard. I landed on my back and slid about ten feet across the ice. My shoulder pads acted as a scoop and loaded my jersey with ice. I looked at him and said, ‘Goddamn, was that necessary?’ He just laughed and laughed.”
The Bears had gone fourteen years without reaching the postseason. Though Payton’s chances of breaking Simpson’s record had long ago evaporated, Chicago’s players wanted to win and get the hell out of the cold and into the play-offs.
Early in the extra session, a handful of short Avellini passes set up a thirty-five-yard field goal attempt. Thomas jogged onto the field, stepped back, waited for the ball to be snapped, burst forward, swung back his right leg, and pushed it wide left. Two possessions later the ritual repeated itself, this time at the eleven-yard line. Thomas prepared to kick, the ball was snapped, and then bounced twice before being picked up by Avellini, who threw an incomplete pass to linebacker Doug Buffone. “I was getting worried there a little,” Plank later said. “I was starting to wonder, ‘How long can this keep going on?’ ”
The Bears mounted one last drive. With 1:22 remaining, they took