Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [12]
Because he was routinely compared to his faster, stronger, more developed and more gregarious older brother, classmates and teachers tended to overlook Walter’s abilities. “Eddie was cocky, and Walter wasn’t,” said Robert Virgil. “Walter was soft-spoken, and Eddie had this incredible vocabulary, where he knew every word the teachers asked. It would be hard to have an older brother like that and not go unnoticed.” Yet as he aged, going from elementary school to junior high, Walter’s athleticism began to blossom. To start with, he was uncommonly strong, with a grip that drained the color from others’ hands, and stumpy-yet-powerful legs that churned like a cement mixer. Walter never tinkered with weights (at black schools like Jefferson High, the very idea of any sort of weight room was laughable), but he developed early—the muscles along his chest and forearms beginning to sprout at age twelve. “Walter got big, and we could no longer handle him physically,” said Eli Payton, a classmate and distant cousin.2 “It happened overnight.”
During recess, Walter and his peers played outside the school. On Sundays, he and a gaggle of friends headed over to Westerfield Park for violent pickup games of tackle football. Walter insisted on playing quarterback, and he did so brilliantly. His arm was a cannon, his feet light and quick. Most impressive, he broke out a move previously unseen at Jefferson; an unstoppable little device where, when a tackler approached, Walter lifted one of his arms and forcefully jabbed the kid in the sternum. THUD! “That’s the first time any of us saw the stiff-arm,” said Woodson. “Thing was deadly.”
“I look back at my style of playing football, and that evolved from my childhood because I loved the game of war,” Walter once said. “When I held the football and somebody was going to take my football, I was going to hit them back first. I worked for that position and I wasn’t giving it up or backing down.... I started then learning how to juke and spin and make me impossible to catch. That all came from my childhood. That is something that a coach did not instill in me, that particular style.”
While Walter enjoyed sports, his apparent calling—one vigorously pushed by his parents—was music. For their middle child’s seventh birthday, Alyne and Peter bought a drum set, then spent the ensuing years having their eardrums pulverized. What Jefferson High lacked in organized athletics, it made up for with a spirited music program that put the all-white Columbia High to shame. Beginning in sixth grade, Jefferson’s students could audition for the school’s dynamic marching band. Alongside Johnson, who mastered the trumpet, Walter tried out as a drummer/bongo player. Both made the cut. “It was thrilling,” said Johnson. “The band gave us a way to travel and go places. The football team had a rigorous schedule, so the band did, too.” Walter was eleven years old at the start of his sixth-grade year, and up until that point he’d rarely left the Marion County limits. Thanks to band, on September 11, 1964, he traveled via bus to Jackson, where the Jefferson High Green Wave faced the Jim Hill High School Tigers. Years later, Walter remembered little of the on-field action—the score, the stars, the uniform colors. What he could not forget, however, was the feeling of being there; of performing music before a large crowd; of seeing people stomp and clap and cheer. It was true love.
Though he never fully learned to read music, Walter could hear a song once or twice and immediately play it to perfection. Because Mississippi’s black high schools were spread out across the state, the marching band made its way alongside the football team north and south, east and west. “We went to Biloxi, we went to Picayune,” said Johnson. “We’d go to high-powered schools with great bands, and we’d show ’em how it’s done.”
By the time Walter entered the seventh grade, Eddie Payton was officially a local star. He was popular, funny, cocky, and good with the girls. Decked out in his band uniform, Walter Payton couldn’t compete. He was