Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [125]
Anxious to make a positive impression, Armstrong didn’t broach the injury as he and Payton shook hands for the first time. The two were standing inside a room within Soldier Field’s bowels. Payton, wearing jeans and a brown pair of cowboy boots, walked with a slight limp. Coach and player chatted aimlessly when Payton bent his knees, jumped straight up, and grabbed hold of a wood beam four feet above his head. As he dangled, Armstrong had a single thought: “Good God.”
“A coach couldn’t ask for a better present than Walter Payton,” Armstrong said. “He loved to practice, he always went hard, he gave it everything he had, he was playful, he was gifted. There are people and there are special people. He was special.”
Like most everyone who has ever met Armstrong, Payton took to his new coach. He would incessantly pester him about expanding his role, halfserious, half-joking.
“Coach, I wanna play defense.”
“No, Walter.”
“Coach, let me return kickoffs like I used to.”
“No, Walter.”
“Coach, if you ever need a punter . . .”
“No, Walter.”
“On and on and on,” said Armstrong. “If every member of that team were as eager as Walter, we’d have won the Super Bowl.”
The Chicago Bears organization, though, left Payton puzzled. About to enter his fourth season, he looked around at the team’s shoddy facilities and cringed. He saw how tight the organization was with money and sighed. 10 He watched from afar as Finks made one questionable move after another and genuinely wondered whether he was the only person scratching his head. A couple of weeks after Armstrong was hired, the Bears announced that their new offensive coordinator was Ken Meyer, the former San Francisco 49ers head coach not exactly known for innovative play calling. Were that not bad enough, entering the May 2, 1978, Draft the Bears lacked bullets, having sent their first-round selection to Cleveland for a past-his-prime quarterback named Mike Phipps (the Browns used the pick to take Alabama tight end Ozzie Newsome, who went on to a Hall of Fame career) and their second-round slot to San Francisco for a past-his-prime defensive lineman named Tommy Hart.
What frustrated Payton most, and what made him question his own future in Chicago, was Finks’ approach toward renegotiating his expiring contract.
Entering the ’78 season, Payton had one year remaining on a deal that would pay him approximately sixty-six thousand dollars in base salary, with thirty thousand dollars more potentially available via performance bonuses. According to a scathing March 13 Tribune article titled “How Bear Salaries Rate,” Payton—the reigning NFL MVP, who rarely took a play off and who served as the centerpiece of an otherwise inept offense—not only earned less than stars like Buffalo’s O. J. Simpson and Washington’s John Riggins, but also Redskin halfback Mike Thomas (the Redskins’ fifth-round pick in 1975, the same year Payton was drafted fourth overall). Wrote Don Pierson: “Compared with all players regardless of experience, twelve of twenty Bear starters received below-average pay.”
Knowing the Bears’ thriftiness was starting to wear thin on a city aching for football glory, Bud Holmes, Payton’s agent, went on the offensive. To any reporter who asked, Holmes insisted that Payton would demand more than the $733,000 being made annually by Simpson, who had