Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [129]
• On October 10, two days after the Green Bay loss, police arrested Ronald Schons, a twenty-six-year-old Arlington Heights resident who had been making threatening calls to Payton and the Bears. Law enforcement officials nabbed Schons only after Payton noticed his car slowly circling his home.
Schons’ initial threat came on October 1, when he called sportscaster Johnny Morris and said that unless he received one hundred thousand dollars, he would kill Payton. When the demand wasn’t met, Schons telephoned the Chicago Park District’s central switchboard and promised he would shoot Payton during the next game at Soldier Field.
Schons told police that he was a frustrated football player who had “applied with the Bears to become a member of the team.”
• Following a 16–7 Monday Night Football loss at Denver, Payton was asked by Morris in an interview with WBBM-TV to assess Armstrong’s coaching. “I kind of liked Jack Pardee’s philosophy when he was here,” Payton said. “He was the type of guy . . . he did everything and used every resource he had to win that particular game, even if it was overlooking running one extra player or using three plays more than the average, he did it. And that was the difference, I guess. Because when you get in a close situation, you put yourself where you stop thinking about your players. With Pardee, he was thinking about his players as well, but he was thinking about winning that game at the time at all costs.”
Payton apologized a day later, but the mea culpa was unwarranted. His take on Armstrong was 100 percent correct.
• Back in 1978, two years before they became parents, Walter and Connie purchased a giant Airedale terrier. They named it Sweetness, and took the animal everywhere. Having always desired a pet of his own, Walter was enamored by Sweetness, who possessed the hulking stature of a medium-sized house.
Although the Bears had a strict no-pet policy inside their locker room in Lake Forest, who was going to tell Walter Payton that Sweetness wasn’t welcome? On most mornings Payton strolled into the locker room accompanied by Sweetness. The dog snarled, Payton laughed. The dog jumped up on teammates, Payton laughed. The dog defecated on the carpet, Payton laughed. While a couple of Bears players liked Sweetness, the majority thought the dog would be better served elsewhere. Like in a casket.
“Why would anyone want a dog in a locker room?” said Bob Parsons, Chicago’s punter. “Especially that dog.”
Three days before the Denver game, Parsons was standing in front of his locker, lifting his shoulder pads over his head. A handful of players had been messing with Sweetness, taunting the dog with food, pulling his tail, barking wildly. “Well, the dog walks up from behind me, grabs my ass, and bites me right in the butt,” said Parsons. “He broke skin. I mean, he literally punctured my skin. Boy, was I pissed off. What was Walter thinking? Why is your dog in there?”
Parsons’ mood only darkened when Payton responded to the attack by laughing. “I get home that night and the phone rings,” said Parsons. “I pick it up and it’s someone barking like a dog. It was Walter.
“I wasn’t amused.”11
• The Bears traveled to Tampa Bay on October 22, only to be humiliated by the lowly Bucs, 33–19. Payton ran for a paltry thirty-four yards on fifteen carries, but most of the blame belonged to Armstrong and Meyer. Following the game, Dewey Selmon, a Tampa linebacker, said his team knew what was coming. “When Payton lines up at fullback, ninety-five percent of the time he’s going to run,” Selmon said. “It didn’t work every time, but whenever he did that we put [linebacker Richard] Wood on him.”
Although the offense had been predictable under Pardee, it had never been this predictable. “When I was up in the press box getting ready for the game, I’d write down the number twenty-five and put a circle around it,” said