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Then, one day, a man holding a whistle changed his life.

CHAPTER 2

LEARNING THE GAME

HIS MEMORY IS FOGGY. UNDERSTANDABLY SO. IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FORTY years since Charles Boston initially laid eyes on the thirteen-year-old boy with the tears streaming down his cheeks. In the decades that followed, kids have come and kids have gone. Many have graduated college, some have dropped out of high school. Most are alive. Too many are deceased. There are parents and grandparents, doctors and lawyers and garbagemen and street sweepers and drug dealers.

“Hard to keep track,” Boston said. “Time flies.”

This, however, the former head football coach at John J. Jefferson High School remembers. This, he will never forget.

“The first time I saw Walter Payton?” Boston said. “Well, it was pretty obvious he was no ordinary kid.”

The year was 1966. Though it had been twelve long years since the United States Supreme Court had declared racially separate public schools to be unconstitutional, nobody in the state of Mississippi paid the ruling much mind. So Jefferson High School remained what it had always been—underfunded, lacking resources, and, to Columbia’s vast white population, irrelevant.

Walter Payton was an eighth grader, known in small pockets of the school either for his drumming or, more likely, for his relation to Eddie Payton. The brothers were separated by three grades; by this time Eddie was a certifiable star and the talk of Jefferson High athletics. Unlike his demure sibling, Eddie had it all. He dated the prettiest girls, hung out with the coolest kids, walked with a can’t-touch-this swagger. Though he was known to goof off and crack jokes in class, Eddie was largely given a free pass by teachers—a nod to his status.

In the summers, Eddie was signed by a couple of local black semipro baseball teams, the Columbia Jets and the Laurel Blue Sox, earning ten dollars a game in return for his line drives into the gaps and smooth glove at shortstop. He played varsity baseball and basketball at Jefferson, and excelled in both. “Truth is, in high school Eddie was faster than Walter and tougher than Walter,” said Charles Virgil, a classmate. “He was only about five foot six, yet he could stand flatfooted directly under the basket, jump up, and dunk the ball.” It was on the gridiron where Eddie Payton truly excelled, emerging as one of the state’s best half backs. Just how good was Eddie? Columbia High’s white players flocked to Gardner Stadium to see Payton in action. “We’d all go and sit in the northeast stands and just be blown away,” said Steve Stewart, Columbia High’s standout linebacker. “He was so much better than anything we had. Eddie Payton was the best football player I’d ever seen. He did things none of us could imagine.”

And what of Walter? The head coach of Jefferson High School, Charles Boston, had been aware that somewhere within the building’s confines his all-everything halfback had a younger brother. But it wasn’t until an otherwise nondescript weekday afternoon that knowledge and reality collided. Boston, who also served as Jefferson’s assistant principal, was sitting in his office, looking over some papers, when he was told that a junior high student was crying in the courtyard.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Oh, just Eddie Payton’s little brother.”

Boston ran out to find Walter, all of five foot five, withering in pain on the ground. He had snapped his collarbone in a game of sandlot football, and his left arm now dangled like a fork on a string. “He’s crying and crying and crying,” said Boston. “So I picked him up, called his mother, and took him to Marion County General Hospital.”

Throughout the long, gray hallways of Jefferson High School, everyone knew Charles Boston, and Charles Boston knew most everyone. Granted, he was the assistant principal, as well as the football coach. But it was more than that. In Boston, Jefferson’s students found an advocate; a man who genuinely believed that, despite reason to think otherwise, young black boys and young black girls could