Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [131]
He was then asked if perhaps Bobby Collins, the soon-to-be-named head football coach at Southern Miss, was available. Holmes checked, to no avail.
“Bobby’s busy, too,” he said.
Was there anyone, Burch wondered, who might serve as a capable speaker?
“Well,” said Holmes, “I have this one kid who’s about to be drafted into the NFL. I can bring him.”
“Great,” said Burch. “We’ll see you there.”
Four days later, Walter Payton pulled up to Holmes’ house, only to be greeted by two hundred or so high school seniors, all white, all dumbfounded by the sight of their black marquee guest. “So they’re assembled, eating their hot dogs and hamburgers,” Holmes said. “And Walter got up there and started talking, and he told a joke or two and they didn’t laugh. And the more he talked, the more silent they were. I was like, ‘Damn, these sons of bitches sitting here are being rude to Walter because he’s black.’ I was ready to run each and every one of them out of there. They come and eat my food at my place and they act like that? It was terrible.”
Just when Holmes was about to snap, an amazing turn of events took place. Instead of cowering or slinking off, Payton talked smack. The Steelers and Vikings were scheduled to meet in the upcoming Super Bowl, and he was rooting for Pittsburgh. “One thing I know,” Payton told the crowd, “is those Steelers are gonna rip apart the Vikes.”
The kids started hooting.
“No?” Payton said. “You don’t agree? Who here says Pittsburgh’s gonna kick some ass?”
A bunch of hands went up.
“Well, who thinks the Vikings are gonna kill ’em?”
More hands.
“Within five minutes of him finishing that talk, those kids—all white—were shaking his hand, asking for his autograph,” said Holmes. “I sat right there and said, ‘I don’t know how well this boy can run a football, but he has a unique charisma about him that you don’t teach.’ Just like you don’t teach someone to run a football, you can’t teach that skill of reading people. You might show them a little bit, but you can’t teach it. I recognized right there that Walter had a certain gift from the Lord for communicating and reading people.”
Over the ensuing four years, Holmes watched as his client blossomed socially. The same man who would be moody and shy and awkward and dismissive when placed in an undesirable setting (talking with the press, accepting criticism from a coach or teammate, being told by Connie what to do) morphed into a bolt of lightning when the spirit moved him. It was almost as if Payton were two different people—the one who brooded at the most insignificant slight vs. the one whose goal was to make everybody feel wanted. Charlie Waters, the standout safety for the Dallas Cowboys, never forgot meeting Payton for the first time at the 1976 Pro Bowl in New Orleans. “We’re at practice, and nobody really knows each other that well so the conversations are sort of stilted,” Waters said. “Well, after practice ended Walter wanted to play a game of touch football, so he rounded up a bunch of the athletes and we played touch. He was the Ernie Banks of football. All fun, all joy.”
Following the 1978 season, Payton—momentarily interested in becoming a commodities broker—interned at Heinold Commodities, Inc., in Chicago. The company’s employees expected a dumb, disinterested jock going through the motions. Instead, Payton was the life of the party—taking coworkers out for lunch; telling loud, rollicking stories; laughing uproariously. “He lit up many a room,” said Holmes. “That was Walter.”
When it comes to describing Payton’s persona, the word “complicated” is frequently evoked. Jerry B. Jenkins, Payton’s coauthor on his 1978 autobiography, recalled meeting Walter for the first time at the half back’s home. “He was wearing a skimpy pair of dark green Speedos,” said Jenkins. “I thought he had just gotten out of the shower, but later I realized he did this kind of thing all the time just for shock value.” A couple of weeks later, Jenkins scheduled to meet Walter for a prearranged interview. Nobody was home when Jenkins arrived at the house,