Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [132]
When Jenkins knocked on the door the following day, Payton made amends. “He apologized,” Jenkins said, “and as we were talking the phone rings. He picks it up and exaggerates the falsetto quality of his already high voice and said, ‘Hello. No, this is his mother. May I take a message?’ When he gets off the phone he winks at me and said, ‘Sorry about yesterday. I forgot.’
“That,” said Jenkins, “was just the way Walter was.”
Though not officially diagnosed until later in his life, when Payton first learned of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) he knew he was one of the afflicted. Payton lacked the ability to sit still for more than a minute or two. His mind raced, his fingers twitched, his knees bounced. He could pace incessantly, and when he spoke his hands moved at 100 mph. He alternated between being a great listener and a terrible one. In 1977 Jenkins spent sixty hours interviewing Payton for the book. “While we talked he played pinball, prehistoric video games, watched TV, and painted his trophy room,” said Jenkins. “I sat asking questions in the middle of the room while he painted one wall.” Patience wasn’t a virtue. He usually slept only two or three hours per night, and not by choice. “Were it possible,” said Roland Harper, “he wouldn’t have slept at all. There was too much to do and too little time.”
“He was fascinated by physical stimulus,” said Ken Valdiserri, the Bears’ longtime coordinator of media relations. “Anything that would just charge up a moment. A cherry bomb blowing up in front of people and seeing their reaction. He was stimulated by visual and flesh and emotional stimulus all at once.”
Reporters hated dealing with him. None stated any dislike for Payton. They simply could not pin the man down. “He was as difficult to capture on paper as he was on the field,” said Ron Rapoport, a Sun-Times columnist. “You never really felt as if you were getting to the bottom of him. The better he got, the more you wanted to know. The more you wanted to know, the more he kept you at a distance. The tough thing was that we weren’t out to get the goods. We just wanted to know the guy and explain the guy. Here was this great player, and we had such great admiration for his abilities. We weren’t there to hurt him, but to burnish the legacy.
“There was one game when Walter played brilliantly, and afterward he blew all the writers off. We were livid, because it wasn’t the first time. Only later did we learn that he had promised an ill child some time, so he couldn’t talk. And why the stupid son of a bitch didn’t take us into his confidence and say, ‘This is what I’m doing—give me a minute,’ I’ll never know. He was one enormous enigma.”
Was Payton the dark cloud that brooded in the aftermath of insufficient carries, or was he the happy-go-lucky fool who tossed lit firecrackers at teammates’ heads and skipped around training camp wearing a sombrero? Why did he seem to take so much pleasure in slapping guys so hard on the buttocks that, come the next morning, they’d be sitting atop a black-and-blue welt? Why were his hugs, literally, suffocating? Why did he relish sneaking up behind teammates and ripping the hairs from their calves? How did he seem so aloof one moment, then remember the name of your cousin the next? “He knew things about you that you didn’t think he’d know,” said Jimbo Covert, a Bears offensive lineman from the 1980s. “Something going on with your family. The names of your nephews. Little things that no other teammate would get.” Grasping Payton’s behavior was like trying to take hold of a wet ferret. He could be the most sensitive person in the room, then turn around and say something that drew gasps and condemnation. Payton was prone to making inappropriate comments about teammates’ sexuality that some found funny and others found disturbing. There