Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [145]
Ditka’s time in Chicago was blissful—he caught 316 passes for 4,503 yards and thirty-four touchdowns and, along with Sayers and Dick Butkus, became a face and symbol of the franchise. Unlike many of his teammates, however, Ditka refused to cower at the sight of the legendary Halas. When, in 1967, Ditka threatened to jump to the Houston Oilers of the American Football League, Halas dismissed him as a traitorous ingrate. Ditka responded with one of the great one-liners in the history of organized sports, accusing Halas of being so cheap “he throws nickels around as if they were manhole covers.”
Ditka was promptly traded to Philadelphia, where he endured two seasons with the lowly Eagles before finishing his career with four solid years in Dallas. Upon retiring after the 1972 campaign, Ditka was hired by Landry. It was the oddest of coaching marriages. Landry was cool and detached. Ditka once famously picked up a table during a card game and threw it into a wall. “All four legs stuck,” recalled Dan Reeves, a former Dallas player. “I said, ‘Man, this guy hates to lose.’ ”
During a game between the Cowboys and Redskins early in his coaching career, Ditka stormed the field, itching to berate an official who called one too many penalties against Dallas.
“Are you a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes?” Ditka asked.
“No,” replied the official.
“No?” Ditka said. “Well, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Ditka spent nine years alongside Landry, studying his every move. The Cowboys were brilliant—they drafted wisely, stressed discipline, discarded those players who shunned hard work.
The Chicago Bears under Neill Armstrong did none of these things.
That’s why Ditka wrote the letter to Halas. Because, more than wanting to coach, he wanted to see the Bears return to their proper place atop the NFL.
On January 20, 1982, two weeks after Armstrong was dismissed, Halas held a press conference in his office. Calling himself a man of destiny and promising to bring Chicago “a winning football team, an interesting football team, and a football team that everybody is going to be proud of,” the forty-two-year-old Ditka was named the tenth head coach in franchise history. His contract, a three-year deal that provided a hundred thousand dollars annually, made Ditka the NFL’s lowest-paid coach. He didn’t care—this was home.
Sitting alongside Ditka was a beaming Halas who, after allowing Finks to call the shots for more than seven years, had had enough. “Jim Finks will be in charge of all information on the draft,” said Halas, eighty-six years old but still sharp and quick-tongued. “And that will be submitted to Mike and me, and we’ll go over it.” (His responsibilities gone, Finks resigned in August, 1983.)
Though Chicago’s fans seemed to be thrilled with Ditka’s return, the media was less enamored. Those few who remembered Ditka as a player couldn’t imagine such a hot head surviving as a coach. In a blistering piece titled “Hiring Ditka Would Be Madness,” the Sun-Times’ John Schulian pointed out that “some of the people who have known Ditka best . . . wonder if there is a punch line to this joke.”
So how did Walter Payton feel? In a word: indifferent. Having suffered through the hope and disappointment of two coaches, the Bears’ brightest star knew better than to immediately buy into Ditka’s bluster about toughness and heart. In fact, for the first time ever, Payton took off all of January. “It’s been a tough year physically,” he explained to the Tribune. Approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, Payton was beginning to increasingly ponder the wisdom of surrendering his body to a franchise that did little to protect it. “Why,” he wondered aloud, “should I sacrifice so much for this team when this team doesn’t sacrifice for me?”
Walter Payton demanded an answer.
He received three.
• First,