Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [153]
Two months later, on March 15, Connie gave birth to Brittney, the couple’s second child. The arrival was all over the news, and images showed Walter gazing lovingly toward his little girl.
Before long, Payton would be named Chicago’s Father of the Year by the Illinois Fatherhood Initiative.
He accepted the award.
How could he behave in such a way? How could a genuinely good guy (and Walter Payton was, in many ways, a genuinely good guy) ignore one child while lavishing affection upon two others?
“I can’t explain it,” said Ginny Quirk, Walter’s longtime assistant and the vice president of Walter Payton, Inc. “I feel like, for many years, I knew Walter as well as anyone. I saw him at his best and at his worst. I saw him incredibly high and incredibly low. But how he could completely ignore his own child . . . I just don’t have an answer.”
There is, of course, an answer. Not a pretty one—but an answer nonetheless. Against logic and most theories of human emotion, Payton took all thoughts of Nigel and simply erased them. He removed the infant from his brain; literally ceased thinking about him. “Our office [in the 1990s] was in Schaumburg, a stone’s throw away from where Nigel lived,” said Kimm Tucker, the executive director of Payton’s charitable foundation. “Walter couldn’t face it. He could not. I told Walter that if he wanted to get right with God and if he wanted God to heal him, he’d have to do the right thing. But in this area, he couldn’t. He just put Nigel out of his mind.” And if someone brought the boy up? Well, nobody brought the boy up because, save for four or five confidants, nobody knew he existed. From Connie to teammates to coaches to close friends, Nigel was a nonentity. One time Linda Conley, a close family friend, took Walter to see a palm reader on a lark. “She took his wrists and she said, ‘I see three children—you have three children,’ ” said Conley. “Walter snatched his wrists back. That really got to him.”
When Angelina contacted Walter’s office to request money or supplies, she was never turned down. But Payton refused to take the call. An assistant handled everything. “Walter would see Angelina every once in a while, and he hated it,” a friend said. “He never showed any interest in Nigel. That’s the type of person he could be.”
Payton loved women. But—and this includes Connie—they were disposable. Athletes often say that excelling at the highest level of sport takes an uncommon level of focus. If one finds a woman willing to accept certain conditions (as was the case with Connie), a relationship can work. It’ll be one-sided and emotionally unfulfilling. But it will, in a strictly mechanical sense, work.
That’s the way people speak of Walter and Connie’s union. Initially, at Jackson State, the pairing was about love and companionship. But by the mid-1980s, the demise had begun. Yes, Walter’s infidelity hardly helped. But the problem went beyond that. When the season was over, Walter rarely stuck around. A handful of pictures showed him changing diapers or holding a bottle, and for brief spells he was interested. But the images were largely staged; moments in time arranged by a photographer or magazine editor. “Was Walter an involved father?” said Bud Holmes. “No. Not really.”
Payton devoted much of his away-from-the-field time to his two passions—fast vehicles and hunting. Both were pastimes Connie had zero interest in.
Through the years, Payton’s garage and driveway served as headquarters to an endless showcase of pricey, high-performance