Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [17]
The photograph, apparently taken in front of Jefferson High, shows a serious Payton. He is neither frowning nor smiling, but staring blankly into space, perhaps wondering whether this Columbian-Progress photo shoot is some sort of joke. In all his years at Jefferson, Eddie’s picture had never appeared in the Progress.
For the first time ever, the whites in Columbia were talking about Jefferson High’s football team. The innovative Jefferson offense combined blinding speed with sharp cuts, funky patterns, and innovative play calling. Payton and Moses even gave themselves their own nicknames—Payton was “Spider-Man,” Moses “Sugar Man.” The sobriquets stuck.
The two schools in town, the white and the black, usually played on back-to-back days at Gardner Stadium—Columbia High always first, Jefferson second, when the field was a mangled salad of dirt and grass chunks. As the season progressed, and talk of the Payton-Moses running tandem grew, an increasing number of fans either attended both games, or skipped out on Columbia High altogether.
Playing in something called the Tideland Conference, Jefferson’s team traveled across Mississippi aboard a pair of beat-up old yellow school buses, complete with torn green seats and the inexplicable scent of dead elk. Boston always strove to schedule the hardest possible competition, which meant the Green Wave trekked an hour and a half to Laurel to face Oak Park High, and nearly two hours to Picayune for a date with George Washington Carver High. The travels were joyless, back-road jaunts to nowhere, with bus drivers always keeping an eye out for redneck cops looking to make an easy collar.
Jefferson went 8-2 Payton’s junior year, routinely dismantling opponents. With a six-foot-six, 260-pound tackle named Bobby Price leading the way, Walter carried the football anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five times per game, emerging as Mississippi’s best black halfback. Boston had been around long enough to know Payton was destined to be different. So he worked tirelessly with him. Payton was stronger than most linemen and faster than most defensive backs, but he initially lacked the ruggedness his coach had insisted upon. Boston drilled into his head the idea of attacking defensive players; of slamming into the tacklers before the tacklers slammed into him. He instructed Payton to use body parts as weapons—a sharp elbow to the chest, a pulverizing forearm to the chin.
Wrote Payton in his autobiography:
He taught me that when I could no longer successfully elude a tackler, I should let the man have a memory of the tackle as vivid as my own. In other words, why should I be the one who gets clobbered? As long as there are two of us in on the play, and I have been slowed by others to the point of where I can’t break away from him, he ought to take half the blow. Then it won’t hurt me so much. I enjoyed that. It made sense.... More and more often, the second time a guy came at me, he remembered that first shot he’d taken from me. If he hesitated or rolled into his tackle instead of driving into it, I had the upper hand. I’d ram right through him or over him, and suddenly it was the scared little running back scoring rather than the big brute executing a crushing tackle.
Because Columbia and Jefferson never played each other, the school’s biggest rival was all-black Marion Central High, located three miles across town. Leading up to the meeting, Boston was more animated than usual. The Tigers were coached by Leslie Peters, a former Jefferson High star who was building an impressive program. “Here’s the deal,” Boston told his players the morning of the game. “If you score seventy points, I’ll throw a barbecue for the entire team.”
A barbecue? For everyone? Behind multiple Payton touchdowns and a big passing day from Johnson, the Green Wave jumped out to a 64–0 lead,