Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [178]
“Our entire goal was to shut Eric down,” said Cliff Thrift, a Bears linebacker. “Our defense didn’t just strive to control a player like Eric. We wanted to dominate him.”
As was tradition, the Bears spent the night before the game at the McCormick Inn, a hotel in downtown Chicago. At six thirty A.M., Suhey heard a loud banging on his door. It was Payton. “He burst into the room and started jumping on the bed, biting me,” Suhey said. “He was so hyper . . . he was even talking about going to the boat show. He was really wired. He was really anxious for this day to come.”
With the crosswinds gusting around the stadium at 25 mph and a late snow sprinkling the field and 63,522 fans in a frenzy, the Bears punished Dickerson, holding him to forty-six yards on seventeen carries and forcing two fumbles. On his first carry of the game, Fencik nailed him for no gain. The tone was set. In pileups, Chicago’s defenders twisted Dickerson’s ankles and clawed at his eyes. When referees were looking elsewhere, they made his knees prime targets. It was, by far, the most vicious beating he would take in what became an eleven-year Hall of Fame career.
Technically, Payton was little better, running for a paltry thirty-two yards on eighteen attempts and catching seven passes for forty-eight yards. But his output mattered not. The Bears jumped out to a 10–0 halftime lead, scored again on a twenty-two-yard touchdown catch by Gault in the third quarter, then sealed it when Marshall picked up a fumble and rambled fifty-two yards into the end zone. With 4:26 left in the first quarter, the scoreboard flashed: THE BEARS WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL OUR FANS FOR THEIR SUPPORT IN THE 1985 SEASON. The game was already over.
With two minutes remaining and the score 24–0, Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” blared from the Soldier Field speakers. Euphoric fans swayed their bodies back and forth, one enormous ocean of frigid glee. They chanted “Super Bowl! Super Bowl! Super Bowl!” When the game ended, the Bears players darted off the field, waving to the fans, twirling towels, laughing and smiling and shouting.
Payton took his own path. Gazing skyward, he sauntered slowly across the turf, helmet dangling from his right hand. Over the past decade, he had attended two Super Bowls as a guest, only to depart by halftime. This time, he would be going as a star.
CHAPTER 20
SUPER LETDOWN
IN THE VISITING TEAM’S LOCKER ROOM OF THE LOUISIANA SUPERDOME, THERE is a broom closet. It is small and dank and cluttered, with darkness’ only foe a dangling hundred-watt lightbulb.
Ever since the stadium opened in 1975, football players big and small have used the closet for privacy and solitude. From prayer to euphoria to furor to despair, the room serves as a confessional booth at the Church of Battered Bodies (and Souls).
On the night of January 26, 1986, with his teammates whooping and hollering inches away, this is where one could find an outraged Walter Payton.
How did it come to this? How did the Bears’ 46–10 walloping of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX end with an iconic NFL superstar wallowing in a pool of disgust and self-pity?
“To understand,” said Bud Holmes, his agent, “you have to know Walter.”
Beginning with the day following the NFC Championship game, Payton had been behaving, for lack of a better word, strangely. Of all forty-five members of Chicago’s active roster, he had the greatest right to cherish the Super Bowl birth. He had been with the team longer than anyone; was witness to the lowest lows; was forever motivated by his 1975 debut, when the Colts held him to zero yards and the fans filed out in stunned resignation. “Walter knew what it was like to be a Bear when the Bears were a joke,” said Steve Fuller, the quarterback. “This was his moment.