Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [179]
Unlike most of his teammates, Payton never allowed himself to be placed into a custom-fitted athletic cliché. As Mike Ditka and Jim McMahon and Mike Singletary spoke of the dreamlike glow that accompanied Super Bowl qualification, Payton seemed to sit back and cynically wonder whether this was as good as it got. He certainly would have preferred to be dancing a jig and floating on air, but to his great dismay, the spirit failed to move him. Having rushed for 275 yards in a game and having broken Jim Brown’s record, Payton knew what it was to stand atop the football mountaintop. He already had tasted caviar and drank Dom Pérignon. When the fans exited Soldier Field and the aisles were swept and the lights were shut off after the Rams game, Payton was left with a sinking feeling that, after eleven years of playing for the ultimate team moment, it wasn’t such a moment after all.
His ho-hum outlook was hardly helped by Chicago’s opponent. Ever since the Monday Night loss to Miami in Week 13, Payton and most of his teammates were itching for a rematch with the Dolphins. When Don Shula’s club reached the AFC Championship game, a Miami-Chicago Super Bowl seemed to be all but written in blood.
Somehow, though, the Patriots, an 11-5 wild card qualifier without a single household name on its roster, snuck into Miami and battered the Dolphins, 31–14. Instead of the media spending two weeks wondering whether Dan Marino could again carve up the Bears, the media would now spend two weeks wondering how badly Chicago’s 46 Defense would decimate the Patriots’ feeble offensive attack. New England already lost to the Bears, 20–7, in the second week of play, and was rightly listed as an early ten-point underdog. Weeks before kickoff, NFL Films had begun preparing a three-hundred-thousand-dollar production of the Bears’ Super Bowl season. No New England video was in the works. “To be honest, we went into the Super Bowl knowing we were a better team, and that the Patriots couldn’t win,” said Cliff Thrift, the linebacker. “We were big, we were bad, and we were going to kick their butts. No mystery about it.”
As was NFL policy, both organizations had two weeks to kill before the big game. Ditka gave his players three days off, and Chicago spent the rest of the first week working out at the University of Illinois’ football field, which featured artificial turf and an enormous vinyl-coated polyester covering reminiscent of the Superdome. Some 175 journalists from across the globe attended the closed practices, desperate for newsworthy nuggets in an otherwise sports-dead time of year.
“What will it mean not to have the Honey Bears next season?” a reporter asked Steve McMichael of the soon-to-be-disbanded cheerleading squad.
“It sounds to me,” the defensive lineman replied, “like you guys are running out of questions.”
The Super Bowl beat took on significantly more liveliness on the night of Monday, January 20, when the Bears’ chartered flight left arctic Chicago (temperature: thirteen degrees) and arrived at New Orleans International Airport (temperature: seventy-two degrees). “We got on the buses from the airport to our hotel, and a convertible full of girls pulled alongside us and started taking their tops off,” said Tom Andrews, a Chicago center. “That was where it started.”
Raymond Berry, New England’s old-school coach, ran a tight ship. At the Hotel Intercontinental there were nightly curfews and meetings atop meetings. All players were expected to carry themselves in a manner befitting a professional football player. Ditka, on the other hand, demanded little—practice relatively hard, don’t get arrested, and seize the day. Inside the New Orleans Hilton, where the Bears were based, the lobby bar was a magnet for action and the party never seemed to end. “Man, we had a great time,” said Maury Buford, the punter. “I remember we flew down and Mike didn’t put a curfew on us. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—we could do whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted. By Wednesday we were begging him for a curfew, because we were partied out.”
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