Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [2]
I can only imagine what Payton must have been thinking, staring at a trembling Sports Illustrated reporter a mere four years removed from college. “I’m dying, and this is who you send?” He had that right. I was completely unqualified. I knew nothing about liver disease, little about suffering, and even less about death. In the entirety of my life, I had lost only two close relatives—both grandparents in their eighties.
“I’m dying, and this is who you send?”
The interview was mostly me looking down at a sheet of paper with a list of medical terms, reading a few words, then glancing Payton’s way and saying, “So, uh . . . eh . . . are you in a lot of pain?” He was polite enough, under the circumstances, but surely as anxious to end things as I was. When my father inquired later that evening what it was like meeting a football player whose poster once graced my bedroom wall, I didn’t hesitate. “Worst experience of my life.” I sighed. “Like watching a superhero die.”
More than a decade has passed since my visit to Hoffman Estates. In that span, I have gained a wife and two children. I’ve written four books, penned a slew of bylines, traveled a good chunk of the world. I have seen and lived and smelled and tasted and heard. It has been a mostly blissful ride, packed with enough highs to minimize the scattered lows.
Through the years, interviews have come and interviews have gone. I’ll occasionally dig through the yellowed scrapbooks, stumbling upon stories I’d completely forgotten about. Ronnie Duquette, the sneaker collector from Oregon. A Mahopac High School football player named Mark Dessi. Theo Ratliff, gangly 76ers center. On and on.
Never, however, have I forgotten my thirty minutes with Walter Payton.
I can still see the brightness of his jaundiced eyes. I can still feel the frailty of his handshake. Most important, I can still hear his voice from that day—a strained-yet-high-pitched blur of words and phrases. Throughout this process, I have used that voice as a guide.
This is the first time I have written a biography of the deceased, and as other writers warned, the process is incomparable. One doesn’t merely become obsessed with the subject. He chases it. Studies it. Craves it. Relentlessly obsesses over it. Dreams about it. Is haunted by it. Just two nights ago I was startled out of a deep sleep by yet another Walter Payton apparition. We were sitting in a vacant apartment. He was wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, with a rainbowcolored headband encircling his radiantly glistening Jheri curl. “Are you finding what you need?” he asked. “Do you get me yet?”
Then he vanished.
The truth is, Walter Payton has been extraordinarily hard to “get.” By nearly all accounts he was a giving and compassionate man; one who took pleasure in randomly stopping awestruck Chicagoans on the street to ask how their day was going. His ex-teammates, dating all the way back to the segregated John J. Jefferson High School in Columbia, Mississippi, tell one story after another of a gleeful prankster setting off M-80s in the locker room and using an effeminate-sounding voice to prank call wives with lines like, “Just tell Matt that Pookie called, and our baby needs new shoes.”
Yet Payton was also an emotional lockbox. He confided in precious few, and worked tirelessly to portray a certain happy-go-lucky image that belied his deep-seated emotional tumult. His cancer? Nobody’s business. His marriage? Nobody’s business. His post-NFL despondency that revealed itself in multiple cries for help (including several suicide threats)? Nobody’s business. In 2005 his widow, Connie, and the couple’s two children, Jarrett and Brittney, released a book, Payton, that was rife with inaccuracies—and the authors are three of the people who knew him best. Why, his own autobiography, Never Die Easy, is—by the estimates of his closest friends—40 percent fiction.
Just how enigmatic was Walter Payton? When he passed he was remembered