Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [209]
“Oh, I was terrified,” she said. “I thought my dad was Superman. I never saw him hurt, never saw him sick. I don’t even remember him having a cold. Now here I was, without my mother or brother, and my father was on a stretcher. I can still remember the scent. The fuel or . . . whatever. The scent.”
Walter and Brittney were taken to the nearby Valley View Medical Center, where he was treated and released that night. Back at the American Club Hotel, Payton walked around as if in a trance. He had survived some of the hardest hits known to the NFL—but nothing like this.
“That was pretty much the end of his racing career,” Brittney said. “I don’t think any of us were disappointed to see him give it up.”
CHAPTER 23
A BOTTOMLESS VOID
TO THE WORLD, WALTER PAYTON INSISTED HE WAS DONE AS A FOOTBALL player. He was a busy man. Auto racing. Motivational speaking. Trying to buy a team. He had moved on. He had stopped paying attention. He had no interest in a comeback. Not even a slight interest.
“Well,” said Bud Holmes, Payton’s longtime agent. “That’s what people thought. Only it wasn’t entirely true.”
On the afternoon of September 24, 1989, a lightly regarded Miami Dolphins fullback named Tom Brown started the third game of his NFL career, against the New York Jets. Best known as Craig “Iron Head” Heyward’s lead blocker at the University of Pittsburgh, Brown was a six-foot-one, 223-pound bulldozer who featured no quickness, no speed, no maneuverability. He was in the league for one reason—to slam into people and open holes. Yet for someone so powerful, Brown was irritatingly brittle. Since being selected by Miami in the seventh round of the 1987 Draft, he had endured the majority of his days on the physically-unable-to-perform list, battling an endless string of knee injuries. “I’ve spent more time with our trainers than their wives have the last two years,” he said shortly before the 1989 opener. “It’s been very frustrating.”
Finally, though, Brown seemed to discover health. He had played well enough to wrestle the starting job away from veteran Ron Davenport, and was confidently knocking back Jets linebackers until an unbearable pain shot through Brown’s right knee, and he fell to the ground at Joe Robbie Stadium. Once again, he tore a ligament. Once again, he was headed for the injury list.
The malady kicked off an unparalleled string of miserable luck for Miami running backs. Shortly after Brown went down, halfback Troy Stradford was lost for the season with cartilage and ligament damage to his right knee. Halfback Lorenzo Hampton followed by also tearing cartilage in his right knee, and fullback Marc Logan wound up on crutches with ligament damage in his left knee. Even halfback Sammie Smith, the rookie standout from Florida State, suffered an Achilles tendon bruise that left him hobbling.
Finally, with his team carrying but two healthy ball carriers (Davenport and Nuu Faaola), Dolphins coach Don Shula told the media he was preparing to hold an open casting call for available running backs. Among the first to be auditioned would be George Swarn, a twenty-five-year-old Miami of Ohio standout, and Kerry Goode, a Buccaneer reject who had played at the University of Alabama. This was hardly Eric Dickerson and Marcus Allen.
Having stopped following the day-to-day goings-on of the NFL, Holmes had no inkling of Miami’s woes. So, when Payton called his home one evening, his high-pitched voice spitting out a hundred words a second,