Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [210]
“I want you to talk to Eddie Jones [Miami’s vice president of administration] and tell him I’m interested,” Payton said. “Tell him.”
“Interested in what?” Holmes replied.
“Interested in playing for the Dolphins,” he said. “They’re not that far off from being a Super Bowl team. Tell him I’ll come in and block, run—whatever they need.”
Holmes was at a loss. Ever since Payton had retired at the conclusion of the ’87 season, the two men worked tirelessly to make his post-football adjustment as smooth and seamless as possible. Though, years later, Payton blamed Holmes for encouraging him to hang up his uniform too early, the truth was he made the final decision on his own. “Nobody forced Walter to stop playing,” Holmes rightly said. “It was his call.”
Now, Payton was making the call to try a comeback. “Walter, here’s what we’ll do,” Holmes said. “Sleep on this, and let’s talk tomorrow morning. If you still want me to contact Eddie, I will.”
The night came.
The morning arrived.
Holmes called Payton. “Well?” he said. “Are you still interested?”
“Interested in what?” the legend responded.
“In the Dolphins,” Holmes said. “In returning to the league.”
“Oh, that,” said Payton. “Nah—forget it. I just got a little emotional. It’s probably a bad idea”
Holmes was relieved.
“There’s no way Miami would have taken Walter at age thirty-six,” he said. “And if they did, it would have been a disaster. He was meant to retire a Chicago Bear, not a Dolphin. The way he went out was the right way.”
At the same time Payton was thinking about Miami, he was also thinking about St. Louis. When he retired after the ’87 season, the prime motivating factor was life after football likely including his becoming the first minority owner in league history. That’s the way Holmes had phrased it—that while he would no longer enjoy the euphoria of crossing a goal line, Payton would know how it felt to become a legitimate trailblazer.
In the waning days of his career, Payton was told that the NFL badly wanted to return a team to St. Louis, which had been vacated when the Cardinals relocated to Arizona after the 1987 season. Not only was St. Louis the nation’s eighteenth largest television market, and not only was it centrally located, and not only was it home to a good number of Fortune 500 companies, but it was a genuine sports hotbed. When Bill Bidwill, the Cardinals’ owner, moved his franchise west, it wasn’t because St. Louis was incapable of supporting football. No, he moved because the city—loathe to support a man considered to be miserly and not civic-minded—refused to fork over the two hundred million dollars necessary to build him a stadium.
Before Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s legendary commissioner, retired in November 1989, he spoke with Payton on numerous occasions about St. Louis. It was, the commissioner believed, a perfect match: Here was a market in need of a team. Here was a league in need of diversity. Here was an iconic figure—beloved, intelligent, African-American—who had nobly represented the NFL and who excelled at bringing disparate people together. Plus, Chicago and St. Louis were separated by a mere three hundred miles. Though not exactly a local, Payton was close enough to travel back and forth with little hassle. “I always felt that Walter was one of the half-dozen real class players during my time in the league,” Rozelle explained. “I have a great deal of respect for him. I think he would be a valued asset to any group.”
Payton was interested, but skeptical. While he had earned a good amount of money throughout his thirteen-year career, he could hardly be classified as wealthy. His highest single-season salary was only one million dollars, and, thanks to a high number of dubious investments, he was not sitting on a major war chest. Payton had laid down hundreds of thousands of dollars into Studebaker’s, as well as four other nightclubs, only later to learn that he had made a tremendous mistake. Those athletes who excelled financially