Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [221]
In 1995–96, Wandro coached the Hawks to the Class AA state tournament in Peoria. Though Payton would only come to one or two practices a week, he was still a contributor. One day, shortly before the team was scheduled to depart for the big event, he arrived at the gymnasium and gave a rousing pep talk about commitment and trust and what it meant to be a champion. Wandro’s players sat rapt throughout the fifteen-minute lecture, and as Payton neared the end he slipped off his Super Bowl ring and said, “If you don’t believe you can do something, you won’t ever get it done.” With that, he handed the ring to one of the awestruck players, a senior center named Nick Abruzzo. “Nick, I want you to hold onto the ring for the weekend,” Payton said. “I trust you, just like you need to trust one another.”
As the members of the Hawks wandered off to the locker room, Wandro pulled Payton aside. “Walter, are you serious?” he asked. “I’ve coached these high school kids for years, and I wouldn’t trust most of them with my CD player. You just gave one your Super Bowl ring.”
Payton shrugged.
Later that night, Abruzzo hosted a pasta party for his teammates at his house. The players traded turns ogling the jewelry until it was time for everyone to leave. “OK,” Abruzzo said, “who’s got the ring?”
Silence.
“Seriously, guys, where’s the ring?”
Silence.
“Fellas . . .”
“It vanished,” said Abruzzo. “It just disappeared.”
The Abruzzo family spent the night searching high and low for the treasured hardware. They dug through pillows, moved tables, emptied cabinets, shook canisters. Nothing. They called the local police department, whose officers questioned a handful of the players. Nothing.
Two days later, shortly before the team was scheduled to board a Peoriabound bus, Abruzzo visited Payton at his office. With tears welling up in his eyes, he explained what had happened. A glum look crossed Payton’s face. He was crushed—but refused to let it fully show. “You know, Nick, I’ve lost that ring a bunch of times myself,” he said. “I once even left it in a hotel room and forgot about it. Don’t worry, it’ll turn up.”
Burdened by the disappearance, Hoffman Estates lost its quarterfinal game to Westinghouse, 42–41. Upon returning to the office, Wandro swallowed hard, picked up the telephone, and called Payton.
“Walter,” he said, “I feel just terrible about this. I don’t know what to say.”
Once again, Payton tried his best to play the incident down. Inside, however, he was heartbroken and his association with the Hoffman Estates basketball team would soon end. Through his remaining years, he remained convinced that one of the kids had swiped his jewelry, then lied about it. “It was never fully about the ring,” said Davis. “I think Walter simply felt taken advantage of.”
So what actually happened? On the night the ring went missing, some of the Hoffman Estates players were goofing around on a brown fake leather couch in the Abruzzos’ basement. In the midst of the scrum, Payton’s ring somehow slipped behind a cushion and into a pocket created by a torn swath of fabric.
Two years later the Abruzzos, moving to a new home, let it be known that they were discarding much of their old furniture. Phillip Hong, a graduating Hoffman Estates High senior who, as a linebacker for the Hawks, wore uniform No. 34 in honor of Walter Payton, claimed a worn brown couch that nobody else wanted. He brought it with him to Purdue University, and for the next three years the couch was a fixture in his various dwellings. “It came to college with me every year,” Hong said. “From Chicago to West Lafayette, Indiana, from moving truck to moving truck.”
One evening, in the midst of his junior year in the spring of 2001, Hong was sitting on the couch, watching TV. His red-and-tan Doberman pinscher, Bailey, was clawing into the underside