• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1529 0

prescribed to a friend’s son. Quirk and Tucker encouraged him to resume exercising—Walter, go to the gym; Walter, take a jog. Nothing. They took his calls at all hours, wondering what odd or exciting or devastating words would emerge from his lips. Payton berated. Payton praised. Payton laughed. Payton cried. He hated his wife—“Why won’t she just fucking leave me?” He hated Gonzalez—“What the fuck is wrong with this bitch?” He wanted Choy back. He wanted Choy dead. What appointments were scheduled for the next day? Cancel them. Don’t cancel them. Let’s do lunch. No, let’s not. I have an amazing idea. I have a terrible idea. Like many Americans, Payton turned especially forlorn during the holiday season. He felt the pressure of having to be everywhere at once—with Lita in New Jersey; with his kids in Arlington Heights; with his mother in Jackson, Mississippi. He said he hoped something bad would happen to him, just so he had an excuse to stay home and hide. “No matter what I do,” he said, “I can’t win.”

Payton made spur-of-the-moment decisions that baffled those around him. He accepted an invitation from the World Wrestling Federation to serve as Razor Ramon’s guest manager for something called SummerSlam. Despite being petrified of deep water, he teamed up with Chuck Norris to try and break the Chicago-to-Detroit 605-mile powerboat record (they failed). He became founding director of the First Northwest Bank of Arlington Heights. He hinted at a run for mayor of Chicago (this from a man who often failed to vote). He tested Quirk and Tucker’s loyalty with insults and threats and, literally, thirty to fifty phone calls per day. Walter on his cell. Walter from his apartment. Walter in the house. Flowers one minute, taunts the next. “It was like having a husband,” said Tucker, “without the intimacy. He was terribly lonely. People loved Walter. People were drawn to him. But he never had the love of a partner who filled him up. It was tragic.”

“He was so manic,” said Quirk. “The flux in his moods was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

On multiple occasions Payton threatened to commit suicide. Usually following a fight with Connie or Lita. Or after being reminded that, even with such a legendary high-profile career, he still had to worry about finances. Payton looked in the mirror and hated the reflection. He was supposed to be happy and secure, and yet he was anything but. The love he received from fans was wonderful and great, but it wasn’t real. The diehard Bear loyalist wearing the No. 34 jersey knew Walter Payton as a halfback, but he didn’t know Walter Payton. Everything was surface and superficial. What would they think, Walter wondered, if they saw him away from the field, cheating incessantly and failing as a businessman?

Once, during a particularly down period, he entered the house at 34 Mudhank with his gun drawn, telephoned a friend, and crying, uttered, “I’m going to end it now.”

“Walter would call me all the time, saying he was about to kill himself,” said Holmes. “He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead.” The first time such a threat was made, Holmes dropped what he was doing and flew from Mississippi to Illinois to console his client. By the time he arrived, Payton’s mood had swung positive. Holmes never again took his threats seriously.

Despite the urging of those around him, Payton refused to see a psychologist or social worker. What would that say about his strength and fortitude? He was supposed to be a hero. Heroes didn’t do therapy.

On one particularly dark day, Payton wrote a friend a letter, saying that he needed to get his life in order and that he was afraid of doing “something” he’d regret. In the note, Payton admitted that he regularly contemplated committing suicide. Thinking about “the people I put into this fucked-up situation,” he wrote, “maybe it would be better if I just disappear.” Payton said he imagined picking up his gun, murdering those around him, then turning the weapon on himself. “Every day something like this comes into my head,” he wrote. He was distraught