Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [226]
While traveling to Orlando for a vacation, Payton—sitting in first class—was told that a ten-year-old boy named Billy Kohler was on the plane, heading to Disney World courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. In need of both liver and kidney transplants, Billy’s odds of survival were long. “We’re on the plane and a stewardess comes up and says, ‘There’s someone who would like to meet you in first class,’ ” said Jim Kohler, Billy’s father. “We go up front and who’s standing there—Walter Payton.”
Payton introduced himself and knelt down to Billy’s level. “You’ve been facing a lot of adversity,” he told the boy. “You will come through this. No matter what follows, you need to keep your head up, you need to keep fighting forward, and you need to believe. You’ve gone through more in your short life than most of us have in a lifetime.”
Overcome by the moment, Billy began sobbing. Payton tickled him beneath the chin. “You’re a hero,” he said. “Just know that—you’re a hero.”21
After retiring from the Bears, Payton traveled most places with a pair of bodyguards, David Robinson and Tony Frencher. They were big men—both in excess of three hundred pounds, with muscles and scowls to match. Payton, however, never wanted them to intimidate or keep people at bay. “We were there mainly to help him out,” said Robinson. “Walter was a man of the people.” In the early 1990s Frencher coached a Pop Warner team in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook. Though loathe to make requests of his employers, Frencher asked Payton to appear at the year-end banquet. “Walter told me he’d try his best and that he’d call to get directions,” Frencher said. “Well, he never called, and on the night of the event I was worried he wasn’t coming. I’m sitting at the banquet when a kid walks in and says, ‘Coach Tony, someone is outside looking for you.’ ” Frencher exited and was greeted by a breathtaking sight: Walter Payton surrounded by the entire Bolingbrook Police force. “He had called the cops to ask for directions,” said Frencher, “and every officer in the city came to get pictures with him.” Payton’s talk, Frencher recalled, was “amazing,” as was the ensuing hour, during which he posed for individual photographs with every Pop Warner player. “The kids were between nine and eleven,” he said. “And their year was made that night.”
A part of Payton actually looked forward to giving speeches, for which he earned anywhere from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars a pop. He would pick up the microphone, pace the stage, feed off the energy. It mattered not whether he was addressing a convention of Cub Scouts or American Express executives. He never relied on notes or any sort of script. “Walter would always say, ‘If you have to speak, speak from the heart,’ ” said Conley. “He said that if you speak from the heart, you can’t go wrong.” Those who expected stories of Mike Singletary and Jim McMahon found themselves surprised, but not disappointed. Payton talked mainly of life—“If you go somewhere, always have pictures of your children on you,” he would say. “They’re the meaning to it all. The real meaning.”
With the message guiding his way, and with nowhere else to turn, Payton seemed to devote more time to his two children with Connie. Though never an overwhelmingly bad father to Jarrett and Brittney, Payton was too often an absentee one. There was always somewhere else to be and someone else to attend to. Football. Racing. Business. Women. “Do you think