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By Root 1455 0

Walter made any sort of effort to be home for dinner with the kids every night?” said Conley. “Do you think Jarrett and Brittney had a genuinely happy home life with their father? Of course not.” Now confronting his own personal struggles, Payton tried harder. He committed himself to teaching his offspring right from wrong. Especially Jarrett. Having grown up in rural Mississippi, loading mounds of dirt onto a wheelbarrow and spending summers spreading it across his yard, Walter feared his son’s corruption via money and celebrity. The boy had enjoyed countless perks because of his father’s fame—a weekend at Camp David with President George H. W. Bush, a spot at the impossible-to-get-into Michael Jordan Basketball Camp, appearances in television commercials. Walter often complained to friends about his son’s apparent softness (“He didn’t understand why Jarrett didn’t run more, why he didn’t lift more,” said Dan Davis, a fellow coach at Hoffman Estates High. “He didn’t think he had much desire.”), and he wanted him to know grit and grasp dedication and appreciate the virtues of an honest day’s work. Throughout the bulk of his teenage years, Jarrett spent summers employed at Payton Power, a company Walter co-owned that supplied heavy equipment. “People might have thought he’d go easy on me,” Jarrett said. “No way. I made minimum wage, and I did every hard task there was. I’d cut grass, pick up machines and bring them back to the shop, hose them down, make sure they were OK. I was lunch boy—every day I was the guy sent to get everyone lunch. He didn’t have to do that . . . he could have let me stay home and play video games. But my dad felt like something needed to be instilled in me.”

When it came to his son, Walter was all about lessons. Right vs. wrong, noble vs. selfish, wise vs. inane. During his eighth-grade year at Barrington Middle School, Jarrett was caught with alcohol on his breath—a byproduct of the screwdrivers he and a friend had shared the night before. When Walter found out, he brought his son downstairs, sat him at the basement bar, poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s and said, “If you wanna drink, Jarrett, drink this.”

“No,” the boy cried from beneath his hangover. “I don’t want to drink. I don’t want anything.”

“No, no, no,” his father replied. “You said you wanted to drink. Drink this.”

“Dad, please,” Jarrett said. “Please, no.”

“Look,” Walter said, “you have many decades ahead of you to have drinks whenever you want. Right now is just not the time.”

That same year one of Jarrett’s fellow students, a girl named Becky Glance, was slapped by a male student. Jarrett challenged the boy to a fight, and wound up breaking his nose and causing a blood clot in his eye. After picking her son up, Connie called Walter to fill him in. He asked to speak to Jarrett. “So you got in a fight, huh?” Walter said.

“Yeah,” Jarrett replied.

“Well,” said Walter, “I’ve got something to give you tonight.”

Jarrett knew he was in trouble. When Walter entered the house later that evening, though, he removed his wallet from his pocket and handed his son three hundred-dollar bills. “That was the right thing you did,” he said. “You stand up for women. I’m proud of you.”

Long a lover of video games (he was a master of Ms. Pac-Man), Payton delighted in visiting arcades with his son and challenging him to marathon competitions of Terminator 2 or Street Fighter. “People would gather around,” Jarrett said, “ just to watch my dad.” In 1997, Payton purchased a new Porsche 911 Turbo. The car was black, and sleek as a leopard. One night, at two A.M., Walter entered the house on 34 Mudhank, snuck into Jarrett’s room, and shook him awake. “Get up, kid!” he said. “Come on . . . get up!” He proceeded to lead Jarrett out of the house and into the Porsche. “We drive out to [Interstate] 90, and there are no cars on the highway,” Jarrett said. “He says, ‘Get your seat belt on.’ I’m like, ‘What?’

“I got my seat belt on and he just let that baby loose, man. I still remember my head going back. The speedometer had the little red numbers, and we