Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [233]
Along with his various endeavors, Payton had been working with Matt Suhey, his old pal and blocking back, to purchase an Arena Football League team for Chicago. The two spoke regularly, and shortly after his return from Mayo Payton met with Suhey and several other potential investors at the Millrose Restaurant in South Barrington. When the meeting ended, Payton pulled Suhey close.
“Matt,” he said, “I have a problem.”
Throughout their friendship, Suhey had been pranked by Payton hundreds of times. He wasn’t falling for this one. “OK, Walter,” he said. “What’s the punch line here?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve really got a problem.”
Payton wasn’t giggling. “He got an inch from my nose,” Suhey said. “We spent about an hour talking about it right there, and he was extremely positive he’d be getting a transplant.”
What Payton didn’t know was that he had a zero percent chance of receiving a new liver. Whether he was misinformed by the Mayo Clinic or provided erroneous information via Quirk or merely lying through his teeth to maintain good karma and positively impact organ donations, well, one will never know. What is now known, however, is that by the time Payton had visited Mayo his body was being ravaged by cancer of the bile duct. It was spreading to the lymph nodes and throughout the liver. The jaundice and weight loss, neither of which are direct byproducts of PSC, were damning indicators. “Most people with sclerosing cholangitis look pretty good until they’re at the very end,” said David Van Thiel, director of the liver transplant program at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. “He may well have had sclerosing cholangitis for a long time, even when he was still playing football. It’s possible. I don’t know that, but it’s certainly possible to have mild sclerosing cholangitis that’s relatively asymptomatic.”
According to one Chicago physician, a liver specialist who, in the late-1990s, worked specifically with transplants, Mayo’s doctors were informed that, were he in need, there was a liver available for Payton. “The people at Mayo told us, unambiguously, that he was not on the list,” said the physician, who requested anonymity. “Somebody misinformed Walter.” Payton was, in a sense, the Titanic passenger convinced the RMS Carpathia should be arriving in a matter of minutes. Unbeknownst to him, a transplant would never come. Once a person on the list is diagnosed with cancer, he is no longer a candidate for a new organ.
John Brems, the director of intra-abdominal transplantation at Loyola, had the opportunity to view Payton’s X-rays. “You never say a condition is one hundred percent hopeless,” Brems said, “but he clearly wasn’t ever a transplant candidate. That would be impossible.”
On the afternoon of January 29, 1999, Jarrett Payton held a press conference at St. Viator High School to announce that he would be signing a letter of intent to attend the University of Miami on a football scholarship.
It was that time of year in America, when hundreds of high school gridiron stars ritualistically sat alongside their coaches and family members and donned red caps and blue caps and green caps and orange caps as the flashes exploded and local reporters collected uplifting quotes about the future.
Now here was a smiling Jarrett, flanked by Kevin Kelly, head football coach at St. Viator, Connie Payton, and Walter Payton. “Miami is the best fit for me as a student and as an athlete,” said Jarrett, a six-foot-two, 210-pound block of granite who had passed for 973 yards and ran for nearly 1,400 yards as a senior. “When I went down there, I fell in love with it. I like the fact that it is a