Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [234]
Jarrett’s future was interesting and intriguing, but the elephant in the room was Walter Payton, making his first public appearance since the diagnosis. Beneath a pair of dark sunglasses, Payton looked shrunken. By now he had lost more than fifty pounds. When a reporter asked about his slimmeddown figure, Payton lied. “I’m training to run a marathon in a year,” he explained. “I’ve lost twenty-three pounds.”
Payton hoped the discussion was over. It wasn’t. That evening Mark Giangreco, the principle sports anchor at Chicago’s WLS-TV 7, cracked that Payton appeared “all shriveled up” and that he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. “I think,” Giangreco added, “I could take him on.”
Watching from his home, Payton was devastated. “That upset me beyond what you can imagine,” he said. “I had felt betrayed.” So, for that matter, did Quirk. Though Giangreco’s barbs were the first public comments Payton had heard of his condition, that was only because he wasn’t paying attention. Throughout the Windy City, a vicious rumor had been spreading that Payton was dying of AIDS. “Walter was definitely not gay, though that was being said a lot,” said Quirk. “And he definitely didn’t have HIV, even though every person I would deal with in Chicago was asking me about Walter and AIDS. I’ve heard people in hindsight say that wasn’t a real rumor. Well, it was real. I was the one being asked—and I was being asked every single day.”
Moved by Giangreco’s words and Quirk’s urging, Payton came to the dreaded decision to go public with his condition. He was scheduled to cohost his radio show, The Monsters of the Midday, on Tuesday, February 2, at Carlucci’s restaurant in Rosemont, Illinois. The scene, Payton concluded, would now double as a press conference.
With as little advance hype as possible, Quirk and Tucker called the various Chicago media outposts and invited them to Carlucci’s for a ten A.M. announcement. Over the course of the previous weeks North and Jiggetts could tell something was seriously off. As with most of his acquaintances, however, Payton maintained enough of an emotional distance that neither man felt comfortable pressing the issue. “He looked more and more like Sammy Davis Jr. every week,” said North. “I don’t say that humorously—he really did. He lost all this weight, and he started wearing sunglasses for every show. One time I was able to see behind them, and his eyes were glowing yellow. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. That can’t be right.’ ”
On the morning of the press conference, North received a telephone call from Jeff Schwartz, an executive with WSCR. “We have an issue,” Schwartz told him. “Walter has decided he’s finally going to talk about what’s wrong with him, and he’s using the radio show as an outlet to do so.”
North, a nonstop gabber, was speechless. “Wow,” he said. “This is going to be big.”
By the time the show was scheduled to begin, the thirty assembled seats in front of the broadcast table were filled. Payton had asked Tucker to write his speech, and despite having recently been discharged from the hospital with forty stitches caused by a ruptured appendix, she did so.
On most Tuesdays, Payton had looked forward to sitting down with North and Jiggetts for four hours of on-air gabbing. Now, with his arrival at Carlucci’s, he was visibly nervous. Payton had asked his assistants to make certain Jarrett would be there, and he was. What he didn’t count on—and what he did not want—was the presence of Connie. Armed with her comforting smile and Reagan-esque charisma, Connie approached her husband from behind, patted him on the shoulder, and said, warmly, “I’m here.”
Payton couldn’t believe it. Despite their on-again, off-again dramas, he and Lita Gonzalez remained a couple. They spoke several times per week, and she even made a few trips to Mayo to accompany Payton. “Walter and Lita were in love,” said a mutual acquaintance. “It might have looked like he was with Connie, but that was all a show.”
Now, standing