Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [243]
Three months before Walter passed, Conley invited Connie her to her house for a conversation. The two had been close for a long time, and Conley felt compelled to finally share an important detail. When Connie arrived, Conley told her about Nigel, the out-of-wedlock son who was now fourteen years old. “I think you deserve the chance to confront Walter about this before he dies,” Conley said. “You have that right.”
Connie’s response stunned Conley. “She told me she’d once asked Walter if he had any other children, and he said no,” she recalled. “Connie said she believed him. I don’t see how she could have, but she said she believed him. Maybe she just didn’t want to believe the entire truth, because it killed her whole narrative.”
Walter Payton took his final breath right around noon on a Monday afternoon. As is the case with most passings, a prolonged numbness ensued. Family members and friends grieved, former teammates were contacted, the Chicago media was alerted. President Bill Clinton issued a statement, marveling how Payton, “faced his illness with the same grit and determination that he showed every week on the football field.” As the news began to make its way across talk radio, one listener after another called in, sharing stories and memories of a man who ranked alongside Ernie Banks as a Windy City icon. Bob Armstrong, an Oswego, Illinois, resident and lifelong Bears fan, was driving past the Roundhouse restaurant when he learned Payton had died. “With tears in my eyes I pulled over to visit the little museum they had inside,” Armstrong said. “I knew the hostess, and she said, ‘Bob, what brings you here?’ ”
“I just heard,” Armstrong said, “and I wanted to pay my respects.”
“Heard what?” she replied.
“Walter,” Armstrong said. “He’s dead.”
Silence.
The Chicago Daily Herald asked readers to send in their best Payton anecdotes. A former Burger King drive-thru worker named Phil Lawitz recalled the time he screwed up Payton’s order, but still landed an autographed napkin. Sue Matthews told of Payton passing a little boy his Super Bowl ring through a crowd at the Chicago Auto Show. “I had always admired Walter Payton as a role model for children,” she wrote, “but from that moment on I also looked at him as a truly gentle man.”
Quirk had worked with Payton for fourteen years. She was now five months pregnant and, upon receiving the call from Matt Suhey, in a state of shock. “How could he be dead?” she said later. “Even though we all saw it coming . . . it still didn’t seem real. Walter Payton no longer alive?” After collecting herself, Quirk realized there was nobody inside the home at 34 Mudhank who would take the initiative and handle arrangements. She went ahead and called the Davenport Family Funeral Home in Barrington, booked the date and time, even picked out the blue suit Payton would wear for his family’s final private viewing. She spent fifteen hundred dollars on flowers and paid a handful of moonlighting police officers thirty-five hundred dollars to provide extra security in the coming days.
When Quirk arrived at the house, she was disheartened to hear Connie and Alyne, Walter’s mother, discussing burial options. “Alyne was a devout Baptist, and apparently Baptists don’t believe in cremation,” said Quirk. “But Walter had told me, in very direct terms, that he was to be cremated, not buried. He even wrote it in his will. The truth was, in fifteen years I never knew Walter as someone who willingly went to church. Ever. He was not a religious man, and he wanted to be cremated.”
When Quirk told the family of Walter’s wishes, they resisted. There