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By Root 1402 0

had beaten the Wildcats 39–0 a year earlier. The Vikings were coached by Dewey Partridge, a star receiver at Ole Miss in the late 1950s. In the week leading up to the game, Partridge devised a plan to shut down Columbia’s rushing attack. He took offensive lineman Archie Anderson and lined him up on the defensive line, across from the tight end. As Warren Central’s strongest player, Anderson’s job was to lock up the tight end, thus allowing a linebacker to go unobstructed after Payton. “From the standpoint of getting me and the tight end on each other, it worked,” said Anderson. “But it was a failure, because you were asking the linebacker to tackle Walter Payton one-on-one. And that was impossible.”

“At one point they threw a screen to Walter, and I thought I was about to pick it off,” said David Chaney, a Warren Central defensive end. “Then—snap! Out of nowhere, he jumped up, caught the ball and took off. I’d never seen anyone move like that. Never.” Payton scored three touchdowns and ran for 123 yards in the 32–0 win.

“We were just kicking ass and taking names,” said Johnson, the quarterback. “Greatness came very easily for that team.”

The Columbia High Wildcats beat Mendenhall 16–6 to improve to 4-0, then downed Crystal Springs 34–21 to post the first 5-0 mark in school history.

Leading up to the clash at Gardner Stadium, Crystal Springs coach Leon Canoy managed to get his hands on a few rolls of Columbia film. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. Davis and Boston had designed four special plays just for Payton. Two, Spider Left and Spider Right, were screen passes into the flat that, with proper blocking, were seemingly impossible to stop. Two others, Alcorn Left and Alcorn Right, were misdirections that gave Payton the option of running or throwing. Also unstoppable. “Back then the taping would be done off of a little ol’ tripod, and the tapes would start up close, then go wide,” said Canoy. “You’d watch Walter, and the image would always switch to a wide shot because he’d wind up running away from everyone. He’d almost be out of the picture by the end of the plays.” High school running backs generally fall into one of two categories. They are either gnatlike slashers, à la Moses, or straight-ahead bowling balls. Payton was both. He ran hard on every play, never stopped churning his arms and pumping his knees. His stiff-arm, developed on the sandlots of Jefferson, could paralyze opposing defenders, and his hips rarely locked into one position. “I began to see that once in a great while you can use getting hit to keep your balance,” Payton wrote. “It’s all a matter of reflexes and coordination and eyes and hands and feet.” In other words, opponents were helpless. They might stop him once. Twice. Three times. But inevitably, he’d break a run.

Like the other men faced with shutting down Columbia High’s high-powered offense, Canoy devised a plan: His linebackers would cheat toward the line, hoping to make contact before the play developed. They would grab Payton’s legs, drag him down, and force Johnson to throw the ball.

“Didn’t work,” Canoy said.

Payton, Moses, and Johnson teamed to rush for more than two hundred yards. “They were incredible,” said Jimmie Stovall, Crystal Springs’ cornerback. “I’ll never forget my one big play against Walter. He came around that corner and I hit him and he hit me. We both went down. I mean, it was a heck of a collision. He came back one play later and scored. I came back a bunch of plays later and was never the same. Forty years later, my shoulder still hurts.”

If older white fans were thrilled by Columbia High’s football prowess, they had mixed feelings over the social implications. Until Payton’s senior year, young blacks and young whites were almost completely separate. Unless you were a black child whose mother served as a nanny for white families, odds are you lacked interactions with the opposite race. Now, however, blacks like Payton, Johnson, and Moses were genuine heroes on the Columbia High campus. They walked the halls with heads held high and chests puffed