Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [30]
On the bus rides back from road games, one of the black players—often Payton—would break out a transistor radio and blast the music. The songs were almost always Motown—Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas—and the crooning grew louder throughout the ride. As gifted a dancer as he was a runner, Payton stood, arms waving, rear shaking. “It sounds like a scene from a movie,” said Dantin. “But the black kids would start singing The Temptations, and we’d all join in. All of us. Those trips became like Temptation greatest hits sing-alongs. It was so incredibly fun.”
In preintegration Columbia, decades of Jefferson football players either partied in someone’s backyard or, occasionally, at Pete Walker’s Place, a black club, that featured a three-songs-for-a-quarter jukebox and Pete’s special brand of bootleg. But the world was changing. Accompanying Columbia’s football players on the bus trips to away games was the school’s all-white fleet of cheerleaders. In the past, a black kid in Columbia wouldn’t dare glance longingly toward a white girl. “Integration,” said Woodson, “completely mixed that notion up.”
Throughout his early high school days, Walter had dated a black girl named Jill Brewer. Notably pretty, with big brown eyes and high cheeks, Jill attended nearby Marion Central High, and was two years Walter’s junior. She wasn’t his first girlfriend. (“Walter was a popular guy, and he’d dated some girls,” Brewer said. “But he was my first boyfriend.”) They had met in 1967, at a semipro football game being played at Gardner Stadium. She was shy and guarded. He was also shy, but a bit more bubbly. “Apparently I gave him my number,” she said. “We grew to be very close.” The two met up at various school functions, at sporting events, at parties. Brewer’s mother ran a small recreation center known as the Shop, and together they played pool and ate ice cream. Because Brewer lived nine miles outside of Columbia on Highway 43, the couple struggled to see each other every week. “But,” she said, “I really liked him. Walter was such a sweet boy. If I had a daughter I’d want her to have a boyfriend who treats her with the respect he gave me.”
By the time Columbia desegregated its schools, Walter and Jill were no longer a pair. “When we broke up, he said I was breaking his heart,” said Brewer. “I told him it was just puppy love. From then on, whenever I’d see him, he’d greet me the same way—‘Hey, Puppy Love!’ ”
Payton’s first intimate moment with a white girl came in the fall of his senior year. Walter and Kim Fink, the white backup quarterback, discussed the idea of setting each other up with girls from the opposite race. “We were both kind of progressives,” said Fink. “I had friends who would have had nothing to do with African-American girls. But not me. I was excited.”
One night, with his parents perched in front of the television, Fink snuck out of the house with a six-pack of Falstaff Beer and picked up Walter. They headed for a spot known as the Duck Pond, an undeveloped subdivision on the outskirts of town where kids went to make out. The girls met them there—Walter’s was blond, with blue eyes; Fink’s had brown hair, with brown eyes and dark skin. “We just fooled around and stuff—nothing big,” said Fink. “But we had to meet far away for it to happen. You couldn’t get caught doing that stuff back then.”
Which made Walter’s life increasingly difficult. Because in that marvelous fall of 1970, he developed a crush on a beautiful cheerleader with peachtoned skin who