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By Root 1495 0

sat in front of him in biology class. Her name was Colleen Crawley, though friends called her “Tweet” for her thin, birdlike legs. She was, like Walter, a senior, with long brown cascading hair, doe eyes, and an easygoing manner that had half the senior boys smitten. Unlike some of her peers, Colleen was open to the idea of having black friends. Her mother, Patricia, had been born and raised in New York City; a Queens girl who came to Mississippi by way of marrying an air force enlistee from the Magnolia State. Colleen was seven when her family relocated, but she maintained her open-mindedness. “My mom wasn’t a sheltered person,” said Colleen. “She worked for a social organization that got a lot of federal grant money to help race relations. Part of her job was going to black homes, then writing proposals. She’d come back and tell us, ‘You wouldn’t believe how these people are living. You just wouldn’t believe it.’ ” Because of Patricia’s overt empathy, the Crawfords found themselves on the receiving end of threatening calls from the KKK. “Mom heard the phrase ‘nigger lover’ quite a bit,” said Donna Williams, Colleen’s sister. “But she was tough.”

Colleen never aspired to become a cheerleader, but when Diane Weems, the captain of the Columbia High team, transferred to Columbia Academy, her friends talked her into filling the vacancy. She knew little of pom-poms or touchdowns, but took an immediate liking to the fast kid in the No. 22 jersey. On bus rides, Walter was funny and respectful. He was the type of boy who surrendered his seat for the girls, and waited patiently for others to exit the vehicle before doing so himself. “Something about Walter stood out, and not just football,” said Crawley. “I think it’s that he was just very nice.” There were three senior cheerleaders in 1970—Colleen, Sandra Height, and Dawn Givens—and each one paired up with a black senior star. Height bonded with Johnson, the quarterback. Givens took to Moses, the fleet halfback. And Colleen Crawley often found herself alongside Walter Payton.

They became close—the cheerleader who thought of Payton as a friend; the running back who thought of Crawley as a love interest. The two sat next to each other on the bus, smiled in the hallways, waved from afar. On more than one occasion Walter carried her books home from school, a quaint act that surely caught the ire of her neighbors on North Park Avenue. “He’d see me walking and he’d get his friends to drop him off so he could walk me to my house,” she said. “I invited Walter over every now and then if my parents were out and I was babysitting. He came to my home once or twice with some of the other black guys. I remember that some of the kids would bring a six-pack of beer and we’d play records. But Walter never drank.”

Walter clearly believed he and Crawley were an item. Or at least a potential item. He bragged to his friends about her, and was smitten by her beauty. “Oh, he had a thing for Colleen,” said Woodson. “He wanted to date her badly.”

On more than one occasion during his senior year, Payton bragged to his friends and teammates that he was close to bedding Crawley. One time, as he told it, he knocked on the front door to Colleen’s house, and heard her voice call, “Come in, Walter! It’s open!” Upon entering, he spotted her on the bed, naked, waiting for him. “So I ran all the way home,” Walter would say, laughing. “I couldn’t get caught with a white girl in her house. They’d kill me.” Because boys are boys and tall tales of sexual conquest seem to be a requisite part of the male adolescent experience, Walter can probably be excused that the story was pure fiction.

“I liked Walter a lot—as a person,” Colleen said. “But there is no way we could have dated back then. Forget that I had two boyfriends my senior year, and that I was Junior Miss for the city and I was editor of the school paper and involved in community theatre. The problem was the times. In 1970, you could not be white and openly date a black person, or vice versa. It just wasn’t allowed.

“But he was very special,” she added.