Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [32]
Even without Crawley as a girlfriend, Walter and his friends found plenty of ways to entertain themselves. Buried within Payton’s quiet exterior lurked a daredevil. With the exception of running the football, Payton’s true love might have been the motorized scooter his parents had once bought him as a birthday present. When the days were long and dull, Walter revved up the red scooter and drove to the nearby town of Harmony, where the rolling, unpaved streets looped and curved like giant pretzels. At the time, the posted speed limit was 40 mph—which Payton promptly ignored. “He would kick it up to sixty miles per hour . . . seventy miles per hour,” said Woodson. “Boy drove like a maniac.” One day, while coming around a sharp turn, Walter skidded across the road before barreling through a barbed wire fence and into a pen of cows. “He wasn’t hurt,” said Woodson, “but only because of luck.”
Payton took pleasure in waiting for his father to fall asleep on the couch, then boosting his truck and driving into the night. It was a beat-up jalopy with a five-speed engine, and to take off one had to push the vehicle down the street, pop the clutch, and jump in. “Sometimes we’d get back to Walter’s house and his dad would be awake,” said Moses. “Boy, would he give Walter an earful. ‘Stop stealing my truck!’ But by this age he was too big to get hit. So we’d just laugh it off.”
Thanks in large part to Payton, Columbia High won its first seven games, and talk of an undefeated season and South Little Dixie Conference title heated up. On October 24, the Wildcats traveled fifty miles north to Magee, Mississippi, to take on the archrival Magee High Trojans in what many presumed would be an easy win.
One year earlier, Columbia sans Payton shocked Magee, at the time the conference’s top team, 14–3. Now, even though the Wildcats were bigger, stronger, and faster, they found themselves facing a daunting opponent: the officials. Payton carried the ball twenty-three times that evening, and according to Danny Davis, a Columbia High senior who was covering the game for the student newspaper, the Hi-Lites, nearly all of his long runs were called back. “It was some of the worst officiating I’ve ever seen,” said Davis. “Payton couldn’t touch the ball without a whistle being blown.” Throughout the season, Tommy Davis and Boston had wondered when (not if) the referees would penalize their team for having multiple stars with dark skin. It was a common phenomenon in the first year of integrated ball—all-white crews singling out black players in key moments.
Here, on Magee’s field, injustice reigned. On the first play of the game, Johnson faked a handoff to Payton, dropped back, and threw a majestic forty-yard spiral to Moses, who caught the ball and cruised toward the end zone. On Columbia’s sideline players were leaping up and down when—flag. “They called Sugar Man offside,” said Woodson. “A terrible, terrible call.” McGee jumped out to a 10–0 lead, and despite a miraculous ten-yard Payton touchdown run late in the fourth quarter (“I swear to God, he carried the entire Magee team into the end zone,” said Danny Davis), the Wildcats failed to come back. They lost, 17–8, and for the entirety of the one-hour bus ride home after the game, Payton sat alone, head in hands, sobbing.
The Wildcats went on to finish 8-2, an extraordinary run for the first integrated team in school history. Payton scored at least one touchdown in every game, and was named all-conference and all-state. “The whole season showed people that blacks and whites belonged together, side by side,” said Dantin. “It was an enormous success by all standards.”
He paused.
“But,” Dantin adds, “it would have been sweeter had we won every game.”
With the pressure of football now behind