Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [40]
The football facilities were no better. The team’s locker room was located inside a decrepit converted army barracks that had been built during World War II. The floor was rotting wood, the walls decaying drywall.
Not that Walter particularly cared. Jackson State quickly felt like home, especially when he was assigned to share quarters with his brother, Eddie, and his best friend from Columbia, Edward “Sugar Man” Moses, also a freshman running back. The three were placed in a second-floor room in Sampson Hall, the school’s football dormitory. There was one regular bed and a bunk, two small bedrooms with a common area, and a bathroom located down the hall. As a star senior with the Tigers, Eddie possessed enough sway to have his own room or, at most, one upper-class roommate. “But I wanted to show Walter the ropes and take care of him,” Eddie said. “He was my little brother, and this was going to be a new experience for him.”
Despite lingering sibling resentment, Eddie made Walter’s early collegiate adjustment significantly easier. He talked to him about which classes to take, where to hang out, who to trust, and who not to trust. Their mother, Alyne, made regular drives up to see her boys, and when the season started she would arrive Saturday mornings with fresh-baked treats. (In Eddie and Walter’s years at the school, Alyne never missed a home game.) “I was feeling right at home,” Walter once wrote. “Eddie was a great kid with just the right personality for a football player—maybe better than mine. He was the type who believed he could do anything if he really tried.” Though far from a wallflower, Walter couldn’t compete with his brother’s social ease. He watched in amazement as Eddie lingered in front of Sampson Hall, heckling people as they passed. “If he saw a carload of girls to flirt with,” Walter wrote, “he’d walk right out there and hold up traffic for half a block to talk with them.” Eddie also introduced Walter to the large oak tree positioned approximately three feet from the window in their room. When Hill imposed curfews, often stationing himself at the Sampson Hall front entrance (Hill was fond of a cologne appropriately named “Trouble,” and players could smell him as they snuck back in), Eddie, Walter, and Sugar Man would grab ahold of the tree, use its branches to scale down the trunk, and indulge in a night on the town at Nita’s or the Doll’s House or one of the other clubs on Lynch Street. “We’d go out to dinner, go out to the park, get some girls, and do some making out. Then we could come back in and go up,” Eddie said. “Security would never stop us because of who we were, but then one day Coach Hill found out what we were up to.”
“And,” Eddie said, “he immediately had all the branches removed from the tree.”
In Columbia, a young black man always had to watch what he said, and who he said it to. But here, on the all-black campus, Walter felt at ease. The vast majority of his teammates hailed from identical small-town backgrounds—poor and black, forced to gaze downward when whites passed, praised by whites only for their athletic gifts. They knew what it was to be called “nigger” and “coon,” and they could relax in the knowledge that, in college, nobody uttered such things.
Walter’s social adjustment to college was smooth, and the first few days were filled with the euphoric giddiness of a new adventure. Yet the freedoms that came with life away from home were mere mirages.
Soon Walter would get to know a force of nature known as Bob Hill.
He was born in 1935 on an eight-acre farm in Tippo, Mississippi, a nondescript