Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [46]
The aftermath of the Prairie View loss was not pretty. If Jackson State’s players thought they had it hard in the lead-up to the opener, they learned quickly that Hill’s devotion to punishment knew few boundaries. The Tigers had two long weeks before their second game, a trip to Frankfort, Kentucky, to play lightly regarded Kentucky State, and Hill was determined to weed out the weak links. He looked over his roster and knew the talent was legitimate—along with the Payton siblings, ten others, including senior flanker Jerome Barkum and freshman linebacker Robert Brazile, would go on to play in the NFL. But under McPherson the work ethic had been underwhelming; the accountability nonexistent. Losses were greeted with dismissive shrugs, and players could often be found partying later in the evening. “No longer,” said Hill. “I wouldn’t accept that.”
The coach had three favorite methods of punishment. First, there were the rocks. Hill would chew out a player, pick up a small rock, scream, “See this rock? Go find it!” then chuck it over a fence into a pack of weeds. Whether it took two minutes or two hours, the guilty party had to return with the exact rock. Second, there were the down-ups. “He’d stand there like a military drill instructor, screaming ‘Down! Up! Down! Up!’ ” said Douglas Baker, a sophomore center. “You’d jump onto your stomach, jump up, run in place, then jump back down over and over again.” The worst, however, was rolling. Were Hill really angry, he’d order players to line up on a goal line, lie down, and roll a hundred yards to the opposite goal line. “It doesn’t sound especially bad, but it was torture,” said Porter Taylor, a reserve quarterback. “You’d vomit, and it’d make you sick that evening and well into the next morning. There was nothing I wanted to hear less than, ‘Roll the field.’”
Several Tigers quit instead of dealing with the coach’s brutality. They were either upperclassmen who had grown comfortable with McPherson or naïve freshmen unaware that they had signed up for the Green Berets. Earnest Wiley, a highly recruited defensive end from Mississippi, left the team after a month, when Hill ordered him not to marry his girlfriend. “I decided my life was more important than football,” Wiley said. “So I got married and quit.”
“Some guy passed out on the field, and throw-up was coming out of his mouth,” recalled Lafayette Nelson, a tight end who transferred to Lane College. “Bob Hill screamed for someone to get him off the field, and they picked him up and towed him off. I knew I needed to get out of there.”
Although Walter Payton didn’t fully escape disciplinary action in the wake of his poor debut at Prairie View, Hill thought it wiser to develop the kid than break him down. “I always told my players the same thing,” he said. “ ‘There ain’t no such thing as treating y’all alike. I’m gonna be fair with all of y’all—but not alike.’ ” Walter had received solid tutoring in high school under Boston and Tommy Davis, but he was still green. Jackson State’s offense utilized the quick pitch, which baffled Walter to no end. Jackson State’s offense counted on a back reading his blockers. Again, Walter had no idea. “He had competitive speed,” said Eddie Payton. “But not blinding speed. And when he arrived, he had no real grasp how to use it.”
Beginning that week, and lasting throughout their time together, Hill took Walter under his wing with the vision of creating a team-carrying superstar. “The first thing he needed to learn was how to block,” said Hill. “Walter never really had to do it before.” At nights, when