Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [50]
“There was a porch in front of our field house, and as we were getting ready to play the football games Walter would stand there and dance, dance, dance, dance,” said Porter Taylor, a quarterback. “Coach Hill would walk by, take a look at Walter moving all around and say, ‘OK, we’re ready.’ ”
At the start of his sophomore year of college, Payton’s primary goal was to lead the Tigers to the SWAC title. With Eddie having graduated and playing professionally in Canada, Walter knew Jackson State’s hopes rested largely on his shoulders. He spent much of the summer in Jackson on the banks of the Pearl River, running through its quicksand-like terrain and envisioning glorious Saturday afternoons inside Memorial Stadium. “If you have to come under control to make a cut, the pursuit will catch you,” Payton once said of running along the river. “In the sand, you have to move one leg before the other is planted. It makes all your muscles work. Sometimes when I’m done even my neck will be aching.”
Because Hill was college football’s Richard Nixon when it came to adhering to rules, he had his entire team spend the majority of the summer at Jackson State, violating multiple NCAA regulations by practicing up to three times per day.
Yet unbeknownst to the Tigers coach, the sly back wasn’t merely pondering pigskin. Like nearly all Jackson State students, Walter was a rabid fan of 24 Karat Black Gold, a half-hour television program that aired every Saturday morning on Jackson’s NBC affiliate, channel 3.
The program’s concept was simple and, in the age of American Bandstand and Soul Train, unoriginal: Invite a large number of local black high school and college students to a television studio and have them dance to the latest hits. “That was it,” said Lee King, 24 Karat Black Gold’s creator and a onetime radio engineer for James Brown. “Our show was eighty percent dancing, and the other twenty percent was videos and appearances by regional and national artists. It worked so well because it was an outlet for African-Americans in Mississippi. Their ambitions were at a low level because they didn’t have a lot of recreational things to do in the area. So when our show came out, it was their Bandstand.”
Without telling Hill (who would have certainly objected), on a Tuesday evening in early September 1972, Walter and a couple of friends drove to the WLBT studio on South Jefferson Street, where auditions were being held for the new season. The line stretched down the block and around the corner—hundreds of young blacks in search of stardom. “We had to introduce ourselves, say what college we attended, what our major was,” said Jones. “Then we formed a Soul Train line and danced. If we were good, they invited us back the following week. There was no salary, but we didn’t care. It wasn’t about that.”
“I was from Augusta, Georgia, so I had no idea who Walter was,” said King. “But he auditioned with this freestyle dance that was crazy and different. He had a great way of carrying himself, too. He radiated something unique.”
The tapings took place on the first Monday of every month—four episodes shot in one exhausting evening. Though he often walked onto the dance floor straight from football practice, muscles aching and knees throbbing, as soon as the TV cameras rolled and the sounds of Earth, Wind & Fire or the Jackson 5 blared across the room, Walter came to life. His wardrobe was, even for the times, outrageous—bright purple cutoff shirts, baggy velvet pants, tight jeans, some sort of fedora-esque hat. The popular dance style of the time was called “Pop ‘n’ Lock,” a precursor to break dancing that incorporated fluid and wavy isolated movements with tight robotic illusions. His go-to move was the Centipede, slinking to the floor and moving his body in wavelike motions. “Oh, he was an excellent dancer,” said Jones. “Walter used to inject a lot of the techniques they did in football . . . some of the calisthenics and exercises. He was really flexible with his body; more so than the rest of us.”
Because the Tiger football program was still finding