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Walter and Mary left empty-handed.

“But the story of dancing with Walter,” said Mary, “has lasted me a lifetime.”

If Walter Payton tiptoed cautiously toward his freshman year of college, he barged in, shoulder first, as a sophomore.

Though he had enjoyed playing alongside his older brother in the Tigers backfield, Walter was his own man, in need of neither guidance nor sibling-provided protection. “At first I was glad to room with people I knew, but it was almost too much after a while,” he wrote in his autobiography of living with Eddie and Edward Moses as a freshman. “I began to wish that I’d roomed with strangers.”

With a year of school—and football—under his belt, Walter was more relaxed and confident. His roommates were now Rodney Phillips and Rickey Young, two young Tiger stars who shared Payton’s on-campus notoriety and were thrilled to have access to his deluxe stereo system with a real remote control. “He had powerful amps,” said Matthew Norman, a teammate, “and he’d try to knock the walls down with music.” Walter strolled campus with a smile glued to his face, exchanging high fives with teammates, offering causal nods to pretty women. He liked to fish with linebacker Robert Brazile in a nearby reservoir and stay up late gabbing with his pals in a common area of the residence hall. In his hands he often carried a wood slingshot, and when the spirit moved him he would pick up a rock and pluck unsuspecting pigeons. “Not to be mean,” said Taylor, the Tigers quarterback. “Just Walter being a big kid.”

Without Eddie, Walter could be himself without worrying about someone hovering over his shoulder. There was the dancing on Black Gold. There were the trips to the Penguin Restaurant, a little place just off of campus where, for a dollar fifty, Walter would buy two hot dogs, slather them in coleslaw and the Penguin’s special sauce, gobble them down, and sprint back to the dorm before Hill could catch him.

There were the women.

Back during his freshman orientation, Walter had been standing in a courtyard when he took notice of a pretty coed named Lorna Jones. A local girl who graduated from Jackson’s Wingfield High, Lorna was immediately taken with Payton’s kind eyes and humble disposition. “He wasn’t all that handsome, but he was very nice and very intelligent, even though he didn’t think of himself as smart,” said Jones. “He also had a shyness to him that was quite endearing.”

Unlike Walter, Lorna lived at home with her parents, both educators, both unflinchingly strict. Her mother, M. V. Manning Jones, refused to allow Lorna to stay out late or, heaven forbid, sleep elsewhere. Kissing boys was against the law. When Walter visited, the two could not be together in a room behind a closed door. “I had my own den, and we’d sit there, but we were never really alone,” said Lorna. “My dad would walk back and forth, back and forth.” Despite their mistrust of all members of the opposite sex, M. V. and Lawrence Jones liked their daughter’s boyfriend. He was polite and friendly, and came over frequently to help cook shrimp and stir chili. When he once needed to attend a certain award presentation, the Joneses even took Walter to JCPenney to buy a pair of shoes.

During Christmas break toward the end of 1971, Walter brought Lorna to Columbia to meet his parents. Because her family was so forbidding, Lorna was allowed to go only as long as her best friend, Patrice Turner, came along, and under the order that they return by evening’s end. In the shadow of the Payton Christmas tree, with Patrice hovering nearby, Walter handed Lorna a small box. Inside was a promise ring with, in her words, “an itty, itty, itty, bitty diamond.”

“That was a big thing,” said Lorna. “Back then you gave promise rings as a token of a serious relationship. We had real feelings for one another. I loved him.”

Walter majored in history as a freshman, compiling twenty-eight credits and earning a GPA between 2.0 and 2.5. He had spent endless hours studying alongside Lorna, who was passionate about her major, special education.