Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [58]
Shortly thereafter, Connie flew to Jackson for a visit. Hill picked her up at the airport and brought her to his house. Hanging from a living room wall were photographs of some of the great players he’d coached at Jackson State—Jerome Barkum, Leon Gray, Rodney Phillips, Walter. As Connie looked the images up and down, Hill said, “Which one of those young men do you think is Walter?” Connie zeroed in on one particular picture. The young man was black, with unkempt eyebrows, a wide nose, a miniature Afro, and pimples dotting much of his forehead. The curled-lip expression on his face suggested he had just whiffed sour milk. “Oh, boy,” she thought to herself, “please don’t let it be that one.”
Bingo.
“OK,” Connie said to Hill, taking a second glance. “Maybe he’s not that bad.”
Their first date came a day later, a stroll to nearby Lynch Street. Walter was awkward—far from what she had expected of a sports star. He glanced toward the ground a lot and struggled to make decent conversation. When he did talk, it was about Lorna and her intrusive mother. He jabbered on incessantly about the girl, until Connie wondered why she had bothered. “We spent that evening just kind of talking about her and that whole situation,” Connie said. “I ended the weekend thinking, ‘He’s a nice guy, he’s here, I’m going back home. That’s it, and I just hope he gets back together with his girlfriend.’ ”
To Hill’s dismay, in the following weeks Walter did not mention Connie again. He continued to mope over Lorna, desperate to make things work. In Hill’s mind, this wasn’t the way a real man behaved. To whine over a woman’s affection? The last thing Hill wanted was a halfback more concerned with a broken heart than the pigskin. “This was my man,” said Hill. “I helped a lot of my players with their girlfriends. These were my guys.”
In an act that violated approximately ten million NCAA regulations, in the spring of 1974, Hill dug into his personal account and paid for Payton to fly back to New Orleans and spend a weekend with Connie, her parents, and her three brothers. What if Walter refused to go? Not an option. He was going. “I called after two days to see how it was, and to check what time he’d be getting back here,” said Hill. “Betty was supposed to put Walter on the plane the next day, but he refused to go. He stayed the whole week. Betty told me he was sleeping on the stairway—he fell in love that quickly.”
Connie recalled things differently. She has said that Walter was guarded and lacking in manners. “When it was dinnertime, he wouldn’t eat with my family at the table,” she said. “When everybody was through with dinner, he would want me to then go with him and get something to eat. It was like he was too shy to eat with everybody else. My mother just didn’t understand that.”
Yet something about Walter Payton caught Connie’s fancy. He was sensitive, which was a rare trait among the men she knew. His bashfulness, while annoying, was also endearing. There appeared to be no phony machismo to the boy. No strut or bombast or arrogance. He only discussed football when asked, and never bragged about his own achievements. If anything, he appeared prouder of his dance moves than his off-tackle moves.
With Hill’s blessing, Connie and Walter kept in close contact. They spoke every week on the phone, and she visited Jackson State on multiple occasions. Eventually, Walter broke up with Lorna. “He did it in a very cowardly way,” Jones said. “He had his brother’s girlfriend tell me he didn’t want to date me anymore and that he had another girl. I couldn’t believe it. It broke my heart.”
As Connie’s senior year at Alcee Fortier High School came to a close, Hill desperately wanted her to attend Jackson State to keep his prized player happy. “I couldn’t