Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [68]
Jackson State won two of its first three games, with Hill giving the ball to his star halfback in every possible scenario. After opening the season with a heartbreaking 10–6 loss to Morgan State in a benefit game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia (Payton returned a kickoff eighty-one yards, but fumbled near the goal line on the potentially game-winning drive), the Tigers kicked off their home schedule by destroying Prairie View at Memorial Stadium, 67–7. Payton ran for two short touchdowns and threw a thirty-six-yard spiral to Jeremiah Tillman for a third. They followed with a 25–6 homecoming triumph against Mississippi Valley, with Payton contributing two touchdowns, a field goal, two extra points, and a two-point conversion.
Payton’s numbers were terrific, but Hill wanted more. The coach believed that in order for Jackson State to become a nationally known program, Payton needed to appear Jim Brown–like in his splendor. A bunch of hundred-yard rushing games wouldn’t cut it. Neither would a handful of touchdowns and field goals. He couldn’t merely be a good running back at a SWAC school of limited note. “We wanted to open eyes to Walter,” he said. “To let everyone in the country see that this was no ordinary football player.”
Enter Nebraska-Omaha.
One year earlier, Hill’s team had opened its season by flying to the Midwest and crushing the Division II Mavericks, 17–0. Now, as part of a homeand-home agreement, UNO would be coming to Jackson for an October 5 meeting—the rare predominantly white college willing to trek to Memorial Stadium and face the Tigers. This was, for Payton and Jackson State, the perfect storm. “The way we saw it, those teams had an opportunity to play a so-called nigger school,” said Charles Brady, a Jackson State defensive tackle. “And we wanted to punish them.”
In 1973, the Mavericks were a solid football team coached by the engaging Al Caniglia. They finished the year 7-2-1, and hope abounded. On a February evening in 1974, however, Caniglia returned home after a day of meetings, collapsed from a massive heart attack, and died. He was fifty-two. “Al was a great man,” said Bill Daenhauer, the team’s defensive coordinator. “He took care of you, and always made sure everything was going well for those around him. He wanted you to succeed.” With his death less than two months before the start of spring practices, the school acted quickly to find a replacement. Don Leahy, Nebraska-Omaha’s athletic director, hired C. T. Hewgley, a standout offensive and defensive tackle at the University of Wyoming from 1948 to 1950 who, in 1973, coached his alma mater’s offensive line.
A tank driver with the 45th Infantry Division in Europe during World War II (as well as an infantry company commander in Korea), Hewgley used his first meeting with the Maverick players to let them know long hair—a staple under the liberal-minded Caniglia—was no longer tolerated. “We had a quarterbacks session once, and he took us to his house to show us a jar of the ‘Gook ears’—his words—that he brought back [from Korea],” said John Bowenkamp, a UNO quarterback. “We were eighteen, nineteen, Vietnam was winding down and most of us were against the war. The ears didn’t go over so well.”
Neither did Hewgley’s football philosophies. Befitting an ex–drill sergeant, the new coach used the preseason to run his players into the ground, often implementing three-a-day practices with no water. “I was two hundred and thirty-eight pounds the year before he arrived,” said Ted Sledge, a star defensive tackle. “After some of the games my senior year I weighed one-ninety-eight. You can’t play the line like that. Not possible.” Under Caniglia, the Mavericks relied on star halfback Saul Ravenell, a third-team all-American in 1973, by operating the