Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [70]
Mills and Payton actually shared some uncanny commonalities. Payton was from Columbia, Mississippi, Mills from Columbia, Missouri. Payton was a five-foot-ten halfback, Mills was a five-foot-ten halfback. Payton followed his older brother Eddie to Jackson State, Mills followed his older brother Bill to Northeast Missouri. Payton started playing as a freshman. Mills started playing as a freshman.
“It’s all very odd,” said Mills, now seventy and a retired high school science teacher. “I actually met Walter once in the Kansas City International Airport. It was 1988 or ’89, and my son saw Walter and brought me over to introduce us. I said, ‘Walter, you broke my scoring record.’ I don’t think it meant too much to him, but he was very gracious about it.”
Through late October Payton continued to believe he had a shot at the Heisman. Inside the Jackson State locker room, coaches and teammates insisted the honor was within reach—a dangling carrot that consumed the running back’s attention. “If they are going to go by ability and stats,” he told the Blue and White Flash, “they will have no other choice.”
Was he deliberately fooling himself? Sort of. Payton certainly knew that while he was wallowing in SWAC obscurity, Griffin was in the midst of a phenomenal streak of exceeding one hundred rushing yards in thirty-one straight games. Yet, in his mind, stranger things had happened. What if Griffin and Anthony Davis got hurt? Or slumped? What if Jackson State won the rest of their games, and Payton ran for more than two hundred yards in all of them? Then, surely, he’d receive his due. Or, at the very least, be strongly considered.
The Tigers followed the Omaha bloodbath by walloping Bishop in Dallas, 36–10 (Payton ran for 144 yards and three touchdowns), then traveled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a Homecoming Day face-off with Southern University, a SWAC rival. Like most of the league’s teams, Southern could not match Jackson State’s talent in a position-by-position comparison. They were thin in most of the skill areas, and ran a wishbone offense that was as simple as it was ineffective.
The Jaguars entered the game 4-1, and Charlie Bates, the team’s cagey coach, based his entire defensive game plan around stopping Payton. “Let them throw, let other guys run the ball, let them kick field goals,” he told his players. “But if you let Walter Payton get space, he’ll run all over us. Choke him at the line, we win.”
For teams like Omaha and Bishop, the strategy would have been pointless. Payton was faster, stronger, and tougher than the opposition, and his line opened gaping holes on nearly every play. If a defensive end or linebacker didn’t get to him, he was gone. Southern, however, featured a defense with three lighting-quick linebackers and a bruising front four. “You had to have three or four people watching him at all times,” said Harry Gunner, the Jaguar defensive coordinator. “Back in those days, if you did an extensive job scouting Jackson State, you knew they gave away certain formations and plays. Our guys were great at following directions. So we told them, ‘Here’s the play that’s probably coming—don’t let Payton get loose.’ ”
In one of the most exciting—and controversial—games in SWAC history, Payton took a rare beating. His uniform was caked in dirt, his chest stung from a cornucopia of crushing blows. The fans at Mumford Stadium relentlessly taunted him, cursing his name and mocking his Heisman efforts. Two years earlier the Tigers had ruined Southern’s homecoming with a last-second win, and the memory in Baton Rouge was raw. Entering the fourth quarter, the Tigers trailed 21–13, but marched down the field and had the ball at Southern’s four-yard line. On first and goal, Payton took the handoff and barreled over Armond Brown, the team’s star linebacker, and into the end zone. “It was crushing, because we were determined not to lose,” said