Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [89]
On the day after the game, McInally found himself in Northwestern Hospital, his left leg immobilized, his spirits crushed over an injury that would wipe out his entire rookie year. He heard a knock on the door, and looked up to see a smiling Walter Payton. “He went out of his way to visit me,” said McInally, who would play ten seasons. “I’ve never forgotten that.” Payton even brought a card, which McInally continues to keep in one of his drawers. It reads: “Hang in there. You’ll make it. But take the year off and eat.”
Walter Payton arrived at the team’s new Lake Forest, Illinois–based training camp with bells on. Literally. That’s the sound many of the 1975 Chicago Bears associate with their first impression of the rookie running back from Jackson State—the jingling of bells.
Why did Walter Payton, a relatively humble young man, decide it’d be a good idea to introduce himself to teammates by tying a couple of small brass bells to his shoelaces, thereby broadcasting his attendance during drills with a jolly jingle? “I’m not sure,” said Jerry Tagge, a journeyman quarterback. “Some of the veterans thought it was incredibly cocky. Personally, I found it sort of neat. If he ran for fifty yards, you would just listen to those bells ring—ding a ling, ding a ling, ding a ling. There was a real rhythm to it.”
“I heard those bells and my first thought was, ‘Who is this guy, and who does he think he is?’ ” said Witt Beckman, a rookie receiver out of Miami. “But then he ran, and nobody could touch him.”
Not that Payton’s NFL beginnings were purely sweet music. With his elbow still a mess, his participation in workouts was sporadic. He practiced one session, then missed the next three. He took one handoff, cut left, juked right, and burst fifty yards down the field. He took another handoff, absorbed a hit, and fell to the ground withering in pain. At one point Payton was sent to Illinois Masonic Hospital for further treatment, missing the exhibition opener against San Diego. When Pardee was asked about his young runner, he smiled and uttered the company line. “He’s such a great guy,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “He went out for a pass and the ball hit him in the arm. He couldn’t fight the tears running down his cheek. But he was hurt.”
For the Bears’ new coach, the words tasted like soap. A sensitive elbow? Are you kidding me? Born April 19, 1936, in Exira, Iowa, Pardee was a person who, from a very early age, believed only in hard work and harder work—excuses be damned. He was milking cows on the family’s farm at age five and digging holes for septic tanks at ten. By age fourteen Pardee was jackhammering in the oil fields of Christoval, Texas, a town of roughly five hundred people near San Angelo where his family had relocated. “To live I had to work,” he once said. “Outside of football, the greatest pleasure I got was from working on our farm . . . working the tractor. I guess I’m just hyperactive, but I can’t stand sitting around doing nothing for more than two days.”
Pardee played his college football under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. He will forever be identified as one of the “Junction Boys”—the thirty-five of one hundred players who survived Bryant’s hellacious preseason training camp in Junction, Texas, when the temperatures reached 110 degrees and water was nowhere to be found. Pardee went on to spend fifteen years as an NFL linebacker with the Rams and Redskins, though his career—and life—came to a halt in 1964, when a mole removed from his right forearm was found to be melanoma. Told he could either die or have the arm amputated, Pardee chose option number three—an experimental eleven-and-a-half-hour operation in which his collarbone was broken and his body temperature drastically reduced. “I didn’t think I’d die,” he said. “I probably always had an indestructible attitude. Nothing was ever gonna happen to me. I’m not afraid of dying—it’s not gonna happen.”
If cancer was his greatest life challenge, Pardee’s toughest football hurdle took place in