Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [92]
Members of the Bears were blown away by their new star’s physicality. Payton’s legs looked like black pipes. His back was immense. He dead-lifted 625 pounds without a sweat. His hands, seemingly regular at quick glance, were thick and dense like slices of cheesecake. “You shook hands,” said Jerry B. Jenkins, the coauthor of one of Payton’s autobiographies, “and his wrapped all the way around yours.”
Mark Nordquist, a veteran offensive lineman who had recently been traded to the Bears by the Eagles, spent the summer of 1975 working harder than ever. He lifted weights four or five times per week, and reported to Lake Forest with an extra thirty pounds of rock-solid muscle encasing his body. When it came time for the Bears to grade the players on the military press, Nordquist silenced the room by warming up with a handful of 250-pound lifts. “Then I put the pin at the bottom of the weight set to three hundred and ten pounds,” he said, “and the room got even quieter, because nobody ever did that.” After taking several deep breaths, Nordquist grunted loudly, pushed and lifted the weight. “I staggered away, breathing hard,” he said. “Walter walks up, sits on the stool, and grabs the bar. I’m pointing at him, laughing, ‘Watch this idiot rookie!’ Well, Payton takes the bar and lifts it really fast—one, two, three times. Three times! He’s five foot ten, two hundred and five pounds, I’m six foot four, two-sixty-five. The guys in the weight room screamed, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town! There’s a new sheriff!’ ”
Despite some high moments, Payton’s training camp was mostly misery. He missed the first four exhibition games because of the elbow infection, and when Parsons, the team’s punter, suffered a twisted knee, Pardee considered having Payton take his place, just to keep him involved. While booting balls during a practice, however, Payton strained a muscle in his left leg, further stalling his progress. For the first time as Chicago’s coach, Pardee lost his cool. “Jack was fed up with Walter always being hurt,” said Richard Harris, a Bears defensive lineman. “He wanted to determine if Walter was a prima donna or a real player.” With the entire roster sitting inside a classroom for a meeting, Pardee called Payton to the front and chewed him out. “If we knew you’d be the kind of guy you are,” he said, “there’s no way we would have wasted our number one pick on you!”
Finally, on September 6, Payton debuted at Miami’s Orange Bowl against the Dolphins. As Don Pierson noted in that day’s Chicago Tribune, Walter “has been practicing as if this were the Super Bowl. He has run every play at full speed and gets to the hole so fast he looks like he’d been catapulted out of a slingshot.”
The game began at eight o’clock that night, and Payton was nervous. He paced the sidelines beforehand, muttering words of encouragement to himself while avoiding eye contact with teammates. The expectations of others were high, but the expectations for himself were even higher. Payton knew Chicago fans had been waiting to see what the kid from Jackson State could do. Was he the second coming of Gale Sayers, or merely another Ken Grandberry?
On that hot, muggy night, the answer came quickly. In yet another Bear defeat (Chicago lost 21–10), Payton was brilliant. He ran for sixty yards on twelve first-half carries, including bursts of sixteen and twelve yards. Payton had been scheduled to sit the remainder of the game, but after begging Pardee for extra work, he stayed in for much of the third and fourth quarters, gaining an additional thirty-four yards. “He was remarkable,” said Waymond Bryant, a Bears linebacker. “The thing I remember is his cuts were so quick and so sharp, he made guys miss with ease. This guy was clearly better than anyone we had.”
Payton played sparingly in the Bears’ final exhibition game, a loss to the Oilers. In case there were any remaining doubts about the direction of the franchise, Finks and