Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [98]
“OK,” Payton said. “I get it.”
“And never call to complain about this again,” Holmes said. “They pay you a lot of money to play football. Now shut the hell up and go play it!”
For Chicago, the biggest matchup of a dismal season came on Sunday, October 19, when the Bears traveled to Pittsburgh to face the defending Super Bowl champions at Three Rivers Stadium.
Payton spent the week leading up to the game going through workouts with half hearted intensity. When others ran, he jogged. When others jogged, he walked. One of the veteran Bears, a fullback named Cid Edwards, was in the final season of his career and beaten down by the losing. Throughout the week, Edwards was in Payton’s ear, encouraging him to loaf. “Let the white boy take the carries,” Edwards said of Mike Adamle, the backup halfback. “You’ve had a long season.” Though now familiar enough with Pardee to know he was no cupcake (Said Carter: “In my two years of playing for Jack I think he smiled twice. And in both instances, he was really just squinting because the sun was in his eyes.”), Payton figured his coach would understand that, on certain occasions, featured backs need to take it easy.
The Bears held their practices at Ferry Hall, an abandoned all-girls school near Lake Forest College. The offices and meeting centers were all converted classrooms and the locker room had been a science lab. While the facility was uninspiring by nearly all standards (Said Caito: “The guys from UCLA and USC would go there for the first time and shudder in disbelief.”), it allowed players numerous inconspicuous spots to sneak off and smoke a cigarette or take a quick sip from a flask. So Payton hid. He stayed out of the way, lingered behind a corner, avoided Pardee’s glare at all costs.
Upon arriving at practice Friday morning, Payton told O’Connor that his knee was hurting, and he needed a day off. The coach was incredulous—the Steelers featured a halfback, Rocky Bleier, whose right leg was filled with shrapnel from a grenade attack during Vietnam. A rookie with five games under his belt was asking out?
“There’s an enormous difference between being hurt and being injured,” said O’Connor. “Was Walter hurt? Sure. But he certainly wasn’t hurt to the point that he couldn’t participate.”
As Payton watched from the sidelines, the Bears practiced with Adamle, a fifth-year halfback out of Northwestern, filling in. After the team retreated to the showers, Pardee called Payton into his office. “Walter,” Pardee said, “we have a very strict rule here. You don’t practice, you don’t play. That’s how it is, and it’s written in stone. So you’re out for Sunday. Mike’s getting the start.”
Payton nodded, left the room, sat down at his locker, and put his headphones over his ears.
“What’s wrong?” asked Roland Harper, the rookie fullback who used the neighboring locker.
“He won’t let me play,” Payton said. “I’m out.”
“Walter pouted,” said Harper. “He couldn’t believe what Jack was doing to him.”
Far from beloved, Bears players found Pardee to be unfriendly, unemotional, and when it came to the team’s dull offense, unimaginative. “He put a bad taste in a lot of our mouths,” said Wally Chambers, the defensive lineman. “We were used to Abe Gibron, the big teddy bear. There were no warm, fuzzy feelings toward Jack.”
In this instance, however, the coach’s decision was brilliant. Veterans applauded it. Though he approached every game hoping to win, Pardee realized that, whether his starting halfback was Payton or Adamle, the Bears were almost certainly not going to go on the road and beat the mighty Steelers. So why not make a statement?
“Long after I had played for Coach [Bear] Bryant at Texas A&M, I’d go to coaching seminars to hear him speak,” said Pardee. “He used talk about disciplining players, and how if you’re going to make a point you better do it with a good player, not the fourth-string tackle. Coach once sat