Remembering Walter Payton

By Jeff Pearlman
VIEWPOINT
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/
February 6, 2009

I knocked on the office door, and the old man answered. He was hunched over, with sunken eyes and brown skin that looked weathered. He wore a blue Members Only jacket, denim jeans and white Reebok sneakers. When he walked, his feet shuffled, reminding me of my 83-year-old grandmother making her way through her Florida assisted living community.


Walter Payton rushed for 16,726 yards and 110 touchdowns in his 13-year career with the Chicago Bears.
Walter Iooss Jr./SI

The date was Feb. 15, 1999, and I was visiting a suburban Chicago office complex to meet Walter Payton, the Bears' Hall of Fame running back who had recently announced that he was suffering from primary sclerosing chonlangitis, a rare (and deadly) liver disease. I was assigned the piece by Sports Illustrated, which wanted to report the details of Payton's illness.

"Excuse me," I said to the senior citizen. "Is Wal--"

Then, in a moment of horror, I stopped speaking.

Staring deeper into the man's face, beneath his yellow jaundiced eyes and saddened expression, I came to a crushing realization: This was Walter Payton. And he was dying.

*****

Now, some 10 years after Payton's death at age 45, hindsight provides a certain perspective and understanding. I was a New York City resident on September 11. I was the first to arrive when my Grandma Marta died of a heart attack. A close friend is struggling with multiple sclerosis.

When I visited Payton, however, I was 26 and cocooned from the harsh reality that, for all of us, life ends. My general day-to-day concerns befitted my age -- I wanted to move up the masthead at SI; I wanted a steady girlfriend; a nice apartment; good times at the nearby pub. Dying? Who worried about dying?

So there I stood, face to face with a man I had never before met; a man I had long considered to be indestructible. Throughout his 13-year NFL career, which lasted from 1975 through 1987, Payton established himself not merely as the league's all-time rushing leader with 16,726 yards, but as the embodiment of what it meant to be a professional athlete. He was a 5-foot-10, 202-pound graceful sledgehammer; a balletic runner who often seemed to hover through defenses, but who also went out of his way to seek linebackers to decapitate.

"In Chicago's Super Bowl year [1985] we played them at Lambeau," recalled Brian Noble, a former Packers linebacker. "Walter came right at me with the ball ... and I hit that man as hard as I hit anyone in my career. I knocked him back about four yards, but he stayed up and just kept going. Touchdown. I was devastated. [Afterward] my teammate put his arm around me and said, 'Believe me, that's not the first time and it won't be the last time that Walter Payton breaks a tackle like that.'"

As opposed to nowadays, where so many so-called "standout" backs couldn't block an oncoming two-legged cat, Payton left behind a long, bloodied list of flattened would-be pass rushers. He pulverized Minnesota's Joey Browner, destroyed Tampa Bay's Hugh Green, flattened Washington's Dexter Manley. "How many times did he save my butt by picking up a blitz before I was blown up?" said Jim McMahon, the former Bears quarterback. "A lot." Best of all, Payton never -- never -- celebrated the aftermaths. (I can only imagine what he would have to say of Terrell Owens.)

Yet for all the brilliance, it was Payton's away-from-the-field philosophy that elevated him beyond the ordinariness of "great pro athlete." Unlike 99.9 percent of his professional peers, he didn't view his job as anything particularly special. Sure, he loved to compete and run the football. But once practices and games came to an end, Payton -- who could never sit still for more than two or three minutes -- was itching for new, non-football adventures.

He collected antique cars and dove from airplanes and fished and hunted and pursued his helicopter pilot's license. He once beat Artis Gilmore one-on-one in hoops, and another time danced his rear off on an episode of Soul Train. He tried his hand at becoming an IndyCar racer, and later bought his own CART team. He co-hosted Saturday Night Live with Joe Montana, cooked gourmet meals for friends, played a mean game of chess and was the best rapper in the Super Bowl Shuffle.

"He was a real person," said former Bears coach Mike Ditka. "There was no phoniness about him."

*****

After inviting me in, Payton and I sat down in a small room. This wasn't a time to talk about Super Bowl XX or Jim Brown or George Halas. Payton made no effort to conceal his plight or offer up false hope.

Though there was seemingly little to gain in speaking to a scrub reporter, Payton wanted to get the word out about organ donations. Not for himself -- surely, he had begun to realize it was probably too late. But for all the others. The battered. The wounded. The kids.

"Everybody has to die," Payton told me, sitting upright in a chair behind his desk. "I'm not afraid of dying. But I'm afraid I'm not going to be here to see the things I feel I have the right to see: my son playing college football, my daughter graduating from college, my kids having kids."

He reached for a piece of notebook paper -- one of the approximately 10,000 letters he had received since announcing his illness. This one was from a 9-year-old boy who was battling cirrhosis of the liver.

"Christopher says I shouldn't be scared," he said. "God will take care of me."

Walter Payton died at his home on November 1, 1999, surrounded by his wife, Connie, and his two children.

God, I hope, is taking care of him.

Send a comment to Jeff Pearlman at anngold22@gmail.com.