Sweetness (37 page)

Following the wins against the Chiefs and Vikings, the Bears were 5-5 and, for the first time in more than a decade, a hot team.

Their star was even hotter.

Wrote Phil Elderkin of
The Christian Science Monitor
: “Nobody would ever confuse running back Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears with an expensive sports car, although he often corners as well. Actually, Payton is a mini-tank, almost as apt to run over people as he is to run around them. He has the torso of a Soviet weight lifter, but the legs of Secretariat.”

Payton appeared on
The Today Show
. He was asked to take part in the wildly popular ABC television program
Superstars
, in which athletes from different sports compete against each other (it taped at season’s end). He held a conference call with seventeen national writers and laughed as two Windy City newspapers—the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Sun-Times
—provided subscribers with free Walter Payton iron-ons. WORLD RUNS TO PAYTON, read a headline in the November 22
Tribune
, and it was hardly an exaggeration. Wrote Pierson: “Payton’s record rushing brought out a symphony Monday and he conducted it with a maturity that is growing off the field as well as on.”

Was Payton still a juvenile pain in the ass? Yes—rolled-up socks continued to soar through the air and pants were regularly pulled down from behind. He ceaselessly mocked Robin Earl for his enormous rear end (Earl: “Walter would line up behind me and scream, ‘I can’t see! I can’t see!’ ”) and delighted in sneaking up on Len Walterscheid, a rookie defensive back, and strangling him with a deathly bear hug. During a trip to Tampa, Albrecht was convinced by veteran teammates to dump a bucket of ice water atop an unsuspecting Payton as he lounged by the pool. “Walter stood up, all wet, and screamed, ‘OK, let the games begin!’ ” Hours later, when he returned to his room after dinner, Albrecht found his bed covered in ice. The next morning, Albrecht’s shoulder pads were glued to a wood beam in the locker room.

The one Bear who seemed most irked by Payton was Avellini, the prickly quarterback who resented the excessive praise accrued by his teammate. Avellini, according to one of his offensive linemen, “thought he was better than everyone else. I don’t know what he did in college at Maryland, but he thought he was God’s gift to quarterbacking. The linemen—all of us—hated him.” During a luncheon appearance at Chicago’s Playboy Club, Avellini answered a guest’s question by insisting he would throw more to Payton as soon as the halfback started running proper pass patterns. At practice the following day, Avellini spotted Joe Lapointe, the
Chicago Sun-Times
writer who used the quote. Avellini launched a pass that nearly slammed into the scribe’s head. Walking by, an amused Payton picked up the ball, flipped it to Lapointe, and in his high-pitched cackle, said, “Here, fight back.”

“Maybe Walter was annoying at times,” said Doug Plank, the longtime safety. “But you had to love his spirit.”

The kid whose effort and heart were once questioned by Pardee and Finks was suddenly the toughest Bear of them all. Less than twenty-four hours after his historic showing against the Vikings, Payton could be found at the team’s Lake Forest practice facility, jogging back and forth through the chilling winds alongside his teammates. “He was running scout plays to get us ready for Detroit,” said Pardee. “He has his head on straight.”

With success and fame, Payton noticed teammates beginning to look his way for leadership. While he was hardly one to give a rousing pep talk, his dedication spoke volumes. Payton was usually the first on the field for practice and the last to leave the facility come day’s end. He finished off every run with a forty-yard sprint, and could often be found in a dark corner, completing hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups.

Whereas others walked through the locker room in either sneakers or sandals, Payton wore shoes without heels or insoles. At practice. At home. On a trip to the movies. Driving his van. “He thought it built up leg strength,” said Plank. “And if Walter thought something could help him, he’d be 100 percent dedicated to the idea. He was always pushing himself and challenging himself to get better. And if you see Walter Payton, a man gifted with so much talent, pushing himself, you want to push yourself, too.”

Though the offensive linemen didn’t always get along with one another, they came to love Payton. He offered regular credit and encouragement, and following the 1976 season bought each one a gold watch with the inscription THANKS FOR 1,000 YARDS. WALTER PAYTON.

Blocking for Payton was, in the words of Peiffer, “ joyous . . . easy.”

“Give him half a hole and he would hit it and be gone,” Peiffer said. “If you did anything at all to block your guy, Walter was going to hit the hole and be past the line of scrimmage.”

When he was scheduled to appear on national television, Payton showed up with his entire line in tow. “Talk to them,” he told prospective interviewers. “They make me.” While the sentiment was hogwash (if anyone was being “made,” it was his mediocre linemen), it was from the heart. Late in the season, he was especially gleeful when Phyllis George, one of the cohosts of CBS’s
NFL Today
, came to Lake Forest, ignored Payton, and focused an entire segment on his linemen.

“You need a nickname,” George told the men.

“I think we’ll be the Beehive,” Sorey laughed, “because we protect the Sweetness.”

The red-hot Bears traveled to Detroit to face the Lions on Thanksgiving Day, and Payton was held to twenty yards on seven carries in the first half. At the start of the third quarter, the words WALTER WHO? flashed across the Silverdome scoreboard. Payton’s first handoff of the second half was a forty-three-yard burst around right end. By the time the game had ended, Payton’s statistical line read 137 yards on twenty rushes (he also caught four balls for 107 yards), and Chicago won, 31–14. The Bears were now 6-5 and in the thick of the play-off race.

With three games left, Payton’s 1,541 rushing yards left him 462 behind Simpson’s single-season NFL record. In the time that had passed between the final week of the 1976 season and now, Payton’s opinion of Simpson underwent a change. Though he harbored no animosity toward Buffalo’s halfback, Payton wondered why, after the 275-yard showing, Simpson had neither called nor offered a public congratulatory word.

As a running back, Payton liked to think of himself as everything Simpson was not. The Juice was fast and sleek, but about as rugged as a Chanel handbag. He rarely ran through the guts of defenses; footage of Simpson confronting a linebacker or defensive lineman was rare. While Payton shunned the limelight, Simpson was the Reggie Jackson of football—were there a television camera within a hundred yards, he was the one speeding toward it, hair perfectly coiffed, teeth aglow.

“I was good friends with [49ers wide receiver] Dwight Clark,” said Steve Fuller, who played quarterback for the Bears in the mid-1980s. “He told me that when O.J. was traded to San Francisco [in 1978] the team practiced on one field and O.J. practiced on the other, stretching on his own. The idea of Walter ever behaving like that was ludicrous.”

When asked about Simpson’s 2,003 yards, Payton hemmed and hawed and acted as if it were insignificant. But the record
was
significant—to him, to the offensive line, to the coaching staff. “If I don’t catch any passes I feel worthless,” said James Scott, the team’s top wide receiver and a notoriously selfish player. “[But] I love Walter, and I’d like to see him break O.J.’s record. I’ll do as much blocking as I can.” Chicago won its next two games. With one Sunday remaining, the Bears were the talk of the NFL. Should he exceed 198 yards against the New York Giants, Payton would surpass Simpson. Were the Bears to travel to New Jersey and beat the 5-8 Giants, the team would qualify for the play-offs for the first time since 1963.

Football storylines have rarely been better.

They woke up at the Sheraton in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, on the morning of Sunday, December 18, and saw freezing rain.

Generally speaking, such weather didn’t overwhelm the forty-three members of the Chicago Bears. When one signs a contract agreeing to make Soldier Field his home, he’s well aware of the inclement conditions. “You never fully adjust, you just accept,” said Waymond Bryant, the Bears linebacker. “When it was particularly snowy and cold, I used to try and think about a warm place. It worked until someone hit you and you fell across the snow.”

In the course of one of the greatest individual seasons in National Football League annals, Walter Payton had run over, around, and through every conceivable obstacle. Frozen rain, though, was the most brutal opponent of all. Especially at Giants Stadium, which featured an unforgiving green Astroturf that made Soldier Field’s cement slab feel like a bed of feathers. As soon as he spotted the rain outside his window, Payton knew hopes of eclipsing O.J. Simpson’s 2,003 yards were diminished.

“There was no way I was going to run for 199 yards on that surface,” he wrote, “so I could just forget about that. The sole concern now was to figure out how to beat the Giants in their own stadium on a terrible day.”

The words come straight from Payton’s 1978 autobiography, and while they read nicely, the sentiment is untrue. Dogged to the end, Payton wanted the record, and his linemen
really
wanted the record. “The Giants hadn’t played by the rules,” said Albrecht, the rookie left tackle. “They didn’t sweep the field beforehand, which would have been the right thing to do. But before the game our locker room was very emotional. We needed to win. But we also needed to get Walter what we thought was his.”

“All of our linemen felt very loyal to Walter, and they probably felt like that record was also
their
record,” said Pardee. “But we got to the stadium and there was ten inches of snow on the field. We were a running team. We had a running philosophy. Our running back was the best in the NFL. But ten inches of snow is ten inches of snow.”

When the Bears players stepped onto the field for warm-ups, they were shocked. To hell with running—it was hard enough to stand without falling. Ray Earley, the team’s longtime equipment manager, had packed everyone’s turf shoes for the trip, an enormous error in judgment. As the weather forecasters had predicted, this wasn’t a field, so much as the East Rutherford municipal skating rink. “It was a joke,” said Peiffer, the center. “The worst surface I’ve ever seen.”

Shortly before kickoff, Bob Markus, a writer for the
Tribune
, called a friend who ran a sporting goods store in New Jersey. The man said he had a couple of dozen pairs of spiked shoes available, if the Bears so desired. Earley bolted the stadium, picked up the footwear, then rushed back. “It was kind of a leathery sneaker with a grip,” said Jeff Davis, who was working the game for NBC. “They were better than nothing.” By they time the shoes reached the locker room, however, it was halftime, and everything that could have gone wrong for the tennis shoe–clad Bears had gone wrong. The score was 3–3. Chicago fumbled the ball twice, while gaining a mere twenty-one yards on the ground. Half the players were suffering from frostbite, and Payton was shivering by his locker. Snot dripped from his nose. He was coughing. “It was miserable,” said Joe Lapointe, who covered the game for the
Chicago Sun-Times
. “There were thirty-five thousand no-shows wisely missing a game nobody wanted to watch.”

With the 5-8 Giants playing for pride and a paycheck (“Our organization was a complete mess,” said Gordon Gravelle, an offensive tackle. “Dysfunctional inside and outside the locker room.”), the host team’s primary focus was keeping Payton’s name out of the record book. New York excelled in few areas, but it boasted a stout run defense that ranked eighth in the league by allowing just 126.6 yards per game. “The only thing we did well was shut down running backs,” said Clyde Powers, a New York defensive back. “We had Brad Van Pelt, who was a strong tackler, and Harry Carson was emerging. That gave us a chance against someone like Walter.”

Both teams failed to score in the third quarter, but the Giants took a 6–3 lead early in the fourth when Joe Danelo kicked a nineteen-yard field goal. The Bears responded by marching down the field behind Avellini, whose twenty-six-yard pass to Scott set up Earl’s four-yard touchdown run. Bob Thomas’ extra point attempt was blocked, however, and Danelo’s twenty-seven-yard field goal with thirty-eight seconds left in regulation tied things at nine.

The game was heading into overtime.

“There has never been a worse day to play football, so while I really, really wanted to win, I also really, really wanted the game to end so I could go inside,” said Peiffer. “I remember on one play the Giants had an interception on us and I was cutting across field, completely uninvolved. The defensive tackle had an angle on me, and he hit me hard. I landed on my back and slid about ten feet across the ice. My shoulder pads acted as a scoop and loaded my jersey with ice. I looked at him and said, ‘Goddamn, was that necessary?’ He just laughed and laughed.”