Sweetness (48 page)

When his son Nigel was born, on January 6, 1985, Walter was nowhere to be found. Angelina was all alone in a suburban Illinois hospital, bringing to life a child who would never get to know his biological father. She called Walter to tell him the news, and he didn’t immediately respond. A couple of weeks later, Walter and Angelina met to sign financial documents. “He hopped out of the lawyer’s office and seemed relieved it was over,” Angelina said. “Nigel was a newborn and in the next room, but Walter said he couldn’t see him . . . it would be too hard. I showed him pictures and he had a tear in his eye. Then he left and never looked back.”

Two months later, on March 15, Connie gave birth to Brittney, the couple’s second child. The arrival was all over the news, and images showed Walter gazing lovingly toward his little girl.

Before long, Payton would be named Chicago’s Father of the Year by the Illinois Fatherhood Initiative.

He accepted the award.

How could he behave in such a way? How could a genuinely good guy (and Walter Payton
was
, in many ways, a genuinely good guy) ignore one child while lavishing affection upon two others?

“I can’t explain it,” said Ginny Quirk, Walter’s longtime assistant and the vice president of Walter Payton, Inc. “I feel like, for many years, I knew Walter as well as anyone. I saw him at his best and at his worst. I saw him incredibly high and incredibly low. But how he could completely ignore his own child . . . I just don’t have an answer.”

There is, of course, an answer. Not a pretty one—but an answer nonetheless. Against logic and most theories of human emotion, Payton took all thoughts of Nigel and simply erased them. He removed the infant from his brain; literally ceased thinking about him. “Our office [in the 1990s] was in Schaumburg, a stone’s throw away from where Nigel lived,” said Kimm Tucker, the executive director of Payton’s charitable foundation. “Walter couldn’t face it. He could not. I told Walter that if he wanted to get right with God and if he wanted God to heal him, he’d have to do the right thing. But in this area, he couldn’t. He just put Nigel out of his mind.” And if someone brought the boy up? Well, nobody brought the boy up because, save for four or five confidants, nobody knew he existed. From Connie to teammates to coaches to close friends, Nigel was a nonentity. One time Linda Conley, a close family friend, took Walter to see a palm reader on a lark. “She took his wrists and she said, ‘I see three children—you have three children,’ ” said Conley. “Walter snatched his wrists back. That really got to him.”

When Angelina contacted Walter’s office to request money or supplies, she was never turned down. But Payton refused to take the call. An assistant handled everything. “Walter would see Angelina every once in a while, and he hated it,” a friend said. “He never showed any interest in Nigel. That’s the type of person he could be.”

Payton loved women. But—and this includes Connie—they were disposable. Athletes often say that excelling at the highest level of sport takes an uncommon level of focus. If one finds a woman willing to accept certain conditions (as was the case with Connie), a relationship can work. It’ll be one-sided and emotionally unfulfilling. But it will, in a strictly mechanical sense,
work
.

That’s the way people speak of Walter and Connie’s union. Initially, at Jackson State, the pairing was about love and companionship. But by the mid-1980s, the demise had begun. Yes, Walter’s infidelity hardly helped. But the problem went beyond that. When the season was over, Walter rarely stuck around. A handful of pictures showed him changing diapers or holding a bottle, and for brief spells he was interested. But the images were largely staged; moments in time arranged by a photographer or magazine editor. “Was Walter an involved father?” said Bud Holmes. “No. Not really.”

Payton devoted much of his away-from-the-field time to his two passions—fast vehicles and hunting. Both were pastimes Connie had zero interest in.

Through the years, Payton’s garage and driveway served as headquarters to an endless showcase of pricey, high-performance cars, motorcycles, and mopeds. From Porsches (one featured the memorable vanity plate: IOUZIP) and BMWs to Testarossas and Lamborghinis, Payton was mesmerized by the sight of a fresh-off-the-assembly-line piece of metal. In 1976 he arrived at training camp in a new De Tomaso Pantera (with a mighty 351 Cleveland engine), the beginning of the obsession. “He drove a different car to the facility every day of the week,” said Rick Moss, a defensive back in camp in 1980. “You’d wait anxiously to see what kind of fancy wheels Walter would be in.”

“I took a lot of pride in my cars, and I had a lot of them,” Payton said. “I had the Lamborghini . . . I had a Rolls-Royce, I had my Porsche, and then at any given time we had eight or nine vehicles in my family. I know it sounds crazy, but coming from where I grew up, I just always found cars, fast cars, a kind of ‘I made it’ statement.”

The cars were not merely show-and-tell items. Payton made use of every ounce of performance in his vehicles. His CB handle was Mississippi Maniac, and it fit like a sock. When Payton, Doug Plank, and Len Walterscheid once made an appearance at a Kawasaki-sponsored event, they were gifted with motorcycles. Payton’s teammates chose the (relatively) tame 750 LTD. Payton, velocity addict, went with the KZ 1100—“a genuine crotch rocket,” said Walterscheid.

The stories of Payton’s wild road antics are endless. “My second year in the league [1979] Walter and I had to go to a picture signing set up by the PR guys,” said John Skibinski, a backup fullback. “We were in Lake Forest and we got out of practice at four fifty. It was snowing flakes the size of pancakes and we had to get to a dealership fifty miles away in a half-hour.” Payton insisted the two take his new Porsche Carrera. Having never driven with Payton, Skibinski complied. “Before we get going Walter picks up a hamburger, some fries, and a milkshake,” Skibinski said. “He’s driving a stick in the snow, a hamburger in one hand, the shake in the other, picking up fries, going about a hundred miles per hour. I was shitting in my pants, thinking, ‘If we die, my name will forever be immortalized in the headline SKIBINSKI AND PAYTON KILLED IN CAR WRECK. Well, we got there with two minutes to spare.”

Hunting, meanwhile, relaxed Payton. In the basement of the home he had built in 1984, there was a state-of-the-art shooting range encased in soundproof glass. “He’d go down there and blast his rifles and semiautomatics,” said Jeff Fisher, the Bears safety. “That was a weird peace for Walter.” One year, as a present for his offensive linemen, Payton presented Remington 11-87 shotguns with the inscription THANKS FOR LEADING THE WAY engraved on the side. He spoke dreamingly to teammates of faraway trips to distant lands, where plump animals roamed free and hunting season commenced on New Year’s Day and ended December 31. “He wanted to go to Alaska and chase down some grizzly bear,” said Tim Clifford, a Bears quarterback and Payton’s occasional hunting partner. “But he didn’t want to use a gun, just a bow and arrow. I said, ‘You know, Walter, I’m not going anywhere with only a bow against something that can outrun and outclimb me.’ ”

Payton, Harper, and other teammates used to take long treks into the woods, chasing down turkeys and squirrels and wild boars. Though their motto, “If it flies, it dies,” might have been a tad crass, the sentiment was genuine. “It was like therapy for us,” said Harper. “No worries, no other people—just the woods, the open air, and a lot of game.”

Following the 1981 season, Payton, Harper, and Skibinski planned a five-day boar-hunting excursion to Crossville, Tennessee. Skibinski had spent considerable time with Payton in duck blinds and on lakes, and he relished the experiences. “The best moments I ever had with Walter were outdoors,” he said. “We’d sit in a boat and not say crap for an hour. Then he’d say, ‘That’s enough. Let’s get something to eat.’

“So we go on this trip to the backwoods of Tennessee, and we rented a Ford Bronco truck at the airport, but all they had was a Lincoln. Well, we get in the Lincoln and it’s me, Walt, Roland, and one other guy—two whites, two blacks. Walter’s driving through rural Tennessee down this gravel road, with a bunch of guns sticking out of the Lincoln, trying to find a place to hunt. We stop to have breakfast at this country dive, and there are some good ol’ boys sitting there, listening to Hank Williams on the jukebox. Walt goes on over, deposits a quarter, and puts on Marvin Gaye. Every cap in that place turned to Walter, guns on hips. Then someone recognized him—‘That’s Walter Payton!’ Once they figured that out it was like old home week, everyone asking for autographs and shaking his hand. And we had one helluva trip.”

Although Payton’s off-the-field behavior sometimes failed to match his gilded image, his football performance was as breathtaking as ever. Ditka followed up his disappointing rookie campaign with a marginally less dispiriting 8-8 record in 1983, but any scorn for the underwhelming coach was obscured by a developing news story that took hold of Chicago: the Chase.

As early as 1981, Walter Payton had been asked about the possibility of breaking Jim Brown’s all-time NFL rushing mark. His 12,312 yards was, without question, the most revered number in the sport. In his nine-year career with the Cleveland Browns, Brown ran with a rage that left opponents awed. He is regarded by many to be the finest athletic specimen to ever wear an NFL uniform, and for years the idea of anyone touching his record seemed ludicrous. Payton agreed. “It’s so far away, I can’t even ponder it,” he once said. “Jim Brown is in another league, as far as I’m concerned.”

That was that, until Payton’s ’83 revival. Behind Johnny Roland, the trusted new running backs coach, and a revamped offensive line that included a pair of massive first-round picks at tackle (Keith Van Horne and Jimbo Covert), a dirt-eating right guard named Kurt Becker, and Jay Hilgenberg, a future great at center, Payton ran for 1,421 yards and six touchdowns. He also caught a career-high fifty-three passes for 607 yards and two touchdowns, and even threw for three touchdowns on six pass attempts. “At the beginning of the season I was very blunt with Walter,” said Roland. “I told him that, despite all his God-given talents, people considered him to be a loser. ‘You’ve never won a thing here,’ I said. ‘If you trust me and trust your line, you might be able to snap that streak.’ It made sense to him and he had an incredible year.”

Yet in a season that featured some noteworthy highs
¹³
and devastating lows,
¹⁴
many were secretly—and not so secretly—taken aback by Payton’s newfound obsession with surpassing Brown.

When the television camera lights were on and the reporter notepads were out, Payton did his best to only talk team-team-team. All he wanted was for the Bears to win. If he ran for zero yards but the other fellas did well, he was happy. Whether he surpassed Brown or not was insignificant.
Blah, blah, blah.
It was utter nonsense. Having struggled to relate to his star throughout the miserable ’82 season, Ditka committed himself to learning to read Payton. He studied the running back. Watched how he interacted with teammates and coaches. Gauged his wide-ranging moods. His conclusion: “If Walter got the ball, he was happy,” said Ditka. “If he didn’t get the ball, he wasn’t so satisfied.”