Sweetness (72 page)

“Walter,” said Quirk, “wigged out. He was devastated.”

On January 1, 1999, Payton, traveling without companionship, checked into St. Mary’s Hospital for three and a half days of testing at Mayo. He was terrified and alone, and had no idea what the future held. When Charley Walters, a staff columnist for the
Saint Paul Pioneer Press
, was tipped off about Payton’s presence at the clinic, he pursued the story. “I’m here for a physical,” Payton told him. “No big deal.”

Payton returned home on the evening of January 4, convinced that somehow, someway the news would be positive.

It wasn’t.

Gores explained to Payton that he was, without question, suffering from PSC. He told him that the disease could be measured in different levels, ranging from hours to live to weeks to live to months to live. “I was at level three,” Payton said, “where they figured I probably had a year or two at that point.”

“This won’t get any better,” Gores told him. “There’s no medication or anything that we can give you to make this better. It’s going to progressively get worse to the point where, in about a year or a year and a half, you’re going to need a liver transplant.”

The report punched Payton in the ribs. Until now, everything had been hypothetical.
Maybe
liver disease.
Maybe
cancer. “He thought the best,” said Quirk. “Until he heard the real diagnosis.” It didn’t compute. Sure, Payton wasn’t feeling like himself. But he was still strong and, at times, energized. There was no way this could be true. Payton knew he would overcome. He didn’t hope or guess he’d overcome—he
knew
. The average wait for a liver in Illinois was said to be 127 days. He could handle that. The success rate was 88 percent. He could handle that, too. Payton would inevitably receive the transplant, and that would be that. End of story. “I beat everything mentally,” he told Mike Lanigan, his friend and business partner. “I prepared myself for Sunday mornings when people said I couldn’t play. I’m gonna do this, too.” The next time he spoke with Quirk and Tucker, Payton made an executive decree: No more bad news. From that point on, Quirk would do most of the talking with the Mayo people (Payton made it clear to Mayo that absolutely no information was to be conveyed directly to Connie). If they had positive updates, Payton wanted to hear them. If they had terrible news, well, keep it away from Walter’s ears.

Upon returning from Rochester, Payton called Connie and asked that they hold a family meeting at the home at 34 Mudhank. The four Paytons gathered in the basement, and Walter—positive, laughing, upbeat—told his children that he required a liver transplant, and there was nothing to worry about. “I was kind of nervous, but he was Superman to me,” said Jarrett. “He didn’t say anything about dying. Everything was positive—‘When I get this transplant, I’ll be fine.’ I was numb. I didn’t cry, because I didn’t think he’d die. I assumed the best.”

“I don’t think I understood,” said Brittney, who was thirteen. “I’d never been to a funeral and I never knew anyone who had been really sick. There were some tears and nervousness, but he assured us he’d be fine. Death wasn’t a part of my world.”

At the time the Roundhouse was preparing to distribute bottles of its newest beer, Payton Pilsner, to the Dominick’s grocery stores scattered throughout Chicago. “The trucks were actually loaded and ready to go,” said Ascher, “and Walter called me and said, ‘I can’t explain, but please don’t deliver the beer.’ ” Ascher and Alberts were livid. Here was an enormous business opportunity. Why would Payton want to ruin things? “We knew Walter was a good man, so we begrudgingly pulled the beers off the trucks,” Ascher said. “It turns out he didn’t want his name on beer at the same time he was fighting liver disease. We had no idea.”

Along with his various endeavors, Payton had been working with Matt Suhey, his old pal and blocking back, to purchase an Arena Football League team for Chicago. The two spoke regularly, and shortly after his return from Mayo Payton met with Suhey and several other potential investors at the Millrose Restaurant in South Barrington. When the meeting ended, Payton pulled Suhey close.

“Matt,” he said, “I have a problem.”

Throughout their friendship, Suhey had been pranked by Payton hundreds of times. He wasn’t falling for this one. “OK, Walter,” he said. “What’s the punch line here?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve really got a problem.”

Payton wasn’t giggling. “He got an inch from my nose,” Suhey said. “We spent about an hour talking about it right there, and he was extremely positive he’d be getting a transplant.”

What Payton didn’t know was that he had a zero percent chance of receiving a new liver. Whether he was misinformed by the Mayo Clinic or provided erroneous information via Quirk or merely lying through his teeth to maintain good karma and positively impact organ donations, well, one will never know. What is now known, however, is that by the time Payton had visited Mayo his body was being ravaged by cancer of the bile duct. It was spreading to the lymph nodes and throughout the liver. The jaundice and weight loss, neither of which are direct byproducts of PSC, were damning indicators. “Most people with sclerosing cholangitis look pretty good until they’re at the very end,” said David Van Thiel, director of the liver transplant program at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. “He may well have had sclerosing cholangitis for a long time, even when he was still playing football. It’s possible. I don’t know that, but it’s certainly possible to have mild sclerosing cholangitis that’s relatively asymptomatic.”

According to one Chicago physician, a liver specialist who, in the late-1990s, worked specifically with transplants, Mayo’s doctors were informed that, were he in need, there was a liver available for Payton. “The people at Mayo told us, unambiguously, that he was not on the list,” said the physician, who requested anonymity. “Somebody misinformed Walter.” Payton was, in a sense, the
Titanic
passenger convinced the RMS
Carpathia
should be arriving in a matter of minutes. Unbeknownst to him, a transplant would never come. Once a person on the list is diagnosed with cancer, he is no longer a candidate for a new organ.

John Brems, the director of intra-abdominal transplantation at Loyola, had the opportunity to view Payton’s X-rays. “You never say a condition is one hundred percent hopeless,” Brems said, “but he clearly wasn’t ever a transplant candidate. That would be impossible.”

On the afternoon of January 29, 1999, Jarrett Payton held a press conference at St. Viator High School to announce that he would be signing a letter of intent to attend the University of Miami on a football scholarship.

It was that time of year in America, when hundreds of high school gridiron stars ritualistically sat alongside their coaches and family members and donned red caps and blue caps and green caps and orange caps as the flashes exploded and local reporters collected uplifting quotes about the future.

Now here was a smiling Jarrett, flanked by Kevin Kelly, head football coach at St. Viator, Connie Payton, and Walter Payton. “Miami is the best fit for me as a student and as an athlete,” said Jarrett, a six-foot-two, 210-pound block of granite who had passed for 973 yards and ran for nearly 1,400 yards as a senior. “When I went down there, I fell in love with it. I like the fact that it is a private school and that it has a small-school atmosphere where I can get help and not be just a number. It just felt right.”

Jarrett’s future was interesting and intriguing, but the elephant in the room was Walter Payton, making his first public appearance since the diagnosis. Beneath a pair of dark sunglasses, Payton looked shrunken. By now he had lost more than fifty pounds. When a reporter asked about his slimmeddown figure, Payton lied. “I’m training to run a marathon in a year,” he explained. “I’ve lost twenty-three pounds.”

Payton hoped the discussion was over. It wasn’t. That evening Mark Giangreco, the principle sports anchor at Chicago’s WLS-TV 7, cracked that Payton appeared “all shriveled up” and that he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. “I think,” Giangreco added, “I could take him on.”

Watching from his home, Payton was devastated. “That upset me beyond what you can imagine,” he said. “I had felt betrayed.” So, for that matter, did Quirk. Though Giangreco’s barbs were the first public comments Payton had heard of his condition, that was only because he wasn’t paying attention. Throughout the Windy City, a vicious rumor had been spreading that Payton was dying of AIDS. “Walter was definitely not gay, though that was being said a lot,” said Quirk. “And he definitely didn’t have HIV, even though every person I would deal with in Chicago was asking me about Walter and AIDS. I’ve heard people in hindsight say that wasn’t a real rumor. Well, it was real. I was the one being asked—and I was being asked
every single day.
”

Moved by Giangreco’s words and Quirk’s urging, Payton came to the dreaded decision to go public with his condition. He was scheduled to cohost his radio show,
The Monsters of the Midday,
on Tuesday, February 2, at Carlucci’s restaurant in Rosemont, Illinois. The scene, Payton concluded, would now double as a press conference.

With as little advance hype as possible, Quirk and Tucker called the various Chicago media outposts and invited them to Carlucci’s for a ten A.M. announcement. Over the course of the previous weeks North and Jiggetts could tell something was seriously off. As with most of his acquaintances, however, Payton maintained enough of an emotional distance that neither man felt comfortable pressing the issue. “He looked more and more like Sammy Davis Jr. every week,” said North. “I don’t say that humorously—he really did. He lost all this weight, and he started wearing sunglasses for every show. One time I was able to see behind them, and his eyes were glowing yellow. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. That can’t be right.’ ”

On the morning of the press conference, North received a telephone call from Jeff Schwartz, an executive with WSCR. “We have an issue,” Schwartz told him. “Walter has decided he’s finally going to talk about what’s wrong with him, and he’s using the radio show as an outlet to do so.”

North, a nonstop gabber, was speechless. “Wow,” he said. “This is going to be big.”

By the time the show was scheduled to begin, the thirty assembled seats in front of the broadcast table were filled. Payton had asked Tucker to write his speech, and despite having recently been discharged from the hospital with forty stitches caused by a ruptured appendix, she did so.

On most Tuesdays, Payton had looked forward to sitting down with North and Jiggetts for four hours of on-air gabbing. Now, with his arrival at Carlucci’s, he was visibly nervous. Payton had asked his assistants to make certain Jarrett would be there, and he was. What he didn’t count on—and what he did
not
want—was the presence of Connie. Armed with her comforting smile and Reagan-esque charisma, Connie approached her husband from behind, patted him on the shoulder, and said, warmly, “I’m here.”

Payton couldn’t believe it. Despite their on-again, off-again dramas, he and Lita Gonzalez remained a couple. They spoke several times per week, and she even made a few trips to Mayo to accompany Payton. “Walter and Lita were in love,” said a mutual acquaintance. “It might have looked like he was with Connie, but that was all a show.”

Now, standing on the stage, his wife by his side, Payton reached for Quirk and Tucker and barked, “I need to see both of you in the men’s room—now!”

The three retreated to the lavatory, where Payton lit into his assistants. “Why the fuck is Connie here?” he screamed. “Who the fuck told her to come to my press conference? Which one of you fucking did this?”

Tucker was irritated and in pain. She had spent the previous six hours finalizing Walter’s speech, and the last thing she needed was a lecture. “You know what, Walter,” she shouted. “It’d be much easier to deal with this if you were divorced! If you had done the right thing from the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this problem right now, would we?”

There was nothing Payton could say. He marched out of the bathroom and sat down at the middle of a long brown table adorned with a black-and-white radio station banner. Jarrett, wearing a plaid shirt, sat to his right. Connie, dressed in black, sat to his left—and Walter barely looked her way. As always, dark sunglasses guarded Walter’s eyes. A black leather jacket hung from his shoulders. He gripped a white microphone with his right hand and, in that familiar high-pitched voice, spoke about contracting a disease that, until recently, he had never heard of. “I can’t lay around and mope around and just hope everything is going to be OK,” he said. “I’m still moving and grooving.”

Asked if he was scared, Payton didn’t flinch. “Hell yeah, I’m scared,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be scared? What can you do? I mean, like I said, it’s not in my hands anymore. It’s in God’s hands, and if it’s meant for me to go on and to be around, I’ll be around.”

Over the course of the decade the media had been presented with a couple of similar situations. In 1991 Magic Johnson held a press conference to announce he had contracted the HIV virus. Four years later Mickey Mantle, his body ravaged by a lifetime of alcoholism, also met with the media to discuss the inoperable liver cancer that facilitated his need for a transplant. Both of those moments were memorable and, in the context of superstar athletes, shocking. Yet Johnson’s disease could be chalked up to unprotected sex, and Mantle’s to the bottle. Here was Payton, a shell of his former self, seemingly the victim of bad luck. “There was some unspoken comfort level in knowing that [Johnson and Mantle] had brought it on themselves,” Bud Shaw wrote in the following day’s Cleveland
Plain Dealer
. “Not so with Payton.”