Every day of the 2015 Chicago Bears season, Chicago Sun-Times Sports will revisit its coverage 30 years ago during the 1985 Bears’ run to a Super Bowl title.
Sweetness lives good life – on and off the field
Tom McNamee
Originally published Dec. 18, 1985
Walter Payton strides into the Bears locker room, marble muscles bulging under a tight T-shirt.
“Buford!” he shouts, slapping the brim of kicker Maury Buford’s hat.
“Oh yes!” he exclaims, pinching a teammate’s behind. He extends his arms. Wrists go limp. “Bunch of queers on this team,” he says.
He drops to the bench next to his dressing area and folds socks and sweatbands into a black gym bag for a bus trip to the high school gym where he and his teammates will practice indoors on this day.
The guys around him start singing a Christmas ditty. He joins in. It starts out quaint. It ends up crude. Everybody cracks up and somebody leaks a Silent But Deadly.
“Oooh, need a gas mask,” Payton scowls, holding his nose. “Running backs got no sense!”
Not so, Walter, not so. One running back has lots of sense. One running back gets up early, works hard, stays healthy, breaks records, makes millions, invests well, lives well, gives to charities, and dotes on his wife and children.
One running back named Sweetness has lots of sense.
Eleven years ago, No. 1 Bear draft choice Walter Payton, a kid from Jackson State, seemed shy and nervous coming to cold
Chicago from hot Mississippi.
He had this impish way of smiling big but ducking cameras, a way of scoring touchdowns and giving all the credit to linemen and coaches and God.
And he had a way of talking softly in a boyish voice as endearing then as William Perry’s gapped-tooth grin is now.
Today – 161 games, three miles rushing, and a few million dollars later – Payton arguably is the best running back in football and still a good guy. It’s for real. Ask around.
“You know how nice he appears before the cameras?” asked Jerald Richman, Payton’s lawyer in Chicago and a close friend. “He’s just like that. It’s got to be tough for the public to believe. He still doesn’t go out of his way to shine in public. He still says something best by setting an example.”
Payton, now 31, grew up the youngest of three children in a one-story frame house in Columbia, Miss. His father was a factory maintenance worker. His mother was a dietitian. His maternal grandfather was a sandlot baseball player who ran so fast they called him “Rabbit.”
From an early age, recalls his mother, Alyne Payton, Walter habitually would say, “I can do that.” It wasn’t a boast, she said, “just confidence.”
“He would do anything enough to let you know he could,” she said. “If he wanted to climb a tree, I would watch and tell him the danger. If he climbed on the swings, I’d say, `OK, but you’ve got to be careful.’ I encouraged him. I knew he’d do it anyway.”
He was restless every day of his childhood, she said, and “would never lay around and watch television.” If he wasn’t playing basketball or Little League baseball, he was fishing, dancing to a song on the radio or banging on his drums in his bedroom. His brother Eddie, who is three years older, played the trumpet. Together, they drove their parents nuts.
Young Walter was pixilated – a teaser and prankster.
Charles Boston, his Columbia High School football coach, remembers driving the Payton brothers to a baseball game one day when a bee flew in the car. Walter dropped it down Eddie’s shirt. “Eddie,” laughs Boston, “almost jumped out of the car.”
Later, as a rookie Bear, he was notorious for his fireworks. “Firecrackers would go off in the middle of the night when we were all asleep,” recalls former Bear running back Roland Harper, who was Payton’s roommate on the road. “Walter would always say it wasn’t him. But we knew, we knew.”
Nowadays, firecrackers almost are a Payton trademark. On the Friday before this season’s game against Miami, the Bears were working out at Soldier Field. A gaggle of photographers, granted a 10-minute “photo opportunity,” were snapping pictures as the players took the field.
Payton peeked around a corner. He grinned. He pulled back out of sight. Seconds later, a handful of popping firecrackers sailed through the air. Payton darted for the field.
In the off-season, Payton is even more of a prankster, said Ron Atlas, Payton’s business partner and godfather to his 4-year-old son, Jarrett.
“During the season, I think I probably deal with Connie Payton’s wife more than him,” Atlas said. “Sometimes I don’t even want to talk with him. He’s so high-strung, and a little bit temperamental sometimes. And half the time he’s in physical pain.”
Atlas recalls an off-season vacation he, Payton, Richman and their wives took in Puerto Rico. It was raining hard one day.
During a lull, Atlas recalled, “Walter takes one of these enormous rolled-up golf umbrellas and starts tapping it like a cane. He’s wearing sunglasses and walking across this bridge and we’re holding hands. He keeps tapping and he forces these two women to move to one side till they almost fall in the water.”
At home, Richman and Atlas have come to expect midnight phone calls from a falsetto stranger who coos to their wives, “just say Barbara called.”
Payton’s favorite shtick these days is his gay routine. Joking with friends, he talks like a girl, fusses with his hair, tweaks a few butts. Several teammates, following his lead, play the game, too.
It’s macho stuff. We’re-so-masculine-we-dare-act-gay. Kojak, the TV cop who called other men “baby,” would understand.
It’s also silly. But vestiges of boyhood linger longest among those who play a boy’s game.
In high school, Payton rode his first motorcycle. He almost hit a dog, veered out of control and left tire tracks on somebody’s lawn.
Later, as a Bear, he and Harper spent free Tuesdays roaring down Wisconsin farm roads on Kawasaki 1000s.
Now Payton rides around his five acres in South Barrington on a similar monster, with little Jarrett riding alongside on a dirt bike of his own.
Payton also owns four automobiles: a Jaguar, a Porsche, a Mercedes-Benz and a Lamborghini, his pet, which cost $125,000, and
peaks at 185 m.p.h.
Does he race it?
As Harper observed, “Running backs like to move.”
But Payton’s great success and the passing years have wrought inevitable changes.
Manufacturers barrage him with requests for product endorsements. Charities beseech his help. Fans interrupt him in mid-bite in restaurants. Reporters queue up for interviews.
Richman said he fields at least six calls a week from manufacturers looking for a Payton endorsement. In the last two weeks,
he said, Payton has been asked to endorse several hair-care products, a heavy rope and vitamins.
“Everybody who has a vitamin to sell ends up calling here,” Richman said.
Payton’s reaction has been to guard his time carefully. He is the only player in the Bears 1985 Media Guide who lists “privacy” among his hobbies.
“Walter doesn’t do anything that takes him away from his family or his workout routine,” said Bud Holmes, Payton’s attorney and hunting companion in Hattiesburg, Miss. “He’s probably got 100 standing offers at any one time.”
Walter, Connie, and their two children, Jarrett and 9-month-old Brittney, reside in a 12,000-square-foot home behind electronic gates. Sensors under the driveway pavement alert them when someone’s near.
Much of Payton’s time away from work is spent there, at the tri-level refuge built to his and Connie’s specifications.
He plays with his children, fishes in his private lake, target-shoots on his shooting range, and entertains with his wife of 10 years. Among his regular guests are Harper, Richman, Atlas, and Bear running back Matt Suhey.
His choice in friends is telling – athletes and non-athletes, blacks and whites. Away from work, Payton seldom talks football. He talks even less about race.
Atlas recalls the time he arranged Jarrett’s baptism. Being Jewish and knowing nothing about baptisms, he “went to the top” and asked the Rev. Jesse Jackson to perform the ceremony at the Arlington Hilton. Jackson agreed.
“I don’t know how happy Walter was about that,” Atlas says. “He’s very nonpolitical. And he doesn’t consider himself to be black first. He considers himself to be a person.”
Holmes, in contrast, says Payton is not blind to racial divisions. He recalls Payton once spoke before an all-white audience at a restricted country club and remarked in a bemused tone, “what a privilege it is to be here.”
By football’s standards, Payton is ancient. After the current season, he has a year left on a contract reportedly worth about $1.1 million a year. He toys with retirement. What then?
“I’m setting it up so I’ll do probably nothing,” he said.
“After 18 years of football, after always sacrificing and putting off and neglecting things, I’ll sleep late. I’ll go hunting, go fishing. That’s the American way. Right?”
Already, Payton has put his millions to work. He is in no danger of ending up like Joe Louis, the boxing champ who lost fortunes and wound up a doorman.
Payton owns a piece of a nationwide nightclub chain (including Studebaker’s in Schaumburg), timberland in Tunica County, Miss., an apartment-office complex and various other chunks of real estate around the country.
He makes thousands endorsing Diet Coke, Wilson Sporting Goods and Kangaroo sportswear.
He serves as American Express’s social representative at the Super Bowl each year (a job he may have to forgo this year) and makes lucrative appearances on behalf of Buick at the annual Chicago and Detroit auto shows.
But should Payton choose to work after leaving football, his likely employer will be Hilton hotels. He has been involved heavily with Hilton in recent years, studying the hotel business and making personal appearances. After dozens of charity dinner speeches, he’s a practiced public speaker.
“But he doesn’t want to be some guy at the podium who says, `Hilton is great,’” said James Sheerin, the Hilton vice president who is tutoring Payton in sales and interior design. “He wants to know the mechanics.”
Walter Payton is tackling his future like a pro – when he’s not doing Michael Jackson imitations on the phone.
