Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (17 page)

I sometimes wondered why anyone would attend a pro game. It’s never as good as watching at home. Football is the ideal television sport—yet another reason it superseded baseball. The field is actually shaped like a screen, and the action divided as if designed for replays and commercials. At the stadium, you spend most of your time waiting, or trying to figure out what just happened. Yet there is something irreplaceable about going to a game, especially in Chicago. It’s the weather of the world experienced in the extreme: heckling and cursing, intoxication, brawls. The colder and the more miserable, the more authentic the experience. We usually sat in the upper deck, covered in blankets, hot-water bottles in our laps, our teeth chattering, our eyelashes freezing. The skyscrapers loomed, the lake taunted us with fantasies of summer. In my memory, it’s always fourth quarter and the Bears are always down. Behind us, defeats. Before us, a January of Sundays. But it was at just such moments that you finally understood Chicago, its resilience, its patience, and its humor. One year, after an especially brutal loss to the Redskins, I was crossing Lake Shore Drive amid a sea of depressed fans. Our heads were down, our eyes wet with tears. Nothing awaited us but despair. Just then, a Polish cop with a big cop mustache saved us all. “Get your heads up,” he said. “Tomorrow is another fucking day.”

*   *   *

Was there a consolation? Was there a salve, a relief for all this suffering?

Indeed, there was.

His name was Walter Payton, and he was the man who carried us through that long dark night of losing. For many, Payton was the only reason to remain a Bears fan. As my friend Mark said, “There is only Walter, but that’s enough.”

They called him Sweetness, a nickname meant to suggest the greatness of his best moves, but it more perfectly captured his personality. He cried when he was drafted in 1975. He did not want to go to cold Chicago. He did not want to play on that terrible team. Who could blame him? He had grown up in the South, where a cold day was 55° and a bad season was 7 and 3. But the fans loved Walter from the first. It was not just his talent, or the contours of his fireplug body, or the high-kicking, heads-up way he ran, or how, at the moment of contact, when most backs brace or run out-of-bounds, he would instead deliver a blow. It was his incredible sweetness. Walter was nothing but muscle, but his voice was effeminate in the way of Michael Jackson, soft and amused. He played the drums in his spare time—a football player with a hobby!—not the wild John Bonham kind of drums but Buddy Rich style, a hepcat working the brushes. In his first years, he dressed like Rerun on
What’s Happening!!
: bell-bottoms, snap-brim hat, platform shoes. He was a terrific dancer. Several times a year, WGN showed his appearance on
Soul Train
, in which he had danced up a storm. It was that funky seventies kind of dancing, too, with lots of hand claps and splits.

Embodied in this one player you had the yin and the yang, the sugar and the salt, the smash mouth and the ballet that make football such a great game. Here was a culmination of Bears history, a resolution of opposites. At once brutal and refined, Nagurski
and
Grange, Butkus
and
Sayers. On certain carries, he was as slick as the Galloping Ghost, running forever, engaged in a kind of parallel play. On others, when only a yard was needed, he was as punishing as Ditka, lowering his head, bulling through. Near the goal, he did something I’d never seen: whereas most backs crash into the line, Payton would take the ball from a pitch, run toward the scrum, then leap, sailing clear over the top, landing on the crown of his head, bouncing back to his feet, as if his neck were a tremendous spring.

He had a rough start: zero yards on eight carries in his first game. He was cold, homesick, and alone. Chicago glowed around him like a coil, electric, unknowable. “I felt it immediately,” he said. “I felt the greatness of this city. I felt it when I started playing and I didn’t have performances as good as they should have been. I felt the wrath of the city then.”

Following a poor midseason performance—zero yards on ten carries in Detroit—Bears head coach Jack Pardee benched Walter. As he watched from the sidelines, his belly churned. Like many players, it was not hope that motivated Payton. It was fear. Fear of failure, humiliation. Payton said that that day on the bench, five games into his first season, was a hinge. It put a scare in him, showed him, just for a moment, the life that awaited if he failed. Very few players make it to college, fewer still to the pros, and most of those, stars at every other level, flame out. You see them years later, pushing a broom or carrying boards at a construction site. Walter’s older brother, Eddie, a high school and college star, was an NFL bust, appearing in a half a dozen games with three teams over three seasons. He was the guy asking the bouncer to double-check the list: Eddie. Eddie PAYTON. Walter’s brother! Eddie’s memoir, published in 2012, is called
Walter & Me: Standing in the Shadow of Sweetness.

After that, Walter played every game with an almost graceful fury. Most impressive were his durability and hustle. As James Brown was the hardest-working man in show business, Walter Payton was the hardest-working man in football. Even late in the day, when a game was as good as over, he never stepped out-of-bounds but always turned upfield to deliver a blow. It gained him an extra yard or two and sent a message: when you tackle Walter Payton, you pay the price. He credited his college coach for the wisdom that determined his style: “Never die easy. If you’re going to die anyway, die hard.”

Walter Payton running for daylight, November 11, 1984

Payton would eventually pass Jim Brown as the NFL’s all-time rushing leader, a record once considered unbreakable. He’d surpass O. J. Simpson’s single-game record, as well as his record for the most consecutive hundred-yard games. But in the end, Payton’s most impressive quality was his toughness: thirteen seasons and he did not miss another game. “The fact that Walter survived thirteen years in the NFL, missing only one game, especially with the beating that a running back takes, is the most amazing thing,” said Jim McMahon. “He was the strongest guy I’ve ever met. Pound for pound, he was muscle everywhere.”

Every fan has his favorite Payton run, but aficionados agree: the best came in his third season, against Kansas City. It was one of those plays, you keep thinking it’s over, they got him, and suddenly he emerges from a crowd, shrugging off, stiff arming, high kicking. “It was the first time I saw him,” Jim Brown said. “He fought for every inch. He must have twisted and knocked three or four guys over. Spun around, accelerated. And I said, ‘Oh, my goodness—what kind of animal is this?’” The following week, playing with the flu—he had a 103° fever; you could see him suffering on the sideline—Payton ran for 275 yards against the Vikings.

Here’s how good he had become: Gale Sayers turned testy; in interviews, he spoke of the pureness of the Gale Sayers style. Payton was, indeed, a different kind of player. Sayers ran seemingly without effort; there was ease in every pivot. Payton was like a car with its engine showing. You could see the pistons firing, the shafts cranking. He was a man at work, ham and eggs, meat and potatoes, a great runner but a great blocker, too. He did everything. He was the team’s backup punter. Now and then, he would throw. In 1984, when McMahon went down, Payton played an entire half at quarterback. He set up in something like the single wing, playground style.
Go out, I’ll look for ya.
When the linebackers dropped back into coverage, Walter dashed through the gaps. In the course of his career, he completed ten touchdown passes. A favorite moment from 1985 was a trick play: McMahon pitched to Payton, who raced around the backfield, attracting the attention of every defender, planted and threw a high-arching rainbow that Mac caught as he crossed into the end zone. It was a backyard play, drawn with a finger in the dirt: I toss to you, you toss to me. For years, I had a picture of it taped to my wall: McMahon’s eyes bugged out, looking at the ball all the way in.

“There are a lot of great Hall of Fame backs, the Jim Browns of the world, the Gale Sayerses of the world, the Tony Dorsetts of the world, but none of those guys blocked,” Johnny Roland told me. In addition to being a good runner in his own day, Roland was the Bears’ running back coach. “But Walter was a great blocker. He was backup punter, backup field goal kicker. He threw the ball. He was our disaster quarterback. If you wanted him to, he could go up into the stands and sell popcorn.”

But it was Payton’s spirit that was valued most. At the end of every play, after he had been taken to the ground, he would extend his arms, placing the ball a few feet upfield. This was Sweetness in a drop of rain, always angling for a little more. “After every run, he’d push the ball forward a few inches,” Ditka said. “The ref would move it back, but maybe over the course of his career Walter gained fifty yards that way.”

Payton was the ideal player for a mediocre team. He gave the fans something to care about on the worst days. He transcended the game and seemed to represent the city itself. He was Chicago as Chicago wanted to be: a fighter, a hitter, a hustler who’s been knocked down but always gets back up. “When I played, I never ever sat on the bench,” Plank told me. “You know why? I wanted to watch Walter. I would stand on that sideline and just look: the way he hustled, even in games when we were hopelessly behind, you could learn from that. If you put on a tape and watch a player and cannot tell from the way he plays whether his team is ahead or behind—that’s who you want. And that was Walter. Watching him was my pep talk. I’d tell myself, ‘That’s how you need to play. When you go back out there, bring it.’”

Payton’s workouts were marathons of self-punishment. “I tagged along on one of those,” Plank told me. “He jumped off cliffs, climbed up ropes, did suicidal stuff. When we finished, I said, ‘Walter, I admire you, but I’m working out alone next time. I want to get strong, but I don’t want to die.’”

Each morning, Walter “ran the hill.” This started at college, in Jackson, Mississippi, where he raced up a hill beside Highway 220. As there are few actual hills in Chicagoland, he resorted to a landfill behind his house in Arlington Heights, a trash heap with a steeply pitched grade. According to the
Chicago Tribune
, it covered fifty feet at a forty-five-degree incline. Payton would ascend in sprints, ten or fifteen trips up and down in a row. Trying to explain what this felt like, he said, “Have you ever jogged up 25 flights of stairs and run down? It burns. Your legs, your buttocks, your back, your chest, your stomach—everything wants to leave you.”

“He’d run that hill in Mississippi, and he had a hill here in the suburbs, and he’d leave guys who were trying to stay with him half-dead, puking their guts out at the bottom,” said Ditka. “If he had any fat on him, you couldn’t have grabbed it with a pair of pliers.”

*   *   *

Early one morning, I drove to Walter’s Hill. I’d woken up sick but went anyway, first to a doctor’s office in Northbrook, then to a Walgreens, where I got antibiotics, before finally heading west on Dundee Road. The hill is in Arlington Heights, past Buffalo Grove High School with its stadium and state championship banners. I turned onto Kennecott and went by subdivisions. I drove into the park that’s been landscaped atop the landfill. I got out of my car and followed a trail out onto a promenade. Suddenly I was standing where Sweetness stood each morning at the end of his run, at the apex of Walter’s Hill. It was cold and clear. A man in a Bears sweatshirt went by with his dog, a Scottie in a Bears sweater. Number 34. I saw joggers. A woman pushed a stroller. The trees were yellow. Looking east, I could see more yellow trees scattered amid the housing grids, the slate roofs as well ordered as circuits in a transistor radio. Payton lived in one of those houses. Behind his house, this hill. Atop this hill, a bench and a plaque that shows Walter’s face and lists his accomplishments. Otherwise, there seemed no evidence of the man who ran the hill. That’s the thing about work. It vanishes like a memory of pain. Only the results are remembered.

Walter Payton is a model for all those engaged in arts that don’t properly value effort. How many times have you heard a person say, “He was a great player but just did not work hard enough,” as if work were different from talent, more prosaic, something anyone could do if he wanted. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe the ability to persist is as much a gift as speed or soft hands. Not everyone has it. Those who don’t, fail. Those who do, leave no proof of it in statistics. Walter’s Hill is the only monument I know to that invisible quality without which everything else would be impossible. Payton was a great athlete, but hard work was his outstanding talent. It was the bedrock upon which the Bears would finally build a great team.

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