Sweetness (70 page)

Along with Studebaker’s, Payton was an investor/owner in four other establishments. Those who asked were told that Payton relished the business; that there was nothing he’d rather do than show up at the Pacific Club in Lombard or the Acapulco Bar in the Holiday Inn–Elk Grove to shake hands, sign autographs, and mingle with his customers. The claim was nonsense—Payton hated having to worry about money, and resented that so many past investments had fallen flat. Were it not for Payton Power, the profitable power equipment company he owned with Mike Lanigan, Payton’s business track record would be uniquely terrible. “It ate him up,” said Tucker. “The instability of it all.”

In 1993, Payton was in the midst of opening America’s Bar, a downtown Chicago club that would feature Top 40 music and the city’s only one-dollar all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. With the establishment set to debut in ten days, three building inspectors stopped in, conducted an evaluation, and told Gary Wallem, the general contractor, that the opening would have to be delayed until a proper permit was acquired. Payton requested a meeting with the men the following day, and showed up carrying a large gym bag. He looked at the first inspector and said, “What’s your name?”

John Doe.

“Walter pulled out a football and a pen and wrote, ‘To John Doe—your good friend, Walter Payton,’ ” said Wallem. “Then he did it for the other two inspectors as well.”

At the conclusion of the ritual, Payton said, “So, about that permit . . .”

“What permit?” replied the first inspector. “Your permit is fine with us.”

The story is funny, and Wallem tells it with gusto. Yet Payton detested this sort of thing. He had always scoffed at celebrities trading in their fame for perks and business favors, and now Payton was trading in his fame for perks and business favors. This wasn’t how he had envisioned his life after football. It was beneath him. Beneath his image of Sweetness.

On many nights Payton refused to sleep, instead staying up to drink bottles of Coca-Cola, gorge banana-flavored Laffy Taffys, and watch old movies. He would slump down on his couch, his eyes gazing longingly toward the escape of the large screen before him. When a Roger Ebert–esque thought entered his head, he had to share it.

“Ginny, quick, turn to channel seven.
Scaramouche
is on.”

Walter, it’s four thirty
A.M
.

On multiple occasions Walter would excitedly call one of the women from a clothing store or jewelry kiosk or shopping mall. “I want to buy something, but I need an opinion first,” he’d say. “Drop everything and get over here now.”

“We had no choice,” said Quirk. “We dropped everything. We were possessions to Walter. People were like puppets on a string to him. He tested you and tested you. Did Kimm and I have healthy relationships with him? No.”

The women hated Payton. The women cherished Payton. At his absolute best, when the darkness subsided and the sun shone brightly, Payton could be spectacular. “He was,” said Tucker, “addicted to laughter. When he was happy, all he wanted to do was laugh and laugh and laugh. He had many flaws. But Walter had a genuine desire to make people happy.” If fans approached him with footballs to sign, Payton first insisted on a quick game of catch. If they wanted him to shake a child’s hand, Payton knelt down and engaged the youngster in a conversation about school. When John Gamauf, his friend and business partner, told him about the passing of his father, John, Sr., Payton asked for the phone number of his mother, Irma. “Walter called her regularly for the next six months,” Gamauf said. “Just to say hello.”

While traveling to Orlando for a vacation, Payton—sitting in first class—was told that a ten-year-old boy named Billy Kohler was on the plane, heading to Disney World courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. In need of both liver and kidney transplants, Billy’s odds of survival were long. “We’re on the plane and a stewardess comes up and says, ‘There’s someone who would like to meet you in first class,’ ” said Jim Kohler, Billy’s father. “We go up front and who’s standing there—Walter Payton.”

Payton introduced himself and knelt down to Billy’s level. “You’ve been facing a lot of adversity,” he told the boy. “You will come through this. No matter what follows, you need to keep your head up, you need to keep fighting forward, and you need to believe. You’ve gone through more in your short life than most of us have in a lifetime.”

Overcome by the moment, Billy began sobbing. Payton tickled him beneath the chin. “You’re a hero,” he said. “Just know that—you’re a hero.”
²¹

After retiring from the Bears, Payton traveled most places with a pair of bodyguards, David Robinson and Tony Frencher. They were big men—both in excess of three hundred pounds, with muscles and scowls to match. Payton, however, never wanted them to intimidate or keep people at bay. “We were there mainly to help him out,” said Robinson. “Walter was a man of the people.” In the early 1990s Frencher coached a Pop Warner team in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook. Though loathe to make requests of his employers, Frencher asked Payton to appear at the year-end banquet. “Walter told me he’d try his best and that he’d call to get directions,” Frencher said. “Well, he never called, and on the night of the event I was worried he wasn’t coming. I’m sitting at the banquet when a kid walks in and says, ‘Coach Tony, someone is outside looking for you.’ ” Frencher exited and was greeted by a breathtaking sight: Walter Payton surrounded by the entire Bolingbrook Police force. “He had called the cops to ask for directions,” said Frencher, “and every officer in the city came to get pictures with him.” Payton’s talk, Frencher recalled, was “amazing,” as was the ensuing hour, during which he posed for individual photographs with every Pop Warner player. “The kids were between nine and eleven,” he said. “And their year was made that night.”

A part of Payton actually looked forward to giving speeches, for which he earned anywhere from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars a pop. He would pick up the microphone, pace the stage, feed off the energy. It mattered not whether he was addressing a convention of Cub Scouts or American Express executives. He never relied on notes or any sort of script. “Walter would always say, ‘If you have to speak, speak from the heart,’ ” said Conley. “He said that if you speak from the heart, you can’t go wrong.” Those who expected stories of Mike Singletary and Jim McMahon found themselves surprised, but not disappointed. Payton talked mainly of life—“If you go somewhere, always have pictures of your children on you,” he would say. “They’re the meaning to it all. The real meaning.”

With the message guiding his way, and with nowhere else to turn, Payton seemed to devote more time to his two children with Connie. Though never an overwhelmingly bad father to Jarrett and Brittney, Payton was too often an absentee one. There was always somewhere else to be and someone else to attend to. Football. Racing. Business. Women. “Do you think Walter made any sort of effort to be home for dinner with the kids every night?” said Conley. “Do you think Jarrett and Brittney had a genuinely happy home life with their father? Of course not.” Now confronting his own personal struggles, Payton tried harder. He committed himself to teaching his offspring right from wrong. Especially Jarrett. Having grown up in rural Mississippi, loading mounds of dirt onto a wheelbarrow and spending summers spreading it across his yard, Walter feared his son’s corruption via money and celebrity. The boy had enjoyed countless perks because of his father’s fame—a weekend at Camp David with President George H. W. Bush, a spot at the impossible-to-get-into Michael Jordan Basketball Camp, appearances in television commercials. Walter often complained to friends about his son’s apparent softness (“He didn’t understand why Jarrett didn’t run more, why he didn’t lift more,” said Dan Davis, a fellow coach at Hoffman Estates High. “He didn’t think he had much desire.”), and he wanted him to know grit and grasp dedication and appreciate the virtues of an honest day’s work. Throughout the bulk of his teenage years, Jarrett spent summers employed at Payton Power, a company Walter co-owned that supplied heavy equipment. “People might have thought he’d go easy on me,” Jarrett said. “No way. I made minimum wage, and I did every hard task there was. I’d cut grass, pick up machines and bring them back to the shop, hose them down, make sure they were OK. I was lunch boy—every day I was the guy sent to get everyone lunch. He didn’t have to do that . . . he could have let me stay home and play video games. But my dad felt like something needed to be instilled in me.”

When it came to his son, Walter was all about lessons. Right vs. wrong, noble vs. selfish, wise vs. inane. During his eighth-grade year at Barrington Middle School, Jarrett was caught with alcohol on his breath—a byproduct of the screwdrivers he and a friend had shared the night before. When Walter found out, he brought his son downstairs, sat him at the basement bar, poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s and said, “If you wanna drink, Jarrett, drink this.”

“No,” the boy cried from beneath his hangover. “I don’t want to drink. I don’t want anything.”

“No, no, no,” his father replied. “You said you wanted to drink. Drink this.”

“Dad, please,” Jarrett said. “Please, no.”

“Look,” Walter said, “you have many decades ahead of you to have drinks whenever you want. Right now is just not the time.”

That same year one of Jarrett’s fellow students, a girl named Becky Glance, was slapped by a male student. Jarrett challenged the boy to a fight, and wound up breaking his nose and causing a blood clot in his eye. After picking her son up, Connie called Walter to fill him in. He asked to speak to Jarrett. “So you got in a fight, huh?” Walter said.

“Yeah,” Jarrett replied.

“Well,” said Walter, “I’ve got something to give you tonight.”

Jarrett knew he was in trouble. When Walter entered the house later that evening, though, he removed his wallet from his pocket and handed his son three hundred-dollar bills. “That was the right thing you did,” he said. “You stand up for women. I’m proud of you.”

Long a lover of video games (he was a master of
Ms. Pac-Man
), Payton delighted in visiting arcades with his son and challenging him to marathon competitions of
Terminator 2
or
Street Fighter
. “People would gather around,” Jarrett said, “ just to watch my dad.” In 1997, Payton purchased a new Porsche 911 Turbo. The car was black, and sleek as a leopard. One night, at two A.M., Walter entered the house on 34 Mudhank, snuck into Jarrett’s room, and shook him awake. “Get up, kid!” he said. “Come on . . . get up!” He proceeded to lead Jarrett out of the house and into the Porsche. “We drive out to [Interstate] 90, and there are no cars on the highway,” Jarrett said. “He says, ‘Get your seat belt on.’ I’m like, ‘What?’

“I got my seat belt on and he just let that baby loose, man. I still remember my head going back. The speedometer had the little red numbers, and we hit almost one-eighty. How cool was that? How many dads do that type of thing?”

Unlike his father, Jarrett wasn’t an otherworldly athlete, destined for unquestionable superstardom. He refused to play football until his junior year at St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, choosing to make a name for himself as an all-state soccer player (he spent several years as a member of the Chicago Pegasus Soccer Club, one of the top amateur clubs in the country). Though he had little interest in or knowledge of the intricacies of the sport, Walter attended most of Jarrett’s soccer games, cheering from the sidelines alongside all the other parents. When, as a junior, Jarrett decided to give football a shot, Walter’s emotions were mixed. On the one hand, he could now offer his son valuable advice. On the other, Jarrett Payton would inevitably be compared with Walter Payton—and that wasn’t fair. “I call it the gift and the curse,” said Jarrett. “It’s great having a name, but it can hold you back, too.”

Brittney felt no such pressures. As a student at Station Middle School in Barrington, she participated in track and field, standing out as a sprinter and long jumper. Walter made as many of her meets as possible, and quietly applauded when she did well. As demanding as he could be with his son, he was equally docile with his daughter. Payton loved having a girl, but was perplexed by the dresses and flowers and tea-party birthday celebrations. (“I was probably seven or eight for that one,” Brittney recalled. “We had someone come in and bring funny hats and boas for everyone to wear, and my mom put out real china. My dad was around, but he wasn’t going to sit there with a bunch of little girls drinking tea.”) He could wrestle with his son, throw balls with his son, trade barbs with his son. “With me, he did a lot of tickling,” Brittney said. “He and my brother would pin me down and tickle me to death. I hated that.”

Every so often, Walter would present Connie with an idea for the children. His best one involved money. When Jarrett was fourteen and Brittney ten, he took the kids to the bank and had them open their own checking accounts. The goal was to teach the value of currency—know how much you’re spending and grasp the power of the dollar. “It was very wise,” Brittney said. “I remember taking home economics in high school, and when it came to money I was way ahead. I learned at a young age to know how much I had in my account at all times.

“Because if you’re not careful, it’s all gone.”

PART FIVE

FINAL

Jarrett Payton, Walter Payton’s son