By Joe Schackman
The revelations included in author Jeff Pearlman's latest book provide a complete look at Walter Payton as both a football legend and a human being.
I have done my best over the years to learn as much as I can about the years of sports that I missed by—you know—not being alive.
Naturally, since golf was my biggest obsession, I started by with the stories of Bobby Jones, Francis Ouimet, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and so on. Baseball and football players came next, and I consumed as many stories as I could about Sandy Koufax, Johnny Unitas and Mickey Mantle (just to name a few). But Walter Payton never made much of an appearance in my assault on sports’ history books. Not to say that I had never heard of him; he is Walter fucking Payton. But I knew very little. I couldn’t recall a specific highlight or a story. He was simply this Chicago blob that resided somewhere out there.
So when Jeff Pearlman, my former tour guide to the absurdly talented and crazy ’86 Mets in The Bad Guys Won, began to promote his newest book, Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton, I took notice solely because Pearlman was writing the book. Wow, did I miss the point of that one. Pearlman does a fantastic job with Payton’s story, but to read Sweetness because of Pearlman is akin to seeing The Dark Knight because of Maggie Gyllenhaal.1
There are dozens of fantastic stories about Payton in the book, and I challenge anyone to read it and not walk away without one of those tales engrained in your mind. There seems to be a perfect story for each point of his life, from Payton the kid to Payton the competitor to Payton the man.
One of my personal favorites was how beloved Walter Payton was by defensive guru Buddy Ryan. Ryan, the father of Rex and Rob, became one of the all-time great defensive minds, known for his tenacity, passion and general hatred for just about every offensive player. He had even been accused of placing bounties on opposing players.
But that wasn't the case with Walter. Ryan loved Payton because of the way he competed. He considered Payton the 12th defender, because whenever the offense turned the ball over, which happened a lot due to poor quarterback play on Payton’s earlier teams, Walter was almost always the guy making the tackle.
And while I realized I erred in my reasons for opening the book, I nevertheless did not exactly right my ways while reading it. About 200 pages in, I fired up my computer to look for Walter Payton highlights on YouTube. The videos are plentiful and spectacular. I spent a good chunk of an afternoon just making weird and awkward noises as I watched Payton cut, leap and plow through defenses. This became my image of the man, hurdling over a pile of linemen en route to yet another touchdown.
Toward the end of the book, though, it dawned on me that nothing could do Payton less justice then simply envisioning him in shoulder pads. He was an actual human being who fought tirelessly for right and wrong. He was a man who on his deathbed went on TV to push more people to become organ donors. Not because he was hoping one of those livers might save him (Walter knew at the time he wasn’t a candidate for transplant surgery), but so that someone else, someone he would never know, would get to live out the days that were being stolen from him.
As I polished the book off on a plane somewhere over the midwestern part of the United States, raw emotion ran through my veins. I was mad about missing out on Walter Payton as a player and even more so as a man. He was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but strived to be a genuinely good person to the end.
What has upset me the most since then is that some have cast such a negative light on this book that couldn’t be filled with more love. All those Walter Payton fans and Bears fans that have boycotted the book because of the painful truths that are revealed are making a huge mistake, and missing out on an opportunity to truly know their hero. The revelations, while at times painful, open a rare window into the beautiful life of Walter Payton. I managed to right my wrongs over the course of reading this book, now can any of you?
[1] This is not an insult to Pearlman, whom I met at an event in New York and was genuinely interested in this site and what we do here. He could have signed my book and blown me off, but he asked me questions about my life and my writing. He sent out a tweet about the blog that was, for lack of a better word, awesome. I thank him for guiding me through the Mets and Payton and driving my love for fantastic journalism. Walter may not have liked the book, but he would have loved Pearlman.
Image via Belle News
Image via Belle News
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