Authors: Jeff Pearlman
Pardee played his college football under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. He will forever be identified as one of the “Junction Boys”—the thirty-five of one hundred players who survived Bryant’s hellacious preseason training camp in Junction, Texas, when the temperatures reached 110 degrees and water was nowhere to be found. Pardee went on to spend fifteen years as an NFL linebacker with the Rams and Redskins, though his career—and life—came to a halt in 1964, when a mole removed from his right forearm was found to be melanoma. Told he could either die or have the arm amputated, Pardee chose option number three—an experimental eleven-and-a-half-hour operation in which his collarbone was broken and his body temperature drastically reduced. “I didn’t think I’d die,” he said. “I probably always had an indestructible attitude. Nothing was ever gonna happen to me. I’m not afraid of dying—it’s not gonna happen.”
If cancer was his greatest life challenge, Pardee’s toughest football hurdle took place in 1974, when he was hired to coach the Florida Blazers of the fledgling World Football League. Though initially elated by the chance to guide a team, Pardee became disillusioned when, midway through the season, the players’ checks began to bounce. “Somehow the owners who stopped paying everyone still had the services of a chartered jet,” recalled Bob Bowser, Pardee’s special assistant with the Blazers and Bears. “The whole situation was laughable.”
Despite every possible reason for his men to pack it in (No money. Games in Orlando’s dilapidated Tangerine Bowl. Putrid facilities. A schedule that changed week to week. Minimal fans.), the Blazers kept playing, reaching the WFL title game before losing to Birmingham. When Jim Finks heard of the unpaid group of journeymen and their feisty coach, he knew who he wanted to replace Gibron on the Chicago sideline. “It was more of a gut feeling than anything else,” Finks said. “We looked for something deeper.”
Now, as Pardee arrived in Lake Forest each morning not knowing whether Payton would be on the field or in the trainer’s room, he doubted the rookie’s toughness and commitment.
But not his talent. Throughout his month in camp, Payton was the talk of the Bears. The hype began shortly before his arrival, when O’Connor, the new running backs coach, interrupted a team meeting one day to show a film clip of Payton at Jackson State. “I think it was done to inspire us,” said Berl Simmons, a rookie kicker out of Texas Christian. “Walter must have run over or around all eleven defensive people, and we were just amazed. It was probably unusual for them to show that, but Walter was an unusual player.”
On his first day of working out, Payton hung with the other running backs and receivers, fielding punts from Bob Parsons. When it was their turn, players waited for the balls, stepped to the left, stepped to the right, moved in, moved back—then made the catch. “Not Walter,” said Jim Osborne, the veteran defensive lineman. “Bob kicked these beautiful punts, big spirals high into the sky, and when the ball finally came down Walter would catch them behind his back. I’d never seen anyone do that before.”
In the NFL, great athletes are the norm. Everyone is either incredibly fast or exceptionally strong, so much so that the remarkable can often appear mundane. There was nothing mundane about Payton. “He had a gluteus that I’ve never seen on another person in my life,” said Ken Valdiserri, the Bears’ longtime media relations coordinator. “His ass was chiseled. It was the most unique thing I’ve ever seen. And if you walked into the locker room it was like, ‘How can a guy have an ass like that?’ The curvature and the depth and the definition of it.”
“He was like an acrobat,” said Tom Donchez, a backup running back. Ross Brupbacher, a Bears linebacker, called him, “A muscle.” Don Rives, the ornery linebacker, said tackling Payton “was like tackling a barrel. I hit him as hard as I could in practice and he shed me like I was Little Bo Peep.” Said Doug Plank, the team’s twelfth-round pick from Ohio State: “At first I thought it weird that Walter was always flexing. Then it hit me—he’s not flexing. He’s made of rocks.” Payton walked on his hands, flipped up, and landed in a split. He stood below a regulation basketball hoop, jumped up, and dunked with ease. “The punters were practicing one day, and he decided to give it a try,” said Dave Gallagher, a defensive end. “He walked over, picked up a ball, punted it sixty yards, and walked away. No biggie.”
“Genetically, he seemed to be just like a rubber ball,” said Larry Ely, a linebacker. “When he got tackled, four . . . five . . . six people would have his legs, his neck, his arms, and he’d bounce back like a rubber ball to the huddle. How in the world did his ligaments and muscles take the pounding and bounce right back? You looked at him and wondered how any human being could be blessed with such a body.”
“He took up golf one day with the Bears,” said Bo Rather, a receiver. “He picked up an eight or nine iron and told us, ‘See that light post out there? I’m gonna hit it.’ The post must have been a hundred and twenty yards away, and Walter took the club, swung, and hit that post right down the middle. It was phenomenal. Whatever he did, he would be good at it.”
Despite the mixed reaction to his shoelace bells, Payton was embraced by veterans and fellow rookies. He was assigned to share an apartment with Gary Hrivnak, a third-year defensive end out of Purdue who was surprised to find himself with a black roommate. “I don’t know if they were trying to integrate the team more, but it was an eye-opener,” said Hrivnak. “Walter was very quiet, but in a good way. He wasn’t always talking about himself and everything he could do. He was unaffected by being a high pick and making good money.” Hrivnak remembered Walter plastering a small section of wall with photographs of Connie, his college sweetheart. He also recalled the time he approached the room and heard the thump of soul music blaring from behind the door. “I walk in, and Walter had four or five African-American players inside and they’re all dancing,” Hrivnak said. “Well, he tried to drag this old white guy in the middle and teach me to dance. Everyone laughed—I was the butt of the joke. But it was OK, because Walter was just a nice, funny, lighthearted kid.”
In the year 1975, a significant racial divide still existed in professional sports. White teammates hung with white teammates and black teammates hung with black teammates. There was a lingering mistrust and a pronounced lack of understanding. Locker room card games were split among racial lines. The tension over music was palpable—country and rock vs. R&B. To many of the black Bears, their white teammates seemed stiff and judgmental. How could they possibly trust the Southerners from schools like Alabama and Auburn and Ole Miss—the ones who seemed perpetually uncomfortable in their presence?
A good number of the white Bears, meanwhile, didn’t like what they perceived to be the never-ending crowing and strutting of the blacks. They found the players to be lazy, selfish, and heartless. All skill, no drive. “When I got there we had a bunch of niggers,” said Rives, a white linebacker from 1973 to 1978. “Great ability, but no work ethic. They were selfish twits, and they wanted to blame everyone but themselves.”
Just as he had done at Columbia High School five years earlier, Payton somehow bridged the gap. Entering camp, Chicago’s top two returning running backs were Ken Grandberry, an unremarkable grinder who had led the team with 475 rushing yards in 1974, and Carl Garrett, the cocky former Pro Bowler. “Walter was different,” said Rives. “His biggest attribute was the fire in his gut, where he honestly believed nobody could stop him. I loved that.”
Payton didn’t merely impress teammates—he wowed them. Steve Marcantonio, the team’s fifteenth-round draft choice out of the University of Miami, had never heard of Payton until they arrived together at camp. One day all the players were required to partake in varied physical tests—bench press, curls, push-ups, sprints. “I was a six-foot-six, two-hundred-and-onepound possession receiver going against all these great athletes,” said Marcantonio. “I didn’t stand much of a chance.” The final activity was dips, where a person stands between two parallel bars and lifts himself up and down as many times as possible. “Back in college I used to finish every workout with three sets of twenty dips, so I finally felt there was something I could excel in,” said Marcantonio. “We go through most of the testing, and sure enough near the end I’ve smoked everybody. The second-best guy did thirty-seven, and now it’s me and Walter lined up next to each other. We’re the final two.” Marcantonio put on his game face, took a deep breath, and completed fifty-six straight dips—easily a personal record. “Everyone was so impressed,” he said. “I felt great.” When Marcantonio finished, Payton—who had never before lifted weights or attempted a dip—approached the bars. “He was just this blur, up and down, up and down, up and down,” said Marcantonio. “He gets to sixty-five and he looks over at me with this expression on his face like, ‘Is this enough?’ I just shrugged. He was too much.”
Members of the Bears were blown away by their new star’s physicality. Payton’s legs looked like black pipes. His back was immense. He dead-lifted 625 pounds without a sweat. His hands, seemingly regular at quick glance, were thick and dense like slices of cheesecake. “You shook hands,” said Jerry B. Jenkins, the coauthor of one of Payton’s autobiographies, “and his wrapped all the way around yours.”
Mark Nordquist, a veteran offensive lineman who had recently been traded to the Bears by the Eagles, spent the summer of 1975 working harder than ever. He lifted weights four or five times per week, and reported to Lake Forest with an extra thirty pounds of rock-solid muscle encasing his body. When it came time for the Bears to grade the players on the military press, Nordquist silenced the room by warming up with a handful of 250-pound lifts. “Then I put the pin at the bottom of the weight set to three hundred and ten pounds,” he said, “and the room got even quieter, because nobody ever did that.” After taking several deep breaths, Nordquist grunted loudly, pushed and lifted the weight. “I staggered away, breathing hard,” he said. “Walter walks up, sits on the stool, and grabs the bar. I’m pointing at him, laughing, ‘Watch this idiot rookie!’ Well, Payton takes the bar and lifts it really fast—one, two, three times. Three times! He’s five foot ten, two hundred and five pounds, I’m six foot four, two-sixty-five. The guys in the weight room screamed, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town! There’s a new sheriff!’ ”
Despite some high moments, Payton’s training camp was mostly misery. He missed the first four exhibition games because of the elbow infection, and when Parsons, the team’s punter, suffered a twisted knee, Pardee considered having Payton take his place, just to keep him involved. While booting balls during a practice, however, Payton strained a muscle in his left leg, further stalling his progress. For the first time as Chicago’s coach, Pardee lost his cool. “Jack was fed up with Walter always being hurt,” said Richard Harris, a Bears defensive lineman. “He wanted to determine if Walter was a prima donna or a real player.” With the entire roster sitting inside a classroom for a meeting, Pardee called Payton to the front and chewed him out. “If we knew you’d be the kind of guy you are,” he said, “there’s no way we would have wasted our number one pick on you!”
Finally, on September 6, Payton debuted at Miami’s Orange Bowl against the Dolphins. As Don Pierson noted in that day’s
Chicago Tribune
, Walter “has been practicing as if this were the Super Bowl. He has run every play at full speed and gets to the hole so fast he looks like he’d been catapulted out of a slingshot.”
The game began at eight o’clock that night, and Payton was nervous. He paced the sidelines beforehand, muttering words of encouragement to himself while avoiding eye contact with teammates. The expectations of others were high, but the expectations for himself were even higher. Payton knew Chicago fans had been waiting to see what the kid from Jackson State could do. Was he the second coming of Gale Sayers, or merely another Ken Grandberry?
On that hot, muggy night, the answer came quickly. In yet another Bear defeat (Chicago lost 21–10), Payton was brilliant. He ran for sixty yards on twelve first-half carries, including bursts of sixteen and twelve yards. Payton had been scheduled to sit the remainder of the game, but after begging Pardee for extra work, he stayed in for much of the third and fourth quarters, gaining an additional thirty-four yards. “He was remarkable,” said Waymond Bryant, a Bears linebacker. “The thing I remember is his cuts were so quick and so sharp, he made guys miss with ease. This guy was clearly better than anyone we had.”
Payton played sparingly in the Bears’ final exhibition game, a loss to the Oilers. In case there were any remaining doubts about the direction of the franchise, Finks and Pardee made clear the point: Garrett (who assured the media Payton would never take his job) was traded to the New York Jets for Mike Adamle, and Grandberry—the leading ground gainer from one season earlier—was cut, never again to appear in an NFL game.
“They told me not to worry, that I had a job locked up,” Grandberry said. “Then they cut me. I was destroyed. It took my spirit away. Walter actually apologized to me for taking my job, and I said, ‘You have nothing to be sorry about. You’re terrific.’
“Years later my dad said to me, ‘Yeah, you lost your job. But you lost it to Walter Payton. Who better to end your career?’ ”
Grandberry laughs.
“I hated to admit it, but Dad was right. Who better than Walter Payton?”
CHAPTER 12
ZERO YARDS
AT THE START OF EACH NFL SEASON, BEFORE GAMES HAVE BEGUN AND INJURIES have occurred and expectations fail to meet reality, optimism is an organizational requirement. As the mindless blather goes, “Every team is 0-0” and “With a few breaks . . .” and “If everyone lives up to their potential . . .” It makes no difference whether your franchise is plagued by a roster of talentless dopes, whether your coach is an alcoholic and your GM a heroin addict, whether you haven’t won since Washington crossed the Delaware.
This, at long last, will be the year!
As the 1975 season opener approached, the city of Chicago felt like their Bears were on the rise. These were the new Bears. The young Bears. The better-than-before Bears. The potentially play-off-bound Bears who had languished in the depths of the NFC Central for far too long. Sixteen rookies made the opening-day roster. Ten starters from the disastrous ’74 club were cut. In a piece titled “Bears are putting it all together,” the
Tribune
’s Don Pierson welcomed in the season by noting that, “With a new attitude, a new general manager, new coach, new players, and a proven old formula, a new era of success cannot be avoided.”