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Walter Payton was not a perfect human being. That might come as a surprise to some people.
After all, those who worship at the altar of the Chicago Bears — OK, at the altar of any sports franchise, celebrity, etc. — tend to deify those whom we might admire for their specialty. It could be playing a sport, acting, singing, being a successful business person, etc.
Painting of Walter Payton by Mark Ben Harris
The reality is we all are human beings with strengths and weaknesses. We all are subject to frailties — no matter how invulnerable some may seem in their field of endeavor.
All of which brings us to Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton. The new book by Jeff Pearlman tells about a Payton who used medications during and after his playing career and who also had extramarital relations.
Surprised?
Only if you believed a picture that might have been painted of Saint Walter. Rarely, if ever, do court jesters — which was a more fitting description of the Hall of Fame running back — become saints. And rarely are court jesters all laughs.
Pearlman said he interviewed close to 700 people for the book.
He writes:
The burden of loneliness and his marriage weren’t Payton’s only problems. As a player he had numbed his maladies with pills and liquids, usually supplied by the Bears. Payton popped Darvon robotically during his playing days, says [his longtime agent Bud] Holmes, “I’d see him walk out of the locker room with jars of painkillers, and he’d eat them like they were a snack”, and also lathered his body with dimethyl sulfoxide, a topical analgesic commonly used to treat horses. Now that he was retired, the self-medicating only intensified. Payton habitually ingested a cocktail of Tylenol and Vicodin. In a particularly embarrassing episode, in 1988, Payton visited a handful of dental offices, complaining of severe tooth pain. He received several prescriptions for morphine and hit up a handful of drugstores to have them filled. When one of the pharmacists noticed the activity, he contacted the police, who arrived at Payton’s house and discussed the situation. Payton was merely issued a warning.
The book also describes Payton taking nitrous oxide (laughing gas); on the other end of the spectrum was Payton talking of suicide.
Of Payton’s 23-year marriage to Connie, Pearlman said: “It was a union solely in name.”
Writes Pearlman:
Walter’s extramarital dalliances were becoming common knowledge throughout Chicago. He confided in those with whom he was close that when his children graduated from high school, he would divorce Connie [who declined to speak at length to the author] once and for all. “He didn’t want the children to go through the rigors of a celebrity divorce,” says Kimm Tucker, the executive director of Payton’s charitable foundation. “He knew what the spotlight felt like when it was negative, and he hated the idea of Jarrett and Brittney experiencing any of that.” Says his longtime friend Ron Atlas, “Walter knew that if he left Connie, all the work he’d done to his image would go by the wayside.” hortly after he learned he’d been voted into the Hall of Fame, Payton spoke with Lita Gonzalez [not her real name], a New Jersey-based flight attendant with whom he’d been in a tempestuous relationship since they’d met at the Michael Spinks-Mike Tyson heavyweight title fight in Atlantic City in 1988. “I’m coming to the ceremony,” Gonzalez said. “There’s no way I’d miss it.” The last thing Payton needed was to have his Hall of Fame weekend complicated and compromised. But Lita was coming, and she expected to be treated as his girlfriend. “She was insisting she be seated in the front row,” says Tucker. “We said, ‘Lita, are you insane? We’re marketing this man as a family-friendly spokesperson. His whole image is based around decency. You will ruin him.
It will be interesting to see if a book that ruins the imagined Sweetness will be a best-seller — or whether a book that does so ruins its own chances for success.