Sweetness (5 page)

Because he was routinely compared to his faster, stronger, more developed and more gregarious older brother, classmates and teachers tended to overlook Walter’s abilities. “Eddie was cocky, and Walter wasn’t,” said Robert Virgil. “Walter was soft-spoken, and Eddie had this incredible vocabulary, where he knew every word the teachers asked. It would be hard to have an older brother like that and not go unnoticed.” Yet as he aged, going from elementary school to junior high, Walter’s athleticism began to blossom. To start with, he was uncommonly strong, with a grip that drained the color from others’ hands, and stumpy-yet-powerful legs that churned like a cement mixer. Walter never tinkered with weights (at black schools like Jefferson High, the very idea of any sort of weight room was laughable), but he developed early—the muscles along his chest and forearms beginning to sprout at age twelve. “Walter got big, and we could no longer handle him physically,” said Eli Payton, a classmate and distant cousin.
²
“It happened overnight.”

During recess, Walter and his peers played outside the school. On Sundays, he and a gaggle of friends headed over to Westerfield Park for violent pickup games of tackle football. Walter insisted on playing quarterback, and he did so brilliantly. His arm was a cannon, his feet light and quick. Most impressive, he broke out a move previously unseen at Jefferson; an unstoppable little device where, when a tackler approached, Walter lifted one of his arms and forcefully jabbed the kid in the sternum. THUD! “That’s the first time any of us saw the stiff-arm,” said Woodson. “Thing was deadly.”

“I look back at my style of playing football, and that evolved from my childhood because I loved the game of war,” Walter once said. “When I held the football and somebody was going to take my football, I was going to hit them back first. I worked for that position and I wasn’t giving it up or backing down.... I started then learning how to juke and spin and make me impossible to catch. That all came from my childhood. That is something that a coach did not instill in me, that particular style.”

While Walter enjoyed sports, his apparent calling—one vigorously pushed by his parents—was music. For their middle child’s seventh birthday, Alyne and Peter bought a drum set, then spent the ensuing years having their eardrums pulverized. What Jefferson High lacked in organized athletics, it made up for with a spirited music program that put the all-white Columbia High to shame. Beginning in sixth grade, Jefferson’s students could audition for the school’s dynamic marching band. Alongside Johnson, who mastered the trumpet, Walter tried out as a drummer/bongo player. Both made the cut. “It was thrilling,” said Johnson. “The band gave us a way to travel and go places. The football team had a rigorous schedule, so the band did, too.” Walter was eleven years old at the start of his sixth-grade year, and up until that point he’d rarely left the Marion County limits. Thanks to band, on September 11, 1964, he traveled via bus to Jackson, where the Jefferson High Green Wave faced the Jim Hill High School Tigers. Years later, Walter remembered little of the on-field action—the score, the stars, the uniform colors. What he could not forget, however, was the feeling of being there; of performing music before a large crowd; of seeing people stomp and clap and cheer. It was true love.

Though he never fully learned to read music, Walter could hear a song once or twice and immediately play it to perfection. Because Mississippi’s black high schools were spread out across the state, the marching band made its way alongside the football team north and south, east and west. “We went to Biloxi, we went to Picayune,” said Johnson. “We’d go to high-powered schools with great bands, and we’d show ’em how it’s done.”

By the time Walter entered the seventh grade, Eddie Payton was officially a local star. He was popular, funny, cocky, and good with the girls. Decked out in his band uniform, Walter Payton couldn’t compete. He was merely a kid with a snare drum.

Then, one day, a man holding a whistle changed his life.

CHAPTER 2

LEARNING THE GAME

HIS MEMORY IS FOGGY. UNDERSTANDABLY SO. IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FORTY years since Charles Boston initially laid eyes on the thirteen-year-old boy with the tears streaming down his cheeks. In the decades that followed, kids have come and kids have gone. Many have graduated college, some have dropped out of high school. Most are alive. Too many are deceased. There are parents and grandparents, doctors and lawyers and garbagemen and street sweepers and drug dealers.

“Hard to keep track,” Boston said. “Time flies.”

This, however, the former head football coach at John J. Jefferson High School remembers. This, he will never forget.

“The first time I saw Walter Payton?” Boston said. “Well, it was pretty obvious he was no ordinary kid.”

The year was 1966. Though it had been twelve long years since the United States Supreme Court had declared racially separate public schools to be unconstitutional, nobody in the state of Mississippi paid the ruling much mind. So Jefferson High School remained what it had always been—underfunded, lacking resources, and, to Columbia’s vast white population, irrelevant.

Walter Payton was an eighth grader, known in small pockets of the school either for his drumming or, more likely, for his relation to Eddie Payton. The brothers were separated by three grades; by this time Eddie was a certifiable star and the talk of Jefferson High athletics. Unlike his demure sibling, Eddie had it all. He dated the prettiest girls, hung out with the coolest kids, walked with a can’t-touch-this swagger. Though he was known to goof off and crack jokes in class, Eddie was largely given a free pass by teachers—a nod to his status.

In the summers, Eddie was signed by a couple of local black semipro baseball teams, the Columbia Jets and the Laurel Blue Sox, earning ten dollars a game in return for his line drives into the gaps and smooth glove at shortstop. He played varsity baseball and basketball at Jefferson, and excelled in both. “Truth is, in high school Eddie was faster than Walter and tougher than Walter,” said Charles Virgil, a classmate. “He was only about five foot six, yet he could stand flatfooted directly under the basket, jump up, and dunk the ball.” It was on the gridiron where Eddie Payton truly excelled, emerging as one of the state’s best half backs. Just how good was Eddie? Columbia High’s white players flocked to Gardner Stadium to see Payton in action. “We’d all go and sit in the northeast stands and just be blown away,” said Steve Stewart, Columbia High’s standout linebacker. “He was so much better than anything we had. Eddie Payton was the best football player I’d ever seen. He did things none of us could imagine.”

And what of Walter? The head coach of Jefferson High School, Charles Boston, had been aware that somewhere within the building’s confines his all-everything halfback had a younger brother. But it wasn’t until an otherwise nondescript weekday afternoon that knowledge and reality collided. Boston, who also served as Jefferson’s assistant principal, was sitting in his office, looking over some papers, when he was told that a junior high student was crying in the courtyard.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Oh, just Eddie Payton’s little brother.”

Boston ran out to find Walter, all of five foot five, withering in pain on the ground. He had snapped his collarbone in a game of sandlot football, and his left arm now dangled like a fork on a string. “He’s crying and crying and crying,” said Boston. “So I picked him up, called his mother, and took him to Marion County General Hospital.”

Throughout the long, gray hallways of Jefferson High School, everyone knew Charles Boston, and Charles Boston knew most everyone. Granted, he was the assistant principal, as well as the football coach. But it was more than that. In Boston, Jefferson’s students found an advocate; a man who genuinely believed that, despite reason to think otherwise, young black boys and young black girls could emerge from a bitterly racist society to accomplish their goals. “Mr. Boston was the perfect example of the strong black male who was comfortable with himself because he never needed a white person to lean on,” said Edward Moses, Walter’s classmate and friend. “He didn’t need a title, and he didn’t need anyone to anoint him a leader. He led by nature. It was his gift.” Born in the impoverished town of Laurel, Mississippi, in 1933, Boston was one of ten siblings in a family renowned for athletic excellence. An older brother, Peter, was perhaps the best wide receiver Laurel had ever produced. His little brother, Ralph, would go on to win a gold medal in the long jump at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. For one remarkable twelve-year stretch, there was always a Boston brother playing on the Oak Park High School varsity football team. “People accused the school of using the same guy for all those years,” said Charles, who excelled in football and basketball. “We all punted, so that raised suspicions. But when Peter was in high school, he weighed a hundred eighty pounds. I was one-forty.”

If Boston took one thing from his prep football experience, it was that brutal coaching methods—at the time a staple of black Southern football—were unnecessary. From the sidelines, Boston watched opposing coaches smack their players, punch their players, kick their players. Although Russell Frye, Oak Park’s coach, occasionally laid his hands on others, he never touched Boston. “I told him I’d do the absolute best I could,” he said, “but that I wasn’t going to be abused.” Boston was a good enough player for Frye to comply.

In 1959, following four years of football at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later known as Alcorn State University), Boston was hired as a gym teacher/football coach by (tiny) Carver High School in (tiny) Bassfield, Mississippi. He was twenty-two years old, and he was greeted on his first day by a team with twenty-two players and seventeen ragtag uniforms. “We won three games that first year, and I was sure I’d be fired,” Boston said. “I’d played on two championship teams in Laurel, and I was used to winning. But the people in Bassfield were so happy with me winning three games that they wanted to name me mayor.” The following year, mighty John J. Jefferson High traveled eighteen miles to Bassfield to face Boston’s team, which now only had seventeen active players. “Somehow we whipped them, nine to six,” said Boston. “And everything changed.”

In 1963, Jefferson High was led by a sports-crazed principal named W. S. MacLauren. Though the black schools could never match their white counterparts in scholarship winners or academic achievement or future college graduates, there was an unspoken goal of stepping ahead in athletics. Columbia High would, of course, never acknowledge Jefferson’s on-field achievements. But Jefferson’s staff and players
knew
they could be the better program. Hence, in the aftermath of the young coach from Bassfield showing up his team, MacLauren presented Boston, a married father of two, an offer he could not refuse: a four-hundred-dollar raise and the chance to continue teaching P.E.

Boston accepted—and the blacks of Columbia quickly turned against their new leader. The previous coach at Jefferson was Scott Jones, an ornery, unpleasant little man who wore a pair of spiked-toed shoes to practice in order to kick players who made boneheaded mistakes. Jones also kept a two-by-four piece of wood in hand, and never thought twice about slamming it into backsides. Such was what parents in the black communities expected of their leaders; a tougher-than-dirt approach to discipline. If your son came home from practice with black-and-blue welts across his arms and legs, well, he surely deserved it.

Boston never physically abused a player at Bassfield, and he would not do so at Jefferson. “I thought I was doing right,” he said. “To get a guy in front of eight hundred people at a game and kick him . . . that has to be degrading.” Boston won four games in his first season at Jefferson, and fared little better the next two. In the community, he was increasingly dismissed as a softie. But the players loved and respected him. Boston was the rare male authority figure who didn’t do his talking with the backside of a hand. He drove his players home after practices and games, found them jobs in the community, and checked on their schoolwork. “When I played for Coach Boston I lived way north of Columbia, so on some days I wouldn’t get home from school until ten or eleven at night,” said Joe Owens, a former Jefferson lineman who went on to spend seven years in the NFL. “One day he showed up with a car—a 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air—and he let me keep it. I dropped off all the guys who lived in the rural areas, and we were all home by eight. He changed the whole way people thought about sports and attitudes toward players.”

The following season, Jefferson’s football team was graced by the arrival of the transcendent Eddie Payton, who teamed with a fullback named Ray Holmes to give the Green Wave one of the state’s best backfields. With Eddie as the star, Jefferson won thirty-four games over four years. “Eddie changed a lot for us,” said Boston. “He was the type of kid you hope for. Simply put, he was a ballplayer. He was short, but I used him at middle linebacker. I’d walk him up on that center’s ear, and if you weren’t ready Eddie would be all over you. And on offense, he was just unstoppable running the ball. I went from a dumb coach to a smart one overnight.” Over time Boston developed an intimate relationship with the Payton family—he lived a few houses down on Hendricks Street, and gave Eddie a job playing alongside him on the Laurel Blue Sox (Boston was an accomplished semipro baseball player). On his daily walk to school, Boston would chat with Alyne and Peter. They embraced him as someone who had their sons’ best interests at heart. “He was a good man,” said Eddie. “He was very, very decent.”

Walter, however, remained an enigma. He was attached to his mother—Boston could see that. And unlike Eddie, he didn’t share absolutely every thought that floated through his cranium. “They were apples and oranges all the way down the line,” said Moses, Walter’s friend and classmate. “Eddie would find himself as the leader of any group he was a part of. Walter was much more laid-back—his leadership came from his gifts.” Classmates told Boston that the boy was a secret prankster, but it was hard to see. The kid was so . . .
quiet
. On Jefferson’s fields, he would run circles around the other boys, ducking, weaving, bobbing, slicing, juking, escaping. His moves were distinctly artistic and ethereal, so much so that a ridiculous rumor started about Walter Payton taking ballet classes after school.