At Soldier Field, the Faithful Salute Payton

At Sunday’s Bears-Panthers game, there were “probably more fans wearing 34s on their backs at Soldier Field than at any point since the mid-80s,” wrote Dan Pompei of The Chicago Tribune. The faithful were making a show of support for Walter Payton, enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1993, dead of a rare liver disease in 1999 and described as a Vicodin-popping, laughing-gas-inhaling adulterer in a book excerpt published last week.

There’s little to put Chicagoans in a sourer mood than an attack on the running back known as “Sweetness,” considered as saintly as he was tenacious. People prefer the highlight reel with Carly Simon singing “Nobody Does it Better,” with Payton evading tacklers and not, as the piece in Sports Illustrated says, hustling morphine prescriptions from dentists.

The book is “Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,” and its author, Jeff Pearlman, says if people would just read the full 460 pages of this “definitive” biography they’ll find it’s far more than a rip job.

But the excerpt contains the juicy stuff. Payton is portrayed as a frequently troubled man who found life after football boring and whose marriage to his wife Connie was “a union solely in name.” Sweetness was said to prefer the company of a New Jersey-based flight attendant whom Pearlman gives the pseudonym Lita Gonzalez. The author describes a zany few days where the running back, “terrified of the potential embarrassment,” tried to keep his lover hidden from his wife during the week of his Hall of Fame induction.

Connie Payton, in an interview with ABC7 in Chicago, said that at the time of the Hall ceremony she and her husband “had been separated for a long time.” She said Walter didn’t act like someone using drugs, “didn’t slur words and didn’t act crazy,” but admitted that he was sometimes suicidal.

“I truly didn’t understand it because I would look at Walter, I looked at him and said, ‘You’re healthy, You’ve had a wonderful career, you’ve got money in the bank, really you are an accomplished person, why, why are you so sad? Why are you depressed, why do you have these problems?” she said in the interview. Mrs. Payton did not speak at length with Pearlman.

Many in the Bears family consider the book the literary equivalent of a late hit. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, the team’s former public relations director Ken Valdiserri, called the book “a self-serving, profit-mongering effort to sensationalize meaningless details of a complex person.” Mike Ditka, who coached Payton, said if he ever saw Pearlman he’d “spit on him,” which is no mild threat from one of football’s greatest expectorators.

According to the book, Payton sometimes brought tanks of nitrous oxide to Bears practices. They were loaded into his RV, and at night and during breaks, players would fill balloons with the laughing gas and carry them around while getting high.

Presumably, Coach Ditka did not participate.