Bears Blitz

Walter Payton: New Book Tells Us More About Sweetness Than We Need to Know

Published by Zachary D. Rymer on September 29, 2011
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears

In the eyes of football fans, the late, great Walter Payton is more than just one of the best running backs in NFL history. He remains one of the most widely respected men to ever play the game. And in life, Sweetness was by all accounts a total class act.

Well, there’s a new book about Payton coming out, and those who venture to read it are going to view him in an entirely different light upon completing it.

Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton, penned by best-selling author Jeff Pearlman, is due to be released next week. It digs deep into Payton’s private life, and the stuff Pearlman reveals is not pretty.

For a summary, I’ll let the Chicago Sun-Times explain:

He popped painkillers like candy and covered his body with a topical gel used on horses when he played professional football. When Walter Payton retired, he took even more painkillers.

He kept a mistress for years and had other extramarital affairs, even while he publicly maintained he was happily married to his longtime wife, Connie.

At his Hall of Fame induction — which should have been a highlight in his life — his wife sat in the front row. And his flight attendant girlfriend sat in the second. His longtime assistant was in charge of keeping them apart. Payton was miserable.

And in retirement, he constantly told friends he wanted to kill himself, at one point even holding a gun while telling his agent of his dark plans.

In a word: wow.

So if you tackle this book with a picture in mind of Walter Payton as a hard-working, honest and respectable man, you’re likely to come away from it thinking of him as a pill-popper, a cheater and an overall emotional wreck.

If you’re at all skeptical about Pearlman’s intentions for the book or the stories that are told within, you’re not the only one. Payton’s family isn’t crazy about the book, and they made it clear via a statement that those who would read it indeed should be skeptical:

Walter, like all of us, wasn’t perfect. The challenges he faced were well known to those of us who loved and lived with him. He was a great father to Jarrett and Brittney and held a special place in the football world and the Chicago community. Recent disclosures—some true, some untrue—do not change this. I’m saddened that anyone would attempt to profit from these stories, many told by people with little credibility.

In his defense, Pearlman wrote in a special column for the Chicago Tribune that he was merely trying to complete the picture of Payton as a person. He describes the things that we know and love about Payton as “hackneyed bromides” that “mask the depths of a significantly more complex—and challenging—individual.”

The point of the book, supposedly, is to get to the core of a man who was a true “enigma.”

For this, many have chosen to bash Pearlman, accusing him of being a worthless muckraker who is looking for a paycheck.

I have to admit, this is kinda how I view his book and his intentions. No doubt you can tell.

If I were to actually read the book, my guess is that it would come off as being far less malicious than the media is making it out to be. Instead of feeling like scolding Pearlman for writing a book that didn’t need to be written, I would probably come to understand why he needed to write it.

But to be brutally honest, this is a book that I don’t want to read. The reason I say this is the same reason I’ve been hinting at all along: ignorance is bliss.

Because I was born in the late 1980s, I didn’t have the pleasure of enjoying Payton’s career while it was in action. But anybody who gets into football will quickly become familiar with Payton’s legacy, and it’s impossible not to respect that legacy.

I want to keep respecting that legacy. I really do. There’s more to the story, yes, but the story that exists is good enough for me.