So Jeff Pearlman has a new book coming out where he writes that Payton lived on painkillers, including a topical analgesic used on horses, throughout his time in football and after. The book also alleges that Payton was consistently cheating on his wife Connie and in his later years was erratic and suicidal.
OK, so first off I’ll get my bias out of the way. I grew up in Chicagoland during the Payton era and in my humble mind, he was perhaps the greatest running back ever. Not only that, but he was a decent passer, kick returner, and kicker as well – an all around athelete who Mike Ditka said could play any position in football except defensive tackle. You could argue that half a dozen other running backs are the best and the aruguments could go on longer than an Enterprise vs. a Star Destroyer conversation. That’s not really the point though.
My question is how reliable is this author? According to his Wikipedia page, Pearlman often personally attacks athletes and that his fact checking may be spotty. And on top of that, why come out with this book, over a decade after Payton died? Why drag his family and friends into this, even if some of it may be true.
I would love to say that Payton was a saint when he was alive, but nobody’s perfect. I have no doubt that he played in pain for much of his career, but to this sounds a little over the top to me. The quote from Connie Payton in the link above from her conversation with his alleged mistress seems way out of character for both Connie and Walter. This stuff just seems too far out to me.
Payton may have not been the best running back of all time but, in my estimation, was the greatest football player of all time. Give me 11 Walter Payton’s and I will beat 11 of anybody else.
That being said, I don’t know what the purpose is of writing stuff to destroy someone’s legacy. Nobody is perfect. Everyone should read “All The King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren.
God bless Walter. At least as a football player he was something very special. I never thought he was perfect.
I think Pearlman generally IS pretty reliable. He’s writtten tell-all books before, and he sometimes seems to revel in negative stuff, but he always quotes sources by name. And even in largely negative books, he’ll include unexpected positive nuggets. For example, in his book on Barry Bonds, Love Me, Hate Me, Pearlman certainly dishes a LOT of dirt on Bonds. But he also tells stories of how Bonds paid the college tuition of a kid whose Mom had been nice to him when he was a minor leaguer.
Now, I haven’t read Pearlman’s latest book. MAYBE it trashes Walter Payton. But maybe it just tells the truth about life in the NFL. Football players take a beating every Sunday, and are in constant pain. It’s not at all surprising that many of them have to pop pills regularly.
Walter Payton took more of a pounding than most. I’m sure it was agony for him to get out of bed on most Monday mornings. I’m not happy to hear that he used (maybe abused) painjkillers, but I have a hard time being judgmental about that.
Wow. Can’t get behind tearing down Payton in a tell all book. Maybe if he killed someone or something but he has always been pretty universally well regarded as a person. In fact he was one of two celeb deaths that really shook me as a kid. The other bein Dimebag Daryll
You don’t have to be high and sitting in a corner drooling to abuse drugs. Given the level of physical damage sustained by NFL players, it would be all too easy to develop a physical dependence on painkillers. Chronic pain issues also arise in pro athletes of all sorts, but particularly in football players, which can result in a need for high doses of painkiller for the man to continue to function in a normal fashion. Where that crosses the line between use and abuse can be fuzzy. It is all to easy to assume that because someone with chronic pain takes daily medication that they’re a “junkie”. Even in a highly supervised setting following appropriate guidelines it is possible for dependence to occur. Peyton could have been taking a lot of drugs AND still be highly functional at the same time. That doesn’t make him a bad man, or diminish the good he did in life. It just makes him human.
Likewise, depression and suicidal thoughts can occur even in people who outwardly appear very happy. As a football player, Peyton no doubt suffered his share of concussions. More and more it seems brain damage of some degree is an unavoidable side effect of a pro career. Such damage is also correlated with depression and suicide. Again, if he suffered from that it doesn’t diminish his accomplishments or the good he did in life. It’s just sad he had to struggle under that additional burden and to his credit that he was able to cope with it.
As for the allegations of having a mistress… I can’t condone it. It’s wrong to cheat. On the other hand, it is more common than we’d like to admit. Walter Peyton, however sweet he was, was also a human being and thus subject to failure at times. If he had a mistress that’s a matter for his family to deal with.
I’d generally assume that most all players in the NFL consume pretty massive quantities of painkillers during the season, especially someone that takes the pounding a RB does, and even moreso in the 1970s/80s than now. It’s pretty well-documented.
It’s also pretty common for athletes to experience depression, even deep depression, when their careers end. It’s a life change as traumatic as getting divorced. As for cheating … for Christ’s sake, he was an NFL star. There were thousands of women who’d have considered it an honor to give him a blowjob. If he confined it to one mistress, I’m impressed.
Writing a book about it is lame and tacky. But nothing in it should be shocking.
There are a few important lessons to be learned here:
As long as an athlete is “a nice guy” he will draw only “disappointment” when his misdeeds are unearthed, not blanket condemnation.
As long as said athlete didn’t kill any dogs he will be nearly universally forgiven.
Taking steroids and/or performance enhancing drugs is what “cheaters” do, but guys like Walter Payton are “gamers” so there’s no need to rip them to shreds, that’s reserved for guys like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.
I’ve never gotten on the steroids bandwagon and I’ve made arguments as to why I don’t think it matters. I’m also not keen on giving the finger to Michael Vick because while what he did was despicable it’s over and done with, he did his time and that’s the end of it for me.
I raise those caveats because that is exactly how I perceive this whole discussion. If Payton “cheated”, treat him like you treat all the other “cheaters”. If he did despicable things to his family, don’t talk about what a warm, kind man he was, give him both barrels like you did to Kirby Puckett when it came out that he wasn’t everything he was said to be.
Let’s have some consistency here, guys. I have no problem whatsoever with Walter Payton or anything he did because it’s frankly not my business, but for those of you that do care it amuses me that he gets a pass on things because he’s “Sweetness”, the greatest player of all time.
Taking pain killers isn’t “cheating” in the NFL. In the sport of football it’s almost a way of life. Convince me that Tony Romo wasn’t full of a boatload of painkillers after his rib injury.
Payton ran behind some of the worst offensive lines imaginable. He took a beating. I remember a post game interview with him after another loss before the Jim McMahon/Richard Dent/Jimbo Covert days. Payton had taken a beating that afternoon and he said, on camera, something like, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” He was obviously depressed. I’m thankful that his football career ended on a high note after what he went through.
Here’s a little from Pearlman on his sourcing and why he wrote the book. If you take him at his word, this is not what he expected to find:
I don’t know from that article how many sources he has on Payton’s drug use or the affairs, but he names Payton’s mistress and offers a lot of supporting details. But it also sounds like the guy did his homework here, and while he may be saying some unpleasant things about a guy almost everyone likes, this doesn’t sound like a hatchet job.
That’s an extremely credulous interpretation of a pretty weak Wikipedia section. It contains one instance in which Pearlman repeated an assertion without checking it (which is a journalistic error, for sure), but that’s not much to support the accusation that his overall fact checking is poor. The entry’s accusation about his “personal attacks” is based on one piece about Will Clark (I don’t know if that specific accusation is accurate) and one sentence apparently written by fans who are unhappy about his writing.
Not as high as it should have been. Mike Ditka is still an asshole for allowing The Fridge to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl instead of handing it off to Payton in the same situation.
Oh, cheating on his wife. I don’t really give much of a damn about that-- There are plenty of guys who’d like to cheat as much as pro athletes, with the only difference being that they don’t have the opportunity. Yeah, it’s wrong, but I’ve never seen the sense in taking athletes as moral role models to begin with.
Now, if he had been cheating at football, that would have been significant, since it would undermine the reason for admiring him to begin with. But he was a great football player before this claim, and he’s still a great football player.
I haven’t read the book, and probably never will, and I haven’t really read the media discussion about it either. I’m a little curious how close to reality the media representation of the book is. From the cursory headlines I’ve seen, threads like this one, and general chatter the book sounds like a complete hatchet job. Like the guy is muckracking on an epic level and Walter Payton was a complete degenerate who’s public persona was a complete lie.
I suspect that the book is largely positive and simply exposes a few personal flaws, extremely common and understandable ones at that, as a small part of a greater whole which largely is positive and confirms much of what was already believed about the guy. I don’t suspect that he’s revealing Walter to be Tiger Woods or Mike Webster, but the media 's representation of this book has painted that picture with it’s sensationalistic headlines.
Or maybe some of us long ago stopped buying into feel-good stories about public figures and celebrities as saints. I don’t expect perfection in people any more.
I have not heard any allegations Peyton took steroids (though I wouldn’t be hugely shocked if he had at some point). All I’ve heard is overuse of painkillers, which for a football pro is like saying a runway model is on a diet - it goes with the profession. I don’t like it about the profession, but there doesn’t seem to be a way around it for the pros at this time.
In my younger days I used to have boiling-hot fury at the notion of a man cheating on his wife, but then I got tired of being outraged all the time. If I kicked every cheating man down the stairs I’d probably have a broken foot, the stairs would be covered with bodies, and there’d still be an endless supply to keep on kicking. It’s wrong but it happens, and the more rich/powerful/celebrity a man is the more likely it is to happen. I would have preferred if Payton hadn’t had a mistress (assuming it’s true) but I’m no longer shocked when this sort of thing is revealed about a pro athlete.
Also, I found it interesting that Jim McMahon directed the blame to himself for Payton’s fumble early in the game. He said that it was he who blew the play at the hand-off. He didn’t have to do that. It certainly tells me that Payton’s teammates liked and admired him.
I’ve never understood this at all. Infidelity is as common as the cockroach. It’s an accepted part of many societies around the world. Fame and fortune makes it more common, and practically expected. Throughout history people with power have always had mistresses. Now we try and pretend that this is some huge character flaw? That somehow monogamy is the norm? Who knows if Connie knew about it and allowed it. Who knows if Connie was equally unfaithful. Who knows if that allowed Walter to remain happily married and an active and present father? Would a divorce or children out of wedlock have been better for his family, better for your opinion of him?
People shouldn’t ever judge a person personal life as it applies to sex and marriage. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach and there’s no saying what’s best in the long run. Don’t apply your personal beliefs to another person, because that’s all they are… personal beliefs.
I grew up in a culture that said either spouse cheating was bad. Hence, in my younger years all the fury. I am also female, and female humans have some biological interest in keeping their mate to themselves rather than having him spread his resources around along with his sperm.
On the other hand, as I’ve gotten more experience in life I realize that the ideal I had been raised to accept wasn’t a great fit with the real world. That doesn’t mean I think cheating is OK, there’s a bunch of issues regarding breaking faith and promises, but I also think how other people conduct their marriages and sex lives isn’t any of my business. I may not tolerate a cheating partner in my life, but if someone else does it’s not my problem, not my business, and not something I’m going to worked up about any longer. Women (and men) have long put up with certain flaws in their marriages as a trade off for other benefits they get from the relationship. That’s why infidelity doesn’t always end in divorce.
