Walter Payton: Cheated on his wife, addicted to pain killers

[AllOutBlitz]

smh..........

 

[shag773]

Big deal. I fucking hate Chicago Bear fans sending this guy death threats, etc. People are morons.

Before making an opinion, take a second to read his blog explaining why he's writing about Walter after his death.

http://www.jeffpearlman.com/the-truth/

There is a reason it's the definitive biography, like Dave stated. Bear fans are caught up in the fact that some of this stuff isn't 100% positive. If anything I respect Walter a little more because this humanizes him. It takes him off the pedestal and illustrates that he was exactly like the rest of us...just a lot faster and shit.

I would buy the book if I wasn't already being sent a free copy from Jeff :shifty: He posted on CCS well before the book caught steam getting opinions from fans.

http://www.chicitysports.com/forum/chicago-bears-forum/16853-new-sweetness-book.html

Walter wrote a biography right before he died that was released in 2000. In all the reviews I read there was no mention of the transgressions that were alleged in the excerpt from Pearlman's book on SI.

He already told his story. If he wanted that part of his life out there, he would have told it himself.

I agree that there are pros and cons to being a well paid athlete, and this book is living proof. However, there are also pros and cons to writing a book that contains part of Walter's life that he never shared with the public. I'm sure Pearlman was paid well, and with that comes the scorn of Walter's numerous fans.

Still not interested, not going to buy it or read it.

 

[jeffx]

Exactly. Love them for their on the field shit. If you want your athletes to be squeaky clean, then well... stop watching sports.

Barkley said it loud and clear 20 years ago, he's not a role model. No athlete is a role model, they are humans that just happen to be really awesome at a particular sport.

This guy wrote the biography of Walter, this stuff was apart of his life, would you rather be lied to? Either way, it doesn't make a difference, still an exceptional ballplayer and a really good guy when I met him, still have his autographed hat in my room.

Can I get an AMEN?

 

[shag773]

If we all got to write our own life's stories Hitler would have seemed like a pretty swell fella who turned around the German economy and unified an empire before being snuffed out by money-grubbing capitalists.

BTW... Not comparing Sweetness to Hitler.

I don't think we needed an unauthorized autobiography about hitler to find out about his transgressions, so I'm not sure what your point is.

 

[shag773]

I was referring more to...

"He already told his story. If he wanted that part of his life out there, he would have told it himself."

Ok, and then I added:

I agree that there are pros and cons to being a well paid athlete, and this book is living proof. However, there are also pros and cons to writing a book that contains part of Walter's life that he never shared with the public. I'm sure Pearlman was paid well, and with that comes the scorn of Walter's numerous fans.

I wasn't questioning whether he should of wrote the book or not. Just saying if you are going to write about a part of Payton's life that he chose not to share, then expect some negative feedback. I just felt like there was a little too much apathy in this thread for Pearlman and the shit he is getting for writing the book. That's all.

 

[Rush]

Pearlman fully expected negative feedback. Where has it been stated that he expected all to shower him with love and admiration?

He's getting death threats. Some guy on my Chicago site said he hopes Pearlman dies from Ass Cancer. It isn't as if the apathy in this one thread reflects everybody's general attitude.

 

[shag773]

Pearlman fully expected negative feedback. Where has it been stated that he expected all to shower him with love and admiration?

He's getting death threats. Some guy on my Chicago site said he hopes Pearlman dies from Ass Cancer. It isn't as if the apathy in this one thread reflects everybody's general attitude.

Fair enough. Death threats takes things a little too far, I agree. I was responding solely to what I've been reading on this forum. Although I do have a hard time believing he didn't know those things about Payton before he started the book, but just my opinion.

 

[ram29jackson]

People cashing in on dead peoples transgressions in unauthorized biographies are fools to begin with.

 

[JBregz]

People cashing in on dead peoples transgressions in unauthorized biographies are fools to begin with.

Sounds pretty genius to me.

 

[Rush]

I cannot fathom how stupid people are these days.

 

[zack54attack]

These "Bears fans" that are so "Loyal" to the team and bashing Pearlman are probably the same ones saying Caleb Hanie should be the starting quarterback..

Or the same ones that STILL Blame Bartman.

 

[FirstTimer]

Great write up by Wilbon.

Let me start by saying that Walter Payton was my last childhood athletic hero. There had been Ditka and Butkus and Sayers before him, when I was a little-bitty kid, but I was 16 when Payton was a rookie. The Bears had been, well, dreck pretty much since I was 4 and there were no illusions of serious contention during his first few years either. But his prolific performances, particularly in his breakout 1977 season, let us stop grieving the early departure of Sayers and undoubtedly lifted the city's collective spirit. So I'm not about to pretend that I'm objective or neutral about Payton.

But as someone who grew up to become a sportswriter and understand the job requires a critical and unvarnished look at the men who are almost always somebody's heroes, I'm trying to understand the exact purpose of writing a book, 12 years after Payton's depressing death at 45, that goes to agonizing lengths to tell us essentially that Payton was flawed.

I'm not suggesting I don't believe Jeff Pearlman's reporting for "Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton;" Pearlman's a pro with two best-sellers to his credit. And he had on-the-record conversations with longtime Payton representative Bud Holmes and former personal assistant Ginny Quirk. The point isn't to question Pearlman's accuracy, but to question his purpose in writing the book. What's the literary mission here?


From what we've seen of the excerpts in Sports Illustrated, Payton's big sins seem to be he allegedly took a lot of painkillers, and he cheated on his wife. The easy rationale is that the NFL's primary citizenship award is named after Payton and you could spend years trying to hammer the NFL as being hypocritical, not that Payton ever asked for the award to be named for him. But what so much reporting, even detailed and accurate reporting, fails miserably at these days is providing context.

One of the reasons Payton is in the discussion for greatest player in NFL history is his durability. If you had told me at 27 years old, by which time I had started covering pro football for The Washington Post and had come to know Payton, that my one-time hero was self-medicating, perhaps illegally, with painkillers, my reaction would probably have been, "Yeah, I can see that."

Payton missed one game in 13 years, in a career that was celebrated because he essentially never ran out of bounds and believed his longevity was due to dishing out punishment as much as taking it. Either way, Payton had to be in a ton of pain for a great many years. One of the things we've come to know, as research tells us more about head injuries football players suffer, is that injuries were often kept from the players themselves and their ways of simply getting through the day and managing the pain was kept from pretty much all of us.

If Pearlman, when we have more than excerpts, deals with Payton's use of painkillers in the greater context of pro football in the 1970s and 1980s, then perhaps I'll drop the objection. Surely he won't suggest that Tylenol and Vicodin, nitrous oxide and Ritalin, which he says were Payton's favorites, weren't even eyebrow-raising for that period of time.

It wasn't rare, wasn't uncommon, might have even been pretty standard. Regrettable? Sure. But at that time and in the culture Payton operated in, it damn sure wasn't scandalous. I know too many players older than Payton and too many of his peers that confided over the years I covered the NFL that they had to take something for the pain, even as they looked away from the eyes of their wives, who had to help them out of bed every Monday and Tuesday at least.






As for cheating on his wife, Connie, who Pearlman himself indicates knew of the infidelities, how relevant is it (once again) that a famous athlete slept around? Isn't this a little like "Dog Bites Man?" My friend Jason Whitlock, as the Tiger Woods sex scandal began to build, wrote rather hilariously, "I don't care about any recreational sex that doesn't involve me."

I'm tired of journalists, under cover of painting a complete portrait, deciding the world is a better place for knowing whom public figures are sleeping with. This isn't news, it's pandering, especially when the man in question has been dead for 12 years and can't defend himself (something I thought Payton paid Bud Holmes all those years to do).

Payton wasn't an elected official obliged to share with us every predilection. He carried a football, and better than just about anybody else in football history by the way. He ran with a style that suggested artist as much as running back. He was perhaps the best blocker ever among running backs, the best pass catcher among running backs back when he played and Marshall Faulk hadn't yet been invented.

If he wasn't the runner Jim Brown was, Payton was likely a more complete player, and I don't ever recall him bringing embarrassment to the Bears or to the city of Chicago or being a civic nuisance. So to balance the books and prove years later than he wasn't perfect I now need to know whom he was sharing his bed with?

The Tiger Woods "He's-making-a-ton-of-money-off-his-image" justification isn't even in play here because Payton made next-to-nothing off his image. He didn't have any national endorsement deals that amounted to anything. Payton spent half his time, if you ask the beat writers in Chicago who covered him, hiding from the press. He didn't defraud anybody or present himself as a paragon of virtue.

You can't even accurately accuse him of misleading the children who idolized him. I know. I was one of them. The fact that he had his mistress and his wife at his Hall of Fame induction in 1993 is titillating, but it sure as hell doesn't change the way I feel about the way he ran the sweep behind Revie Sorey and Noah Jackson, or stiff-armed linebackers 30 pounds heavier or took the Vikings for a then-record 275 yards.


What I am interested in, and I don't know yet to what degree Pearlman pursues this issue, is whether Payton's talk of suicide suggests he had suffered the kind of head injuries that might have left him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which we knew virtually nothing about when Payton died, yet now know affected potentially a great many players during Payton's playing days (1975-87), including perhaps his teammate Dave Duerson who took his own life months ago.

Was Payton in constant pain when he talked of suicide? Was he already suffering from the early stages of bile duct cancer and the liver disease primary sclerosing cholangitis, which killed him? Or are we to think these were just the rantings of an out-of-control prima donna? If there's true cultural value to be derived from looking back at Payton's life without glorifying him, which surely isn't necessary either, it probably lies in what playing every single game save one over 13 seasons at running back might have done not just to a player we look at (maybe mistakenly) as indestructible but to an entire generation of players.

Otherwise, it comes to me as no shock that Payton was no angel, that he was imperfect and at times behaved in churlish ways, just like our fathers and uncles and brothers and coaches. But is that the bar we're setting now, that anything short of exemplary at some point should bring shame? I'm wondering how many of our heroes, anybody's heroes, can live up to that.

 

[dave]

Sorry ... but Wilbon just comes across as a guy who is a Bears' homer upset that he won't have a best-selling book.

I absoultely understand why Bears' diehards are mad at this book, it exposes a legend's failures, but Wilbon criticizing this book is like Barry Bonds criticizing steroids.

 

[FirstTimer]

Sorry ... but Wilbon just comes across as a guy who is a Bears' homer upset that he won't have a best-selling book.

I absoultely understand why Bears' diehards are mad at this book, it exposes a legend's failures, but Wilbon criticizing this book is like Barry Bonds criticizing steroids.

I'm convinced you didn't even read the article.

If anything the article comes off as the exact opposite of upset.

Dave with another late night fail.

 

[MrBill]

I think Wilbon hit the nail on the head.

 

[Senser81]

Sorry ... but Wilbon just comes across as a guy who is a Bears' homer upset that he won't have a best-selling book.

I absoultely understand why Bears' diehards are mad at this book, it exposes a legend's failures, but Wilbon criticizing this book is like dave criticizing a VSN posting.

FIXED

Pearlman is kind of like a Skip Bayless/naysayer/negative writer. It worked for his book on the 1986 Mets, because no one liked the 1986 Mets. I think Pearlman might have chosen the wrong subject matter to write a "tell-all" book, because 1) people like Payton, and 2) its not that compelling of a story, really.

 

[bucky]

When Walter was still alive, the author was nothing more than a columnist for SI, and in his words "no position to write a book".

He spent multiple years on this book, and interviewed more than 600 people. I just dont get the timing issue some people have (your not the first Bucky). I mean, Walter aint getting anymore dead.... If not now, then when, 5 years, 10 years, never? There is a WHOLE BUNCH more to this book that the piece SI took.

After his loved ones (immediate family) are long gone.

 

[bucky]

You guy can say whatever you want about me once I die. I'm dead what the fuck do I care?

Your family (living relatives) might care. Your view is kind of selfish heels.

 

[bucky]

You're an idiot. Walter Payton was an icon. He exchanged his privacy when he agreed to get paid hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to play at the highest stage. You have ZERO privacy.

You're an idiot if you think being a public figure means you deserve no privacy.

Why write a biography when somebody is alive? Then you can't write about the scope of their entire life. Seems very logical to me.

Then wait for the fucking immediate family to be deceased as well.

I'm the biggest Bears fan here, I have the fucking logo tattooed on my body. However, I'm not eating up this illogical bullshit.

It's not illogical. It's a pussy move. National Enquirer kind of stuff. Guy sold his sole for money.

 

[Anthony]

You're an idiot if you think being a public figure means you deserve no privacy.



Then wait for the fucking immediate family to be deceased as well.



It's not illogical. It's a pussy move. National Enquirer kind of stuff. Guy sold his sole for money.

I hope he bought a new sole, lumbar strains are painful.