Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (39 page)

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Gary Fencik was attending Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business while the ’85 Bears were making their run. It gave him a stunning résumé: Barrington High School, Yale University (BA), Kellogg School of Business (MBA), Chicago Bears (twelve years, two Pro Bowls, one Super Bowl, career interception leader). In negotiations for his last contract, he inserted a clause that guaranteed him the right to purchase four season tickets if the team ever built a new stadium. The seats had to be between the 40-yard lines. Those tickets, which Fencik got after the renovation of Soldier Field, are probably worth more than Doug Plank made in his entire career.

These days, Fencik sounds less like a football player than a banker, which he is: “As soon as I retired, I joined the firm I’m still with,” he told me. “We manage pension assets with a focus on private equity. We have a venture capital group and our primary strategy is a fund of funds. We’ll take ten, twenty million and put it into various ventures around the world.”

Of course, the football thing—it never goes way. A few years back, Fencik served as head coach of his daughter’s flag football team. What do you think happened? He went insane. Drills, meetings, options; reverses, tricks, flea flickers, the flying wedge—an arrow of adolescent girls blazing up the field. In the end, he had thirty plays, too many to remember, so he had them printed on armbands, which the quarterback could check as she took a knee in the huddle—just like the kind worn by the pros. When the team won it all, Fencik had a mini–Super Bowl trophy made for each player.

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Buddy Ryan turned the Philadelphia Eagles into a power but never could win the big game. He was zero and three in the playoffs. Perhaps he was too defensive minded, overly attuned to just one side of the ball. After going ten and six in 1990, he was fired. He took the defensive coordinator position with Houston but was fired again, this time after he punched his own team’s offensive coordinator on the sideline. When he arrived in Arizona in 1994, he told the press, “You’ve got a winner in town!” He lost half his games in 1994, more in 1995, and was fired before the ’96 season. He suddenly seemed very old. His method—beat ’em down, build ’em up—was of an earlier era. You grab a kid by the face mask or call him fat Jap today, he’ll call his lawyer. Buddy Ryan didn’t change; the country did. He retired to a farm in Kentucky, where he trains horses. He has one named 46 Blitz, and another named FiredForWinning.

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The decision came from the Bears front office: 1987 would be Walter Payton’s last season. At thirty-three, he was no longer a broken field runner who could weave through traffic. On his best plays, he was good for three or four yards up the middle. “He [didn’t] embarrass himself, but he had lost the stuff, no question,” Ditka said. Payton played his last game in the playoffs against the Redskins. The Bears were down 21–17 with time running out. They had the ball on their own 36. “Fourth down and a season to go,” said the announcer. McMahon was in the shotgun, Payton and Suhey behind. Mac licked his fingers, took the snap, got away from the rush, faked the bomb, then tossed a soft screen to Payton, who had nothing but open field ahead. Years before, Walter described this as his dream situation: give me the ball with everything on the line and ten to go. He went upfield, turned from a tackler, and raced toward the sideline, trying to beat his man around the end, but he no longer had the speed. He was driven out-of-bounds a yard short of the first down.

A second later, the game was over. A second after that, the stadium was empty. Darkness washed over the grounds. Only Payton remained, in his equipment, his chin strap buckled, waiting to be sent into a game that would never be played. He had his feet out, head down. “I’ll always remember Walter, when we got beat by Washington, that last game, sitting on the bench till the stadium was just about empty,” McMichael wrote. “He sat on the end of the bench like he was trying to suck it all in and remember where he was right then in his life. Just sitting with his head down, reflecting, like [Rodin’s] statue of the Thinker.”

“They paid me for football,” Payton said, “but I would have played for nothing.” Payton was never going to be satisfied showing apartments, or making combo meals. He was an adrenaline junkie. He might’ve been too old for football, but he was still a young man, and, when he left the game, he lost everything that made life fun. “It’s like being a Vietnam vet,” he said. “You go in and it’s such a different world, and all of a sudden you come home and you’re expected to just be normal and you’re not normal.” He spent years searching for ways to get the blood moving. He had affairs. He fired weapons. He raced for Paul Newman’s stock car team. He toyed with a return to the game. With the failure of each attempt, his mood blackened—he treated himself with drugs. It’s the typical experience of an NFL star trying to adjust to the blandness of civilian life.

As I read Jeff Pearlman’s book
Sweetness
, I jotted down some of the symptoms said to characterize Payton at loose ends:

Took a lot of pills

Avoided old friends

Missed appointments

Gained weight

Was a lunatic for Brach’s candy

Stopped working out

Cheated on his wife

Accidentally shot an employee

Made speculative investments, lost money

Worked as assistant coach for a high school basketball team

Lent his Super Bowl ring to a kid who lost it in a couch

“Walter Payton often found himself suffocated by darkness,” wrote Pearlman. “Oh, he wouldn’t let on as such. He smiled and laughed and told jokes and pinched rear ends and tried his absolute best to come across as the life of the party. Inside, however, happiness eluded Payton in the same manner he had once eluded opposing linebackers.”

“I was definitely lost those first few years,” Payton wrote. “I went through withdrawal when it was game time. It was the biological clock kicking in.”

“It sounds like just about every other guy who ever had to adjust to normal life after the NFL,” Kurt Becker told me.

As Pearlman wrote, Walter was a nut for Brach’s. A piece of candy was like a plug of tobacco. His pockets were filled with wrappers. He sucked on them from morning till night, which is why he was annoyed, then alarmed, when he came upon one bum piece of candy, then another, then another. Then the stomachaches started, mild at first, then like knives. He tired easily, had to lie down in the afternoon. Smells began to bother him. Then everything lost its taste. The whites of his eyes turned yellow. He went to a doctor, who sent him to the Mayo Clinic. In December 1998, he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare liver disease. The bile ducts stop working, the poisons build up, you start to die.

No one can say what had caused the disease. I wondered if it could have been all those years of punishment. He had not missed a start in thirteen seasons and now, still young, he was being erased from life. The doctors gave him a year, maybe two—he was put on the list for a liver transplant. He told few people about his illness, but it was hard to keep the secret. Payton’s son Jarrett, a star high school running back, held a press conference to announce what college he would attend. A camera lingered on Walter, standing behind his son. He had lost fifty pounds in a few months. A reporter named Mark Giangreco blanched. “The man there who looks like Gandhi is the former Walter Payton,” he said. “I think I could take him on.”

The rumors that spread around the city—Payton is gay, Payton has AIDS—convinced him to go public with his disease. He appeared on Oprah and Larry King. He needed help finding a liver. He broke down at a press conference, hugging his son as the tears flowed. When a reporter asked if he was scared, Payton said, “Hell yes, I’m scared.” A follow-up appointment at the Mayo Clinic found cancer. It had spread to Walter’s liver, making him ineligible for a transplant.

Payton had always liked fullback Matt Suhey, but the illness made them even closer. “It’s like the movie
Brian’s Song
,” said Payton, “only, in this version, it’s the brother that dies.” Suhey took Walter to the doctor, gave him medicine, drove him around. Payton was a joker. “Two weeks before he died, he told me he wanted me to take him to Mike Singletary’s house,” Suhey said. “We were driving around and Walter would say, ‘That’s his house.’ So I’d go to the door and it would be someone who never heard of Mike Singletary. I’d look back and there was Walter sitting in the car laughing at me.” Payton fought with Singletary when they played but wanted to see him before he died. He respected Singletary and needed his blessing. “I went in and got on my knees and began to pray as I held his hand,” Singletary wrote. “When I finished praying, I got up … and looked at him and I couldn’t believe the peace on his face. There was such peace, it was unbelievable. I didn’t know that was the last time I would see him alive.”

Payton died on November 1, 1999. He was forty-five years old. “He must have weighed 90 pounds,” McMahon said. “Here’s a guy that did everything to his body, he couldn’t break it in thirteen years on the field. It was devastating. It sucks. Life’s unfair sometimes, you know?”

“I will always remember Walter the great football player and Walter the champion for life,” said Singletary, “but there’s something that I realized, and something that I always knew but I had never really seen—a man who is created by God and was given a message to deliver. All of us are vulnerable at any moment, and as I looked at Walter in those final days, the glory of God was never more apparent to me. When I say that Walter was courageous, I mean courageous in coming to a realization that life is more than touchdowns. Life is more than all the great runs and everything. Life is to be lived at every moment, and you have to be courageous in life and death and he was. He made a difference. We all should be so lucky.”

Speaking at the memorial a few weeks later, Singletary said, “Walter made one last great run. Fourth down, no time-outs, and he looked across the line of scrimmage and they were all there. He didn’t have any blocking whatsoever. And as he looked, he saw they were there to take him out. Hate, fear, unforgiveness, selfishness, everything else you can imagine, they were there. And Walter was asking the question, How do I get past this? And as he looked forward, he just looked up and Christ was there saying, Walter touch my hand. Grace is yours today. And Walter took His hand. He didn’t have to run, he didn’t have to jump, he didn’t have to earn it. It was free.”

Ditka spoke next: “I think Coach Halas has finally got the greatest Bear of them all on his heavenly team. You know, when you think about all the guys who have gone before us, Nagurski, Luckman, Piccolo, Stydahar, Galimore, Farrington, Osmanski, George, Lee, Marconi, Dave Whitsell … all those great Bears have joined George Halas. He’s saying, Hey, I’ve finally got the last piece of the puzzle, I’ve got the greatest Bear of all.

“Now, the Bible tells us very simply that all men are like grass and their deeds are like the wildflowers. Now, the grass will wither and the flowers will fall, but the word of the Lord will live forever. And I believe this in the bottom of my heart, I really do, and I’ve believed it for a long time. I know the two great commandments we are given. I know that Walter loved God. He honored God with his whole heart … and soul. He always kept God in front of him.

“The game is greater than the athletes who play it. It always has been that way and it always will be. Walter knew it, too. So when they make a mark against his name, it’s not going to be whether he won or lost, but how did he play that game, and man, did he play that game. Walter Payton really played the game.”

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For most veterans, retirement is the story of their bodies: surgeries and pain; the saga of knees, the hymn of shoulders.

Wilber Marshall is bad knees and bad back and paying for every big hit. William Perry is stay-at-home, a man who got everything from the game, then had most of it taken away. But Dave Duerson’s story is the most tragic of all.

Duerson was a great player, one of the All-Pros the Bears let walk away. He played for the Giants, then ended his career in Arizona in 1993. He made the reentry into civilian life look easy. He succeeded in business, worked for the players’ union. He was a family man. He was loved by many people. Then, as he got into his forties, something changed. He began to forget, got lost in his own neighborhood. His mind became disordered. He had trouble making decisions. He had headaches. He was beset by inexplicable rage. His mood turned dark. He was sad. He was mean to the people he loved. He was confused, and sick, and hurt, and angry, and tired.

On February 17, 2011, Duerson was found dead in his house in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. He’d shot himself in the chest. He had sent a text to his family saying he was going to shoot himself in the chest because he wanted his brain preserved and studied by the doctors at the Brain Bank in Boston. “It took everybody by surprise ’cause we’d seen him a month before that happened,” McMahon told me. “He was a little quieter than usual but you couldn’t have told me he was going to shoot himself. I wouldn’t have believed that. I guess in his note he said he was tired of not being able to make a decision. He was always a bright guy. At the end, he couldn’t find his way home and stuff like that. And when you have a guy with that kind of pride, it was like, well, what else can I do?”

Duerson was convinced he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an Alzheimer’s-like disease that’s been found in an increasing number of dead football players. CTE, which results from repeated head trauma, causes memory loss, mood swings, depression. It can be diagnosed only in an autopsy. After the Brain Bank issued its Duerson report—he was indeed suffering from CTE—his death, along with the deaths of, among others, Mike Webster of the Steelers, Andre Waters of the Eagles, and Junior Seau of the Chargers, fueled a crisis that is threatening the future of football. Does the game give its own players brain damage? When you cheer a big hit, are you cheering the onset of a disease that will eventually rob a person of everything?