Walter & Me (11 page)

How about Oxford, Mississippi, native, Bill Houston? Could he have helped his hometown Ole Miss Rebels win a couple more games and gotten them to a bowl game? Something to ponder. But that’s okay. It all worked out for the best at Jackson State. I loved my college experience and my teammates, and so did Walter. Coach Hill’s tactics were tough at times, but we still wouldn’t have changed a thing. Walter and I knew how much talent we had as a team, and we loved the way Coach kept it simple. With guys like we had, Coach knew to just let us go.

Coach Hill didn’t see any use in making things complicated for all of his talented guys. To him, football was a simplistic game anyway, so why not just keep it that way? It’s sort of like all those basketball players who get interviewed after a game. The reporter might ask, “So, how’d you guys get the victory tonight?” The player might say, “Well, we were better than them tonight, we brought our ‘A’ game, we ran when we could and got baskets when we needed them.” You hear that kind of stuff over and over from the winning team, and it’s really not any more complicated than that. The easiest way to become a millionaire is to get a million dollars, and the easiest way to win a game is to score more points than the other guys. You just have to figure out the best way to do that. For us, the best way was usually our running game.

Coach Hill thought that if we would run, block, and tackle, we were going to beat the bad guys every time. If we were better at it than them, we’d beat them. Coach Hill had a very basic philosophy that football is a game of runs, blocks, and tackles. That’s it. And he figured the best way to get good at runs, blocks, and tackles was to run, block, and tackle every day. So, practice was pretty simple, too, even if it was a little hard. Every single day we went out there and scrimmaged, blocking and running and tackling. We did it over and over. Practice makes perfect, as they say, but it also perfects the team. It brings the best to the top. All those who were left after the hard push of practice were the real players. Those who got hurt or quit, they were the weaker ones. When it was all said and done, we had the guys who were gonna give us the best shot at winning each game. Like I said, simple. Coach Hill even liked to refer to our program as KISS (the Keep It Simple School). But with all that weeding out of the weaklings, the guys who remained were more like the kiss of death for anyone who faced us. And I think it would’ve been the same for all the teams we never got to face.

Take Ole Miss, for example. They were a big time program, right? Everyone just knew they were the best team in the area. Well, the Jackson State team with Walter and me would’ve beaten Ole Miss easily. For all you Rebels fans out there, I’m sorry if that upsets you, but it’s the truth. Back when Walter and I were playing together, Ole Miss was a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust team. They’d line up with two tight ends, and we’d have known exactly what they were going to do. And when we knew what a team was going to do, we were going to win. It didn’t even matter that the Rebels would’ve probably known what we were going to do, too. They would’ve likely known we were just going to run it down their throats, but they would’ve been defenseless against it anyway. We had the superior fire power. With us, it was lights, cameras, JACKSON (STATE)! Compared to the wave of the future we were bringing, calling them “Ole Miss” would’ve been right in more ways than one. We had men; they had ladies.

The SEC teams like Ole Miss didn’t have receivers of the caliber we had in our league. There’s no question we had better runners, but we also had receivers who could flat-out fly and catch anything delivered anywhere close to them. The SEC had a bunch of possession receivers, so they couldn’t spread the field for their runners like our receivers could spread the field for Walter and me. The SEC schools didn’t throw to the tight ends, either, like we did, so they didn’t have as many threats in the passing game to account for. We threw to our tight ends a lot, probably eight or 10 times a game. The SEC teams would’ve had to adjust to that while also trying to cover our elite wideouts. You can imagine the room we runners would’ve had. It would’ve been like that all day long, too. And, without being able to stack the box on us, they just wouldn’t have had the speed to match up with ours. Not a single team in the SEC could match up with our speed, period. They had the “better” programs in the eyes of many, but we had the better players. I don’t care whose eyes were doing the looking.

If you disagree with that, then name me one team in the SEC—or in the South for that matter—in 1972 that wouldn’t have wanted four first-round draft picks and 10 future NFL players on their team. What’s that? Come again? I can’t hear you. The fact is, we looked good to them on paper, but just not in person. We were the wrong color. We were stacked with elite black athletes who’d been overlooked. As I said, not a single one of us was recruited by any of the top-flight white schools, and that’s more than just a shame. It was downright stupid. Without even talking about Walter, a few of the guys we had, like Rickey Young, Don Reese, Robert Brazile, John Tate, and Emanuel Zanders, could’ve been the difference makers for Alabama (10–2) or Auburn (10–1) in their failed quests to win the national championship. Yet those schools didn’t even see those guys standing right there in their own backyards. Either that or they saw them and just looked the other way because they couldn’t get over the color of their skin.

You probably don’t even think of mentioning Jackson State when you talk about the great teams of yesteryear, because being all black, we weren’t part of the history. But let me tell you, our team had so much speed up and down the lineup and so much pure athletic ability that I don’t know of any team anywhere who would’ve been able to match up with us. Not even legendary Alabama would’ve been up to the task. We would’ve done the same thing to them that USC did when they pounded ’em 42–21 in Birmingham in 1970. USC’s Sam Cunningham was historic that night and ran all over ’Bama. The world remembers what Sam the Bam did, and they remember how Bear Bryant reacted by reaching out to black players after that game. But there were lots of unnoticed black kids who could’ve done that. Not to take anything away from Cunningham, but it could’ve easily been any of us Jackson State guys had we played that game. Change came to college football not because Sam Cunningham was Sam Cunningham, but because Sam Cunningham was black. It wasn’t that Sam Cunningham couldn’t be ignored anymore; it was that black kids couldn’t be.

I’ve heard before that after the USC/Alabama game, Bear Bryant said something like, “We got to get some of ours to keep up with some of theirs.” What he meant was, they had to start looking at the black kids. Bear Bryant gets credit, but only for seeing that first. In Sam Cunningham, Bear saw what he was missing out there, so he wanted to start recruiting blacks. Cunningham changed Bear’s mind in the same way Elmo Wright and Warren McVea of the University of Houston convinced Johnny Vaught that Ole Miss needed to take this integration thing a little more seriously, too. They hadn’t before seen anybody that big and athletic and with that kind of speed. Our color kept those white schools from recruiting us for so long, but hey, at least they finally came to their senses. All the white schools started to want us black kids around the end of my college days—but let’s be real here. They didn’t want us because they wanted us. They wanted us because they needed us.

Of course, if I am really being real here, I have to say it wasn’t just white folks who saw some of us black kids as too dark back then. Some black folks did, too. Take, for example, the parents of a black girl Walter took a liking to. During his first year at Jackson State, he found himself this little number that turned into his girlfriend. Walter was completely infatuated with her, and she was infatuated with him. Then the girl’s parents got all up in their business and started fussin’ about Walter dating their daughter. The problem there was that, though the girl’s mother was dark-skinned, the girl’s father was fair-skinned. The two of them coming together produced a daughter who was also fair-skinned. Amazingly, the girl’s mother disapproved of her fair-skinned daughter’s relationship with Walter and ultimately ended it because she was concerned about the skin complexion of her grandkids. Walter was too dark, and they didn’t want to risk having dark-skinned grandbabies. Can you believe that? The mother wasn’t worried about her daughter’s happiness or anything like that. She was worried about the color of her daughter’s potential offspring. I shake my head about that even to this day.

That was all pretty hard for Walter to deal with, as you can imagine. In fact, it crushed him. What made it worse was that the girl went right along with it. Walter bounced back from hits on the field all the time, but that girl’s rejection really leveled the poor guy. He couldn’t get his mind off that girl, and it put him in a real funk. If it had been me, I might’ve just said “good riddance” and moved on to all the other pretty girls out there waiting for me. I mean, I’ve been out of the dating game for so long now that I don’t know if this is still the case, but I don’t remember ever seeing an unattractive black female back then, whether fair-skinned, dark-skinned, or whatever. They were all beautiful. I couldn’t understand why some black people didn’t see it that way.

It’s gotten better over time, I guess, just like the whole “white schools not recruiting black kids” thing got better, but it’s still there in some places. In a state like Louisiana, for example, the biggest racial issue doesn’t exist between blacks and whites. The biggest problem is between light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks. One group says they’re Creole Cajuns, and the other group says they’re black. Each group sees the other group as different. There are still some black people out there who’d prefer their daughter or son marry somebody who is fairer-skinned than they are. Even when I was growing up in Columbia and going to an all-black school, the fair-skinned black males and females were always class president, prom queen, Miss this, Mr. that, etc.

Walter and I were roommates, and we talked a lot about that kind of stuff. We talked about how backward that girl and her parents were, and I tried to push Walter to just move on to other things. Prettier things. Like I said, there were plenty of beautiful black girls out there, and I knew most of them wouldn’t care how dark he was. In an effort to get him to explore a little bit, I showed him “the tree.”

There was this tree right outside our dorm room window. It was a towering old oak tree with lots and lots of big sprawling limbs, and I showed Walter how to slip down it so we could get out and see some girls. Of course, Walter mostly just wanted to go into town and hang out. So, we did that, too. We’d just slip out to go down to the Penguin Restaurant to get a fish sandwich or the hot dog special (which brought me back to what got me to sign with Jackson State in the first place). Anyway, though the food seemed to be the main thing on Walter’s mind, I was usually scanning the place for girls. Actually, one girl in particular. Her name was Mary.

Mary’s daddy had a big Cadillac, and she’d often get to drive it out and would park it in the parking lot adjacent to Jones Hall, the football dormitory. I’d climb down that tree with Walter, but once we were down, Mary was mine and Walter was on his own. You would’ve done the same had you seen Mary. I’d climb down the tree and go down the side of the building where it was dark, and I’d sit there in the car with her. And don’t worry about how Walter was doing out there on his own. The kid was good-looking, and he was doing just fine. He finally found this one new girl he kinda liked (and who didn’t mind his dark skin), and that girl’s roommate had a place in the apartments right behind Jones Hall, right across the tracks. So, when we climbed down that tree, I’d go off to see Mary, and if Walter didn’t head into town for a burger, he’d go around back, go through the fence, jump the track, and go across the street to the apartments where that girl would be waiting for him. Looking forward to going down that tree was often what got us through Coach Hill’s crazy hard practices. Coach would push us to the limit, and Walter and I would talk about how crazy he was, and then we’d start talking about who was going down the tree first that night and what time we were coming back. Those were some damn good times. Then Coach Hill found out about that tree.

Word got to Coach Hill that players had been seen climbing out the window and on down that oak tree. He found out that Room 201 was the room with the window right by that tree, and he knew Walter and I were in that room. Well, Coach put two and two together and came up with 22, which was my number. That’s right, he blamed me for the whole thing and said I put Walter up to it. So, he wanted to kill me, probably because I was a senior and all, but he didn’t want to piss off Walter. He’d already had to chase Walter down once before, and he wasn’t about to set him off again.

So, what Coach did, besides lay into me a little, was get out the saw and start cutting the bottom limbs off the tree. He figured we wouldn’t have enough to hang onto at the end of our climb. He was wrong. Cutting down those bottom limbs didn’t bother us at all. We discovered that we could hang from the top limb, catch the tree, shimmy down the tree, and use the cut off stumps to get back up to the upper limbs and get back in the room. I suppose the coaches at the white schools weren’t the only ones underestimating our athletic ability.

Coach found out we were still getting up and down that tree about three weeks later, so he had maintenance cut off all of the limbs on the tree. So as not to kill the tree, they left a stump about five inches long where each limb had been and then painted the ends white. It looked an awful lot like steps to us, and that’s what we used them for. Seemed every time they’d cut the limbs, it just got easier to climb up and down.

We started staying out longer and longer and didn’t even really fear Coach Hill when it came to sneaking out down that tree. Coach could have the day, but the night belonged to us. Curfew? Not for the Payton boys. We snuck out every night, even if it wasn’t exactly “sneaking out” anymore.