Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton (a review)

American sports fans have a curious relationship with professional athletes. They either love them or hate them, and the emotional energy fans invest into their favorite players can either lionize them or transform them into demigods. These men are, after all, like family. They visit every Sunday and are given round the clock coverage through a plethora of media outlets. Rarely does the thought cross those fans’ minds that there could be more to a man’s life and story than what’s presented, because they seem so warm and gracious, thuggish and unsympathetic, or cold and aloof.

But the idea that you can know a man simply from watching him on and off the field through the lens of television cameras and beat writers is, to put it kindly, foolishly naive. Due to the combined efforts of organizations like the NFL and the athletes’ own representation, their image to the public becomes a carefully cultivated persona that might not entirely be true to the man behind the helmet. It can delude, conceal, or outright fabricate details of an athlete’s personality and life story, feeding into the fans’ eagerness to believe.

So when Sports Illustrated published an excerpt of Jeff Pearlman’s new book Sweetness, a biography of NFL Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton that included episodes of depression and abuse of prescription pain medication, an angry mob formed of NFL fans and pundits. When he was alive, Payton cultivated an unrealistic image of the perfect family man that was maintained by his family and friends after his death. It was a standard that was impossible for any person to live up to, but was none the less accepted by a public eager to find any reason at all to love the man. When fans were told the man was far from perfect, the reaction was outrage and condemnation. Insults and threats abounded from anonymous fans on the internet flexing their keyboard muscles. Former jocks and professional acquaintances frothed at the mouth. Payton’s former head coach Mike Ditka, who was interviewed for the book and quoted extensively, promised to spit on Pearlman the next time he saw him. Others confronted Pearlman in interviews and editorials, accusing him of attempting to destroy the lives of athletes, even going so far as to calling him disgraceful for detailing the Payton’s private life. Some even went so far as to call him an outright liar.

None of them read the book.

Pearlman interviewed hundreds of individuals and spent three years working on the life story of Payton. More importantly, though, the excerpt published in Sports Illustrated portrayed Payton at his absolute lowest. Context matters, especially when you consider that Sweetness comes in at a whopping 430 pages. Although the excerpt published was honest and forthright, it amounts to a hiccup in the life of a man who you come to know and love, warts and all, through Pearlman’s exhaustive research and unparalleled gift for relatibility through his prose.

And boy, are there warts. Contextualized, though, they amount to nothing worse than what the average person goes through but might not publicize to the world. Walter Payton had his flaws, and some of them were spectacular, but he was after all a spectacular human being. The man’s motto became “never die easy” because of his smash mouth style of play, but that was rooted in a strong personality that approached everything in life with the same crushing tenacity he displayed on the field. If you were to isolate those moments where he was less than perfect, then he could seem like a bad person. But he wasn’t, and Pearlman’s chronicling of his life makes that obvious. The penultimate scene in the book comes in its final pages, when Walter is dying and asked to speak to a young fan. I would run the excerpt here, but don’t want to deprive you of that moment. But let’s say it was Walter at his weakest being Walter, and it was wonderful and moving.

If you were to base your view of the book on the reaction seen on the internet, you’d come out thinking that Sweetness was a tabloid expose that violently ripped the veil off the Payton mystique. The truth, however, is quite different. Sweetness is, instead, the story of a man who overcame tremendous odds: an alcoholic father, a town fiercely devoted to segregation, institutional racism that severly limited his collegiate options, and the rigors of playing the most physically demanding position in the most physically demanding team sport in America, just to name a few. You come out of reading this biography not thinking of Walter Payton as a flawed man, but as a man who, despite having shortcomings as all of us do, rose to greatness in and out of his sport.

I’ve always been a fairweather football fan. I’ve never had a favorite team, save for the few years in middle and high school when I adopted the New England Patriots on a whim (I dropped them before their epic run of playoff and Super Bowl victories). I know enough about the sport to understand what’s happening and get invested in a game I’m watching, but I rarely if ever go out of my way to watch a game of my own volition. Despite that, I was completely wrapped up the last week in Pearlman’s book and transfixed by the most minute details of the game and Payton’s life. I came to adore the man so much that when the book reached the inevitable point where Payton dies, a fact I was already well aware of, my eyes welled up. Not because I thought he’d beat it, because Pearlman conveys Payton’s fate unequivocally from the moment he’s diagnosed. I teared up because for the first time since his death twelve years ago, I knew who Walter Payton was.

Credit goes to Jeff Pearlman for writing what was, in all honesty and sincerity, the best biography I’ve ever read. And especially to Walter Payton, a man who gave so much to the world and never lived, or died easy.

You can purchase Sweetness on Amazon and at most bookstores.