It was late November in 1998, and Sweetness was on his way home. Momma, my friend Bubba Barham, and I were all at the Jackson, Mississippi, airport, waiting on Walter to walk off the plane. It had touched down just moments before. Daddy would have been there, too, had he not already passed on. The airport was busting at the seams with busyness, and with Christmas only a few weeks away, the atmosphere was full of good cheer. There were big ol’ smiles all over the place and lots of laughter and chipper chatter as folks met up with loved ones, associates, and friends. It all paled in comparison to how I felt, though. I was more keyed up than anyone, that’s for sure. It’d been about five months since I’d seen my brother, so I was really looking forward to jumping in a car with him for the ride over to Butler, Alabama. We were headed to our annual deer hunt at Pushmataha Plantation.
It seemed like forever until people started walking off that plane, so it was quite a welcome sight to see Walter among the first passengers coming through. There he was, a larger-than-life sports icon who doubled as my little bro. He had a bag on his arm and, once he saw me, a big smile on his face. But it didn’t take long to see something was wrong with that normally electrified grin of his. It didn’t match the merriness of the other smiles floating all around us. Actually, Walter’s smile wasn’t floating at all. It looked as heavy as that bag he was carrying. Maybe he’d had a bad flight. Did the other passengers hound him for autographs? Did the plane hit a rough patch and toss him around a bit? Did all that turbulence make him toss his peanuts?
I looked over at my momma, Alyne, and her face was like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds that had followed Walter off that plane. Her toothy smile was as wide-open as the great American South, and her eyes sparked up as bright as the stars out there in that clear Southern sky. She approached Walter with her arms open even wider than her smile and gave him the biggest Momma hug I’d ever seen. You know, the extra-long, uncut, extended version of what would have already been a pretty long hug. Walter didn’t fight it at all; he just let it linger. About an hour later it was my turn. I looked deep into Walter’s eyes before hugging him with all my might. The world knew him as Sweetness, but I knew him as something more. He was my brother, and I was his. We slapped each other on the back with that great-to-see-you-bro-but-this-is-gonna-hurt-a-little enthusiasm that only brothers can give each other.
As we pulled away, I looked at Walter’s eyes again, only this time not so deep. I focused on the surface and noticed the color. Just like that, all the heaviness that had gone away came right on back. “Dawg, you feelin’ okay?” I asked in a way that was more like a statement than a question. That color…it was definitely off. “You look a little yellow. Your eyes…”
Sweetness had grown accustomed to shaking defensive backs on the field, but when he heard my question, all he could shake was his head. “Nah, I’m good, dawg. I’m good. I just been drinkin’ a lot of juice, takin’ a lot of vitamins and stuff. You know, cleansin’ my system and all that.”
Despite his MVP-worthy effort, he sure wasn’t shaking my concern with all his vitamin talk. I could just see something wasn’t right about him, and Momma was starting to take notice, too. Her eyes stopped sparking like stars and started moving up and down with that patented Payton quickness that was passed down to Walter and me. She was scanning her baby boy as if examining him. “You losing weight, Walter?”
“Yeah, sure,” Walter conceded. “This stuff I’m taking and drinking…I don’t know, maybe I’ve lost a few pounds, but I’m fine. Really, I am.”
I jumped back in. “Well, when you get back to Chicago, you need to get yourself checked out.”
“I will, man, I will. Don’t worry, I’m good.” He put his hand on my shoulder to change subjects. “Let’s go huntin’!”
I’d gotten so wrapped up in hunting for answers from Walter that I’d forgotten about all the real hunting we were fixin’ to do. Walter’s “let’s go huntin’” snapped me back to it, though, and I decided to look past what was bothering me. Yellow eyes or not, I was ready to go hunting with Sweetness.
We visited with Momma for a little while longer there in the airport before Walter, Bubba, and I left for Alabama. When Momma finally said her good-byes, she walked away without saying another word about Walter’s weight or how he looked. I thought I should probably do the same for the rest of the trip, so it was mostly small talk on the drive to Pushmataha. You know, just catchin’ up and whatnot. He’d already assured us he would get checked out when he got back, so that was that.
When we got to the lodge that evening, we were sitting around, just chillin’ in anticipation of our morning hunt the next day. I looked closely at Walter’s eyes again. Contrasted against his dark complexion, they were as yellow as a Post-it note colored in full with a neon yellow marker and placed under a neon yellow light. Okay, maybe they weren’t that yellow, but you get the idea. I was still disturbed by those yellow eyes, but I told myself I wasn’t going to bring it up again on that trip, so I kept my mouth shut. Then I noticed his skin. Even with skin as dark as Walter’s, I could see the yellowish undertones. Not as drastic as his eyes, but it was there. And that’s when my mouth just had to open.
“Hey, dawg,” I said as we sat there. He looked at me with raised eyebrows that said “what’s up?” I responded to his eyebrows with a two-word accusation. “You’re jaundiced.”
Walter’s eyebrows lowered quickly to form a scowl. “I told you not to worry. It’s just the juice, man.”
It wasn’t adding up to me, but what did I know? I’m not a doctor, and I’d heard of that sort of thing happening before with vitamins and juice. Maybe he was all right, but I wanted to hear it from a professional. “Okay, okay, just get it checked out to be sure.”
“I told you I will, man. I promise, okay?” It was a short conversation, but I could tell he’d had enough of it anyway. It was time to head to bed and start dreaming about all those deer we’d be hunting the next day. All that worrying and questioning about yellow eyes and skin must have worn me out, too, ’cause I was sleeping like a rock as soon as I hit the mattress.
We all woke up bright and early the next day ready to hunt, so we got right on out there. It was a good hunt, but Walter didn’t seem like his usual energetic self; he seemed fatigued and lethargic, even for a normal person, but much more so for a world-class athlete. I tried to let it go and just have a good time, but when we got back to the lodge to clean up and rest a little, I noticed Walter as he got out of the shower. I was shocked at what I saw. It looked to me like he’d lost about 25 to 30 pounds since the last time we’d gotten together. Now, again, I’m no doctor, but dropping that much weight over five months for a guy like Walter didn’t make sense. The drastic weight loss plus the yellow eyes plus the yellow skin was all adding up quickly in my mind to one thing: Walter was a sick man. I had to express my concern once again and insist he really go see a doctor.
“Walter, man, what’s up? You look pretty thin. I don’t think those juices and vitamins are making you lose that much weight. And I don’t think it’s turning you yellow neither. I don’t give a shit what you think is causin’ it, you need to have it checked out. I’m serious.”
Walter had a look of defeat on his face. It was very unusual for him. “Look, I’ll go to the doctor if it’ll make you feel better.”
“Well, it damn sure will,” I said, “and it’ll make you feel better, too.”
“Just promise me one thing, okay?” Walter said. “I promise I’ll go get checked out right when I get back if you promise not to bring it up again for the rest of this trip.” I agreed, and so we hunted hard for the next three days without a word about how Walter looked or any of that. When I took Walter back to the airport for his return flight to Chicago, though, I couldn’t help myself. I walked with him to the gate and bit my tongue only until the boarding call. That’s when I made him promise me one more time that he’d see a doctor when he got back to Chicago.
“I promise,” he said with a wink and a grin, and just like that, he turned and was off again.
I tried to talk myself into thinking maybe it actually was just vitamins and all that, like Walter said. Maybe he was okay. After all, he was Superman, and I hadn’t heard anything about any kryptonite where we’re from. This was a man who had only missed one game in his entire NFL career. I had absolutely no need to worry. That’s what I wanted to think, and that’s what I tried to tell myself. But in the days following our hunt, I just couldn’t get Walter off my mind. I kept thinking back to that week hunting with him in Alabama, and the same troubling details kept rising to the top of my head. Not only was he yellow-eyed, yellow-skinned, frail, and tired, but he also didn’t eat much during the trip. He said he wasn’t hungry, but that just wasn’t Walter. He was always hungry, so something just had to be wrong. I felt a little better each time I remembered he was going to see a doctor. What I didn’t know at the time was that a few weeks prior, he already had.
Walter was a big, big star, but he was a very private person. He kept mostly to himself, and if something was wrong, he’d often try to keep it even from his family. He didn’t want anyone fussin’ over him or worrying about anything. Looking back, my opinion is that Walter came to that deer hunt fully suspecting he was seriously ill. I think that’s why he visited a doctor before the trip, and I think that’s why he let Momma’s hug linger for as long as possible. I think that heaviness around him at the airport wasn’t something I imagined. I think that shadow coming off the plane behind him was something he knew was there. I think he also knew that what was ahead of him was the most difficult challenge of his life.
When I checked in on him just days after he got back, he told me he had visited a doctor already and that he had been diagnosed with “vitamin toxicity.” Now, I have no reason to think he was lying to me. I think he did visit that doctor, and I think that doctor really did tell him it was vitamins. Of course, that’s what Walter had blamed it all on during our hunting trip, but I felt a little better about it when he told me a doctor actually said it. I’m not sure why I didn’t think to ask him why he didn’t tell me before that he’d already seen a doctor. Maybe I was just too excited to hear that it was just because of the vitamins. Looking back, though, I think Walter may’ve talked the doctor into that diagnosis. He couldn’t do it with me, but Walter had a way of talking others into saying what he wanted to hear.
As soon as Walter returned to Chicago from his trip, he picked up his regular schedule as best he could. And his regular schedule was anything but regular. It could usually be boiled down to three words and then three more: hustle, hustle, hustle and push, push, push. Before his illness, all that activity would have been because that’s just how Walter Payton lived his life. After his illness, I think it was all a distraction so he could avoid dealing with reality. He was trying to act normal, but it certainly wasn’t normal for Walter to go to the doctor. He couldn’t keep the charade up for long due to one very inconvenient truth: Walter kept getting worse.
When he called me up to tell me things weren’t going so well, despite what the doctor had said about vitamins, that’s when I knew things were bad. That’s when I really started to worry. And that’s when we started to connect like we did back in the day, before we got pulled away from each other by life. For the first time in a long time, we started talking a lot. Every three days, in fact. And our days of talking weren’t the only things coming in threes. He started describing three recurring symptoms: severe stomach aches, diarrhea, and exhaustion. Those things were hitting him harder than any linebacker ever did. Sweetness was hurting, and I could tell he was reaching out to me, his older brother, to push him to do something about it. He couldn’t force himself to take the next step, so he was asking me to. And that’s exactly what I did. I told him to forget all this vitamin stuff he heard from that doctor and finally get some real help. He stopped telling me nothing was wrong and agreed to do what I said.
In early December, Walter called Jim Sheridan, a business partner and one of his closest friends. I didn’t know much about the guy, but I knew he had a lot to do with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. That’s to say, I knew he was legit and would be able to help my little bro. He was a very busy guy, but he got Walter worked in within a few weeks, which was fantastic. Still, I was worried. The fact that Walter listened to me and was going in there to get checked out had me thinking something very bad could be going down. I didn’t feel optimistic about it at all. I feared the worst. I expected our world to come crashing down. Even so, I was stunned by the results. Superman had stumbled upon some kryptonite.
Walter was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare and chronic disease that attacks the bile ducts of the liver. In plain English, he was gravely ill, and the diagnosis hit me like a speeding bullet. I was dazed, trying to make sense of it all, and at the same time I was trying to keep up with my duties as golf coach at Jackson State. It was a tough, tough time and almost impossible to stay focused on my job. Primary sclerosing cholangitis didn’t sound good, and not just because I couldn’t pronounce it. Walter was dying. He wasn’t just injured, he wasn’t just hit a little too hard in the head, and he wasn’t just “doubtful” for his next NFL game. My little brother was actually dying. He was doubtful to live.
Then I got a little bit of hope from Walter. He explained that the doctors said a liver transplant could save his life. I pumped my fist and instantly thought Walter was gonna make it. He’d be certain to get a transplant. I mean, he was a big football hero, so surely they’d put him high on the list, right? Well, in all my hope, I guess I forgot for a second that Walter is Walter. He told the doctors that just because he carried a football better than most people in the world didn’t mean he deserved to get ahead of anyone else on the list. The Mickey Mantle liver transplant fiasco was still fresh on Walter’s mind, I think. Some thought Mantle had jumped ahead of others since he got his donor liver in just one day, and Walter didn’t want to be remembered as pushing folks aside to get his. He didn’t think he was better than anyone else, and he didn’t want to be treated that way. That was hard for his family to hear.
Us kids were always tops in Momma’s eyes, though, and Walter was about to get the Momma treatment. She decided to make Chicago her temporary—but indefinite—new home. She just had to see Walter through this and went to all the doctor appointments with him. I wanted to be there, too, but I knew he was in good hands with Momma by his side. It was at that point that I started getting most of my information about Walter’s rapidly advancing condition straight from Momma. I knew Walter would try to give me the optimistic view with a wink and a grin like he often did, but Momma wouldn’t. No, sir. She’d just lay it on me, unfiltered and with no candy coating. I was counting on her for that, so I called her right after they met with the doctor for the final results of all his tests. Good, bad, or whatever, I wanted to know the truth.
“Momma, what did y’all find out?” I asked, hoping for any sort of good news.
No good news came.
“They told him it was really bad, Eddie. The doctor said his only chance is to have a liver transplant.”
“Yeah, that’s what Walter told me before,” I said. “He acted like it was no big deal, but it sounds radical to me. What do you think?”
“That’s what I think, too,” Momma continued. “And to have this surgery…you know…it could work, I guess, but they say sometimes they take and sometimes they don’t, so who knows? Walter asked me what I’d do if I was him.’”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I wouldn’t have it.”
I was wishing Momma would have told him to do whatever it takes, but like I said, with Momma you always get the truth. “What did Walter say to that?” I asked.
“Not much. He just said he didn’t want to be put ahead of anybody, that if he was going to do it, he’d wait his turn.”
I was relieved to hear that Walter at least wanted to have the transplant, even if he’d insisted on waiting in line like everyone else. There was hope again, but along the road of waiting for Walter’s turn, that hope turned into despair. A few weeks later, New Year’s Day 1999, brought with it a return visit for Walter to the hospital at the Mayo Clinic. He emerged from the hospital this time without his patented wink and grin. He’d been told he was no longer a candidate for a transplant and that he wouldn’t be placed on the transplant list after all.
We were all stunned and couldn’t make sense of what we were hearing. I didn’t believe it. I mean, this guy had made all sorts of lists as a football player. He’d received the kind of recognition that other guys would die for. Yet here he was, actually dying, and he couldn’t get on the one list that could save his life. I wanted to know why, so I started digging.
Though I may never know exactly what went down with all that, I suspect any hope we ever had that Walter would get a liver transplant was nothing more than false hope. After much research and talking with experts in the hepatobiliary field (liver, bile duct specialists), I’ve come to the conclusion that Walter was never a candidate for a liver transplant and was never on a transplant list. As I later discovered, by the time Walter got to the Mayo Clinic in mid-December, he already had bile duct cancer, so a liver transplant would’ve been pointless. So, why did the doctor tell Walter the only thing that could save him was a liver transplant? Why did he get his hopes up?
It could’ve been a few different things. Maybe the doctor told Walter a transplant was a possibility for PSC, not addressing the fact that it wouldn’t help a patient with bile duct cancer. Or maybe Walter simply heard what he wanted to hear. The doctor might’ve said something like, “A transplant would be the best ‘treatment’ for PSC…,” and then gone on to explain, in terms over everybody’s heads and to a patient deaf to anything negative, that Walter wasn’t a candidate for a transplant. Or it could just be that Walter pulled one over on me and Momma, simply telling us what he thought would make us feel better. Walter might’ve told Momma something like, “See, Momma, a transplant is all I need to beat this thing,” knowing full well that a transplant was out of the question. Having known Walter like I did, it wouldn’t surprise me at all had he done something like that.
No matter what actually happened with all of that, looking back, I wish all the doctors and such would’ve just told Walter to go fishing and enjoy the rest of his life. I can tell you I’d have jumped at the chance to join him out there on the water, bass fishing and finishing out his days in peace. Instead, we were there in a hospital together, and all I was joining him in was a state of devastation and depression. Even so, he didn’t stay there with me for very long. Walter quickly accepted the hand he was dealt, and he resolved to move on. Just like when he was living in my shadow growing up as a kid, he never once complained, blamed, or bellyached about what he was going through.
Walter was so set in his acceptance of the situation that when our close family friend, Bud Holmes, wanted to send his plane up to get Walter and fly him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for a second opinion, Walter just flat-out refused the offer. Bud was in the room when the autopsy was performed on my daddy, Peter, after he died in Columbia, Mississippi, and I’ll never forget what he told me when he saw Walter sick. He said Walter actually looked older than Daddy did when his body was in that autopsy room. He looked older than a dead man? That told me that in Bud’s mind, Walter looked like a dead man walking.
Well, Walter didn’t act like a dead man, that’s for sure. He just kept trying to keep hope alive for his family, friends, and fans by continuing to assert that he was just waiting on a liver and that everything would be fine once he got on a list and the transplant had been done. But he knew the truth. Momma and I did, too. Momma had talked with the doctors one-on-one, and they didn’t sugarcoat it like Sweetness tended to do. She knew there would be no transplant, and she made sure I was well aware of that fact, too. I wanted to believe it didn’t matter. I was hoping Walter really was Superman and that he’d somehow find a way to overcome this kryptonite at the very last second, when all hope was seemingly lost. I imagined him as the Walter of 10 years earlier and tried to hold on to the dream that he would rise above and conquer his illness like he always conquered everything else in life. But down deep I knew it wasn’t going to be. I knew he was the Walter of today and that right then and there, he was dying. No matter how powerful I liked to imagine him to be, he wasn’t really Superman. Even with all of his otherworldly accomplishments on the football field, he was just flesh and bone like you and me.
The weakened flesh and aching bones of a mere mortal notwithstanding, Walter attacked his sickness with the same ferociousness he used to assault opposing defenses. There was nothing he could do about his physical condition, but his mentality never changed. As a mega-star athlete, he lived by the old “suck it up and play with pain” attitude, as well as his own personal motto of “Never Die Easy.” He took all that to heart as he struggled against a foe that he had no chance of defeating. In truth, he’d only had to apply it before on a football field. It wasn’t life or death when he was carrying that pigskin, but this was a whole new ballgame he found himself in. Others might have just crumbled, but not Walter. He still wasn’t going to die easy, even if he knew he was going to die.
At times like that, you realize that relationships are the only things we take with us when we go, and I wanted desperately to be there with Walter every step of the way. My job as Jackson State golf coach prevented me from seeing him as much as I wanted to. We talked regularly, of course, but as Walter’s condition worsened, that got harder and harder. He just didn’t want to talk much at times, so I’d usually just be looking at a silent phone instead of that face I knew so well. And when he did talk, he’d make it clear that he didn’t want the public to see him sick. One time he said, “If I’m going to have to leave here, I want them to remember me from my playing days.” He didn’t want to be remembered for a sickness. He wanted his fans and the generations that followed to remember him as Sweetness, with those bright white eyes sitting just below his ever-present headband and scanning ahead for an open running lane. To me, that says a lot about who Walter was. He didn’t want his fans to be in despair about his condition; he wanted them to remember how much fun the ride he took them all on had been.
Another thing we talked about, when he actually felt like talking there at the end, was our Christian faith. We talked more and more about that as he approached death, in fact. Walter and I shared the belief that through God, all things are possible. Not that all things we desire will happen, but that all things are possible—and only according to His will. Only by His grace were we able to do the things we did and enjoy the talents He gave us. Walter was so very thankful to God for graciously giving him the life that he had the great privilege of living.
Some writers and others have said Walter wasn’t religious. Jeff Pearlman wrongly, even recklessly, concluded from sources he interviewed that my brother would have “cringed” at all the religious expression at his funeral. Well, shame on Pearlman and his sources. In truth, Walter wouldn’t have had it any other way. It’s easier for writers like Pearlman to get attention if they just tell stories about the “big fish that got away” rather than showing real evidence to back up their sensational claims. You see, with “professional” writers and other members of the media, falsehoods and scandals often rise to the surface like dead fish. Now, I understand that a dead fish is easy to catch, but it sure don’t make for good eatin’. You have to be patient and do some deep-sea fishing to get to the good stuff. That’s where you’ll find the truth about Walter. It’s swimming deep under the surface with everything else worth catching. I promise it’s there. You just have to fish for it.
There are all these surface-level “revelations” floating around out there about the “enigmatic life of Walter Payton,” and we can have ourselves a debate about what’s true and what isn’t, but to say he wasn’t religious is a flat-out unreligious thing to do. Walter often professed his faith during his speeches and gave credit to the Lord for his talent, in public, yes, but even more so in private. Make no mistake; Walter was a believer in Jesus Christ and a follower of our Lord. He wasn’t Tim Tebow, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t religious. Tebow puts it out there for all the world to see, and that’s great. You can’t miss it with him, but that wasn’t Walter Payton. He was a high-profile person with a low-profile personality. He liked his business to be his business, and he’d stay out of yours, too. He revealed who he truly was only to those willing to take time to look. You can argue Tebow’s way is better than Walter’s if you want. I’ll leave that to you. But whether or not Walter was religious and whether or not he’s with the good Lord right now, well, that’s not up to you. And it’s not up to all those sportswriters, either.
There’s another side to the story of Sweetness that has to be told. Guys like Jeff Pearlman can’t tell it. They don’t have memories of growing up with my brother. They didn’t know him before he was a star. They don’t have much more to give you than dead fish. The truth about Walter Payton can only come from those of us who knew him best, those of us who truly loved him, not just for a short time, but for his whole life.
I’ll never forget October 31, 1999, Halloween night. Walter was at his home, where he wanted to spend his final days with his wife, Connie, and other family. None of us knew exactly how long he had, and we wanted to spend as much time with him as we could. I was there for a visit and had just walked into his bedroom. I didn’t know exactly what we were going to say to each other, of course, but it turns out we were about to have a conversation that will stay with me forever. It was one of those special moments that comes once in a lifetime, and it was about to take place right there in that room between us Payton boys. I’ll let you in on that conversation later in the book, but for now, just take in the scene with me.
At first, there were no words spoken. There was only the background noise of a television with the volume turned low. I tiptoed farther into the room, and before I broke the silence, I just looked at him. There was my baby brother, unable to move, just lying there, dying. I shook my head. It couldn’t be. A million images of Walter and me ran through my mind. Our life together flashed before my eyes. I remembered us as children hunting in our neighborhood woods, as teenagers playing together on the field, as young men going out into the world. There was a hard conversation coming later in that room, but all I wanted to do when I saw him there was go back—back to the beginning of an era. Back to when the man you know as Sweetness was just my baby brother. Back to where you’ll find the truth about Walter Payton.