BOOKS
Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton
(Jeff Pearlman; Gotham)
By Steven Campbell
There was perhaps no better endorsement for Jeff Pearlman’s book Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton than the recent condemnation of it by Payton’s long-time coach, Mike Ditka. Such candidness, including his admission that he’d spit on Pearlman, was of course not intended to help book sales, but that’s just what the overreaction accomplished. And that’s a good thing because, in Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton, Pearlman presents an honest if not sympathetic view of the football legend as a man.
As most sports fans know, Walter Payton retired as the NFL's all-time leader in rushing yards. He was a Super Bowl champion in 1986 with the Chicago Bears, selected to the Pro Bowl nine times, and was a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee. Beyond his unparalleled career, Payton was considered an even greater human being—celebrated as a selfless, humble player who routinely put the team’s needs ahead of his own. The man didn’t even believe in touchdown celebrations; after scoring, he simply handed the ball to a teammate or an official. In every facet of his game, he was considered a class act and was exalted as a role model for children after having performed countless acts of charitable work during his life. The NFL even created the “Walter Payton Man of the Year Award” to recognize players like Payton who make off-the-field contributions.
Yet Pearlman reveals that this public persona may have been partially crafted by Payton's agent, Bud Holmes. In Sweetness, Pearlman presents a Payton who is slightly more selfish than we knew. He didn’t necessarily place personal achievement ahead of his team, but individual accomplishments meant a great deal to Payton. Pearlman recounts countless occasions when Payton became upset or angry because he was deprived a chance to break some record. He wept in a locker room closet after the team’s Super Bowl blowout victory because he wasn't given the opportunity to score a touchdown. While surprising due to Payton's public image, such behavior certainly isn’t uncharacteristic for modern superstar athletes.
Of Payton’s personal life, Pearlman tells us that Payton had difficulty adjusting to retirement—as would be expected from any top-level athlete. He experienced depression and severe mood swings and even made suicide threats to his manager and personal assistants on multiple occasions. Ginny Quirk, Payton’s executive assistant, recalled one such call that concluded with Payton saying, “You won't see me when you get to the office tomorrow. Enjoy life without me.” We also learn that much of his depression may have been due to or compounded by his abuse of pain medications as a result of injuries from his aggressive running style. Payton refused to deliberately run out-of-bounds and routinely stiff-armed tacklers. And playing on lousy teams, especially during his first few years in the NFL, took a tremendous toll on his body. Sadly, as an intensely private man who was protective of his image—even to Bud Holmes, the man who helped craft it—Payton could not bring himself to ask for help. “Walter was pounding his body with medication,” explained Payton’s agent Bud Holmes. “I wish I knew how bad it was, but at the time I really didn’t.”
In public, Payton was a loving husband and devoted father. He married his high school sweetheart, Connie, and the couple had two beautiful children. In reality, the couple lived apart during the final decade of his life. Payton was also a notorious womanizer, and he had a long-time mistress who even attended his Hall of Fame induction. Likewise, the man who was once name the Illinois Fatherhood Initiative's Chicago “Father of the Year” was often an absent parent who refused to meet his own illegitimate son.
In all, Sweetness is an engaging, well-written narrative that chronicles every step of Payton’s life from his childhood in segregated Mississippi to his untimely death from bile duct cancer in 1999. To learn the true story of Walter Payton, Pearlman interviewed hundreds of teammates, friends, family members, neighbors and others who knew him, so it’s difficult to imagine that a more thoroughly researched book will ever be written about the NFL great. And despite revealing the sad and difficult parts of Payton’s life—and coach Ditka’s fury over his having done so—Pearlman’s book doesn’t make Payton any less great. It certainly doesn’t diminish his Hall of Fame-caliber career or the extent of his immense volunteer and charity work. It simply reveals that Walter Payton wasn’t perfect. He was human.
BOOKS
The Passion of Tiger Woods
(Orin Starn; Duke University Press)
By Steven Campbell
The fact that an academic has taken a stab at a book about a popular and controversial figure like Tiger Woods may put off some readers. But it shouldn’t, because The Passion of Tiger Woods (Duke University Press) is actually a very engrossing read. Author Orin Starn, a cultural anthropology professor at Duke University, provides an undoubtedly intellectual but highly entertaining look at golf, race, and celebrity scandal.
Starn opens with two-year-old Woods' demonstration of his putting skills on the Mike Douglas Show—he golfed a 48 for nine holes at the age of three—and proceeds to take readers through a brief and interesting overview of the history of race, social class, politics, and golf. For example, he details the little-known Greensboro Six, a small group of African American men who illegally completed a round at a whites-only golf course in North Carolina before being arrested and thrown in jail. The event occurred in 1955, years before the more famous lunch-counter sit-ins and civil rights marches.
Today golf has become even less racially diverse than when Woods was a child in the late 1970s. In fact, Woods is the only African American golfer on the PGA circuit. There isn’t a single African American golfer in the Nationwide (golf’s equivalent of the minor leagues) or any major college program. Starn also draws an interesting parallel between Woods and professional basketball icon Michael Jordan, who both chose to ignore race, politics, and anything else remotely controversial to enhance their marketability and personal fortunes. Likewise, Starn places golf within the context of social class, explaining how the game has evolved from a sport for industrialists and the wealthy to gain popularity as a working- and middle-class pastime. He discusses why some, including conservative national radio host Rush Limbaugh, consider golf the quintessential capitalist, free-market sport. No doubt, argues Starn, this shared perception was what motivated communist leaders, like Mao and Fidel Castro, to have ordered the ploughing under of their respective nations' golf courses.
Of course, Starn ties all his anecdotes and observations to Tigergate, the epic sex scandal that tarnished the world’s first billion-dollar athlete. The book would hardly be noteworthy without at least a cursory examination of the scandal. Yet Starn has a unique perspective on it, calling ours a “society of apology,” where celebrities feel the need to make public apologies for their moral indiscretions. Or even more perplexing: They blame sex addiction for their adulterous behavior and then check into rehab. While Starn doesn’t advance a central thesis about Tigergate, he does use the event as a springboard to introduce and address a wide range of thought-provoking questions about race and sports. Did Woods lose his partial exemption from racial hatred and stereotyping due to his infidelity? How did Woods’ race impact the world’s reaction to the scandal? Did Woods' interracial marriage to blonde, blue-eyed Elin Nordegren play a role? The author even devotes an entire chapter to Tiger’s penis!
Unfortunately, Starn seems to draw some rather sweeping conclusions about society based on comments posted to message boards, online forums, and online articles, along with blogs, political cartoons, Internet search statistics, and even email forwards to support his conclusions about American society. Reliance on such sources may weaken the credibility of his arguments by begging the question, Can racially charged anecdotal remarks from randomly-selected comments to online articles or message boards be used to gauge the views of mainstream society?
Regardless, the value of The Passion of Tiger Woods is simply that it is thought provoking. Starn provides readers with plenty of issues to consider about sports in culture, along with his own unique perspective.
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