Sports Illustrated will publish an excerpt this week from a new book about Walter Payton, and it does not paint a pretty picture of the NFL Hall of Famer.
“Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,” authored by Jeff Pearlman, relates stories of infidelity and heavy drug use by the former Bears great.
The book says Payton lived on painkillers throughout his playing days, often lathering his body with “dimethyl sulfoxide, a topical analgesic commonly used to treat horses.”
Pearlman says Payton’s drug use escalated after his retirement in 1987. He writes that Payton “habitually ingested a cocktail of Tylenol and Vicodin.” He also tells a story about how Payton visited several dentist offices in 1988 complaining about a toothache. Payton reportedly received several prescriptions for morphine. When a pharmacist noticed the strange activity, he contacted the police, who issued Payton a warning.
The book, which is scheduled for release Oct. 4, also describes a philandering Payton. In one anecdote, a Payton staffer, who had worked for Payton for almost a year, said, “I didn’t even know he was married until probably a year later. I just thought Connie was the mother of his kids.”
Payton died in 1999 at age 45 from a rare liver disease.
Other details from the book:
• Payton was a nervous wreck on the day of his Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in 1993, because his longtime mistress had insisted on attending, and was staying at the same hotel as his wife Connie and children. The book says the two women talked after the ceremony, and Connie said, “You can have him. He doesn’t want me or the children.”
• Pearlman quotes Payton’s agent, Bud Holmes, saying, “I’d see him walk out of the locker room with jars of painkillers, and he’d eat them like they were a snack.”
• During training camp, according to the book, Payton kept tanks of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, in an RV. The book says he shared balloons of the gas with other Bears players, and that after retirement he kept large tanks of it in his garage.
• In retirement, Payton also ate greasy fast foods — he had a card which gave him free lifetime supply of Wendy’s hamburgers — and “gorged on fettuccine carbonara, his favorite dish,” Pearlman writes. Payton dumped 10 sugar packs into each cup of coffee, ate pork rinds with hot sauce and “now drank his fair share of beer.”
• Before Payton’s death from cancer and liver problems in 1999, the book tells several anecdotes of Payton behaving erratically because of his use of pain-killers. That included threats of committing suicide, according to Holmes and others.
In a letter to a friend in the mid-90s, Payton “said he imagined picking up his gun, murdering those around him, then turning the weapon on himself,” Pearlman says. In the letter, Payton writes, “Every day something like this comes into my head,” he wrote. Payton ends the letter by saying that he needed help but had nowhere to turn.
• As Payton was dying, there were two regular visitors: former Bear players Matt Suhey and Mike Singletary. In 1985, Singletary confronted Payton about his infidelities and their relationship had been distant. But in the end, Singletary, a religious man, would talk “at length with Payton about life and death, love and salvation and football,” Pearlman writes.
