Chicago Bears: Sweetness and Might

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Always he tests himself against youth, most recently in the person of an indefatigable Indiana University football player named Kevin Kelly, 20. "My goal was to make him drop," says Payton, 31, who gauges the hill's angle and rise at about 45° and 50 ft. "Ever jog up 25 flights of stairs? It burns. Your legs, your buttocks, your back, your chest, your stomach--everything wants to leave you." Then, Payton smiles, young Kelly asks him, "Ready to go again?" But more telling than Payton's muscular capability for playing this game is his emotional capacity for enjoying it. "He's a man-child, a grown-up kid," says Safety Gary Fencik, a ten-year observer. "He's always out there throwing and kicking. I've never known anyone who likes to play outdoors so much. It's not even football. I used to worry that he'd get hurt. I used to pray every night. But he's got a frame that just seems invincible." A frame of mind?

The analogy of a child is helpful in discerning Payton, who has the smile and voice of a choirboy. Always Walter, never Walt or Wally. His given middle name is Jerry, though, not Jerome, as if the diminutive has always been right there just below the surface. Even his signature, a high-stepping kick in the open field, is a remnant from the first grade. "After school the teachers would line us up and escort us to the edge of campus. Everyone moved so slow. didn't know why I had to stop." When he finally broke free of authority, Payton kicked loose in a burst of unremitting joy. At seven he received a present of a set of drums, and absently now he turns almost everything before him into percussion instruments, including linebackers. Payton is fond of the phrase, "Tomorrow is not promised to anyone," but repeats it with out conviction. Delivering his annual retirement estimate of "two more years," he betrays no real sense of mortality. Back in the worst days, whenever the Bears were out of the running, all there was left to do was watch Payton run. Well, he is not the whole offense anymore, but he is going to the Super Bowl.

While Ditka attempts to hold on somewhat, the football is now fundamentally the property of that idiosyncratic punk rocker or just rocker or just punk McMahon, who favors red spandex tights and wraparound sunglasses with checker board panes. He puts nobody in mind of Sid Luckman. Trying to unknot the lace on his toy holster with a fork, McMahon stabbed himself in the eye at six, and the little buckaroo has been jabbing conventions all the 20 years since. Emphatically a non-Mormon at Brigham Young University, he set records for scandalizing Provo that will never be broken. Stashed away his junior year as an accommodation to Marc Wilson, McMahon now says of the Los Angeles quarterback, "He's not a bad player. He just doesn't belong with the Raiders. He belongs with Dallas, where everybody's Goody Two-shoes." New or leans has not battened down for such a visitor since Jean Laffite.