Jeff Pearlman on Walter Payton

Well, I'm not so sure that...

Cheating on your wife and being addicted to painkillers = having a life-long cocaine addiction, sleeping with scores and scores of prostitutes, getting charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 16-year-old girl years after you supposedly got your problems under control.

Where are all the good acts L.T. engaged in that we know Payton did on a regular basis?

 

It's what I said. People disagree that a definitive biography, as we understand it, should be written at all about someone.

 

Bingo. I feel the same way. Anyone who says this isn't an admirable work of sports journalism is reaching.

I think Pearlman did a great job.

 

Certainly they should. But only for a select few. Only for icons. Payton hurdles the bar easily.

 

Perhaps we should wait until reading the actual book before leaping to these conclusions?

Jeez, didn't take long for this thread to evolve from one extreme to the other--began with unfair accusations of a supposed Kitty Kelleyesque smear book, rapidly jumped to over the top slobberings about this supposedly"definitive" piece of work. And both sides share one thing in common--neither's actually read the book, instead only a tiny excerpt cherry picked by SI.

 

A couple points:

1. I think you should judge a book by what's in, not the excerpts. I read Pearlman's book on the Cowboys expecting it to be basically a sex and drugs expose based upon what I had heard and found it to be actually pretty balanced. While the lurid parts were in there it was not necessarily the nexus the book as I remember it.

2. And the only reason any of us will read the Payton book is because he was a hell of a halfback. Probably a great guy but if he had blown out his knee early in his career no biography would have been written.

I think you can argue reasonably argue that you could have kept his sexual activities out of the book because it was not really central to his role as a football player. But I don't know how you keep the the pain killers out. That happens when you get tackled in the NFL over 4,000 times. The pain became part of his life because it was the price he paid to be a hell of a halfback.

 

Umm, not quite. They weren't polar opposites and they had some similarities. How was LT upfront, because he wrote a book, when he needed money, and confessed to wrongdoings years after the fact? Do you ever recall him saying after a game 'we went out last night, drank a bit, did some lines and got in at 7 am so the start of the game we might have been a little rusty.' when he saw he could make some money from being upfront in an autobiography he wrote another. and even with that i don't know if he was so upfront about everything.

 

The excerpt is excellent. Completely sourced, except for changing the name of Payton's girlfriend. Outstanding writing, very balanced.

He does not take shots at Walter Payton. The basic goodness of the man clearly shows through, but it does not hide the fact he had weaknesses and did not always do what most would perceive to be the "right" thing.

 

David Haugh with a legitimate criticism of the book, that Pearlman should have addressed the possibility of CTE:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/ct-spt-0930-haugh-payton-book-bears-chicago--20110930,0,5781444.column

Nice to see a rational column after a couple days of reading every ex- and current Bear, from Mike Ditka to Brian Urlacher, weighing in the last couple days. The last book Brian Urlacher read was probably "My Pet Goat."

 

Yeah Ditka needs a giant cup of STFU ....

 

Haugh saying what I was trying to get at earlier 1,000 times more eloquently than I ever could:

We dig. I've asked Brian Urlacher about his marriage and Milton Bradley's mother if her son took antidepressants. Not necessarily proud of either moment, but those personal intrusions come from believing a player's life away from the field can affect his play on it. Still, I would struggle to justify publishing scandalous anecdotes and allegations about a retired player who wasn't a criminal or public official and isn't alive to defend himself.

 

http://network.yardbarker.com/nfl/article_external/mike_ditka_reacts_to_soon_to_be_released_book_about_walter_payton/7117003

"I'd spit on (Pearlman)," the coach said in an exclusive interview with NBC Chicago. "I have no respect for him."

http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/grizzly-detail/Coach-Mike-Ditka-Would-Spit-on-Payton-Author-130817828.html#ixzz1ZSPSkkyK