They are all inadequate, all the gestures made to honor Walter Payton and bless us for making them: the Bears for their jersey patch, for the 34-yard line at Soldier Field, the NFL for its moment of silence and the city for its organized memorial, for every private thought and every common ache shared and understood.
All the suggestions on how to make Payton’s name and legacy endure are as wonderful as they are insufficient. There is no statue, no structure, no roadway, no award that might carry Payton’s name that will not need explanation one day. New generations will get their own heroes.
Payton was ours, as Rev. Jesse Jackson put it, “the distant star that became a brilliant sun,” who lit our youth and our leisure and our dreams, who brought all our separate shadows together. That is what the brightest lights always do.
Nothing we could do will ever match the measure of the man, but we needed to do something, we had to do something. We gathered at Soldier Field on a November Saturday to wipe a tear and see the ghost of memory high-stepping out of a tackle.
We spoke to each other on public transportation, in malls, on street corners and across lawns. For a long and solemn week, the world became less suspicious. What Payton did in death for Chicago was what he did in life: He gave us a familiar connection.
None of it was too much and none of it was a bother, as harmless as it was essential. We can forgive the mayor’s brother for messing up Payton’s number and we can believe the fiction that narrows a complicated life into tidy, measurable moments.
Of course we felt sad, but we felt something more. We felt again the moment when it mattered most to us, that moment when Payton would get another yard, that anticipation of when he would get the ball again. We had to feel that one more time. It was 1999, but it was 1978 or 1983 or junior high school or a first date or a father’s hug.
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Payton was ours as Red Grange was someone else’s, as Michael Jordan was ours and Sammy Sosa is ours. It is that time we do not want to let go, as well as the actual man, that frame of existence shared with Payton, he the hero, we the witnesses to his heroics. It is for each other that we mourn, for lost youth and for how important the exploits of a special athlete seemed.
The echo of a life so large and so inclusive cannot be allowed to fade too fast. For as it fades so does our youth and our investment in time and in affection, the weight we gave to great deeds on autumn Sundays, when we could be sure that greatness was an actual and measurable thing.
We had to hold whatever part of Payton touched us, making each tribute to Payton a tribute for ourselves in the end.
This is the heart of celebrity, the explanation for heroes and why their passing is always full of greater sorrow and larger meaning, when every life is as precious as any other.
Payton was our surrogate, as was Wilt Chamberlain and Joe DiMaggio and Payne Stewart, as are all the great champions to come, and some of them will come through Chicago.
It is not that they are our better angels but we do assign them that responsibility. When it is accepted and justified, as it was with Payton, he carries the load for all those lesser lights who miss the point.
Give Walter Payton a day in Chicago or in Cook County? Payton did not need proclamations to make it so. Sunday was always Payton’s day, as was the occasional Monday night.
Payton would have loved so much genuine and unbounded affection from so many strangers Saturday at Soldier Field, but he got that in life. All heroes do, yet not all heroes handle warmth well.
The easy and misdirected promise from the present Bears that they will dedicate this season and the first Green Bay game to Payton is not only meaningless but rude, no matter how things turn out.
Emulating Payton’s work ethic, his selflessness, his modesty, his sacrifice–these are all worth doing. To be Paytonesque is not a costume change, it is an attitude adjustment.
The cheapest and most dishonoring thing that could happen would be for the Bears to beat Green Bay and then boast that they had won one for Walter.