The Hero No One Knew

His football career done, his auto racing days over after a near-fatal crash and his dream of owning an NFL franchise having fallen through, Payton often found himself suffocated by darkness. Oh, he wouldn't let on as such. He laughed and told jokes and pinched rear ends and tried his best to come across as the life of the party. Inside, however, happiness eluded Payton in the same manner he had once eluded opposing linebackers.

Quirk and Tucker came to expect Payton's mood swings—giddy one second, despondent the next. He kept a tub of painkillers inside a desk drawer and popped them regularly. He ate greasy fast foods and gorged on fettuccine carbonara, his favorite dish. He dumped 10 sugar packs into each cup of coffee and dunked pork rinds into hot sauce. Never an imbiber as a player, Payton now drank his fair share of beer. He behaved erratically and was prone to strange and confounding moments. Holmes, his agent, recalls visiting Payton's office for a meeting. "Walter came in, and he was bouncing off the walls," he says. "He was totally incoherent, all hopped up on these painkillers. I said, 'Walter, what the hell?' He drank a couple of beers, and I couldn't believe it. Who was this person?" Convinced he was suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Payton began taking Ritalin, which had been given to him by a friend whose son had been prescribed the pills.

He turned especially forlorn during the holiday season. Payton felt the pressure of having to be everywhere at once—with Lita in New Jersey, with his kids in Illinois, with his mother in Mississippi. He said he hoped something bad would happen to him just so he would have an excuse to stay home and hide. "No matter what I do," he said, "I can't win." Payton made spur-of-the moment decisions that baffled those around him. Despite being petrified of deep water, he had once teamed with Chuck Norris in a failed attempt to break the Chicago-to-Detroit powerboat record. He hinted at a run for mayor of Chicago. He tested Quirk's and Tucker's loyalty with insults and threats and calls at all hours. "It was like having a husband," says Tucker, "without the intimacy. He was terribly lonely."

On multiple occasions Payton threatened to commit suicide—usually following a fight with Connie or Lita, or after being reminded that, despite his legendary career, he still had to worry about finances. Once, during a particularly down period, he entered the house at 34 Mundhank with a gun drawn, telephoned a friend and, crying, said, "I'm going to end it now."

"Walter would call me all the time saying he was about to kill himself," says Holmes. "He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead."

The first time such a threat was made, Holmes dropped what he was doing and flew from Mississippi to Illinois to console his client. By the time he arrived, Payton's mood had swung positive. Holmes never again took his threats seriously.

Despite the urging of those around him, Payton refused to see a therapist. What would that say about his strength and fortitude? He was supposed to be a hero. Heroes didn't do therapy.

On one particularly dark day in the mid-'90s, Payton wrote a friend a letter saying that Payton needed to get his life in order and was afraid of doing "something" he'd regret. In the note Payton admitted that he regularly contemplated suicide. Thinking about "the people I put into this f---ed-up situation," he wrote, "maybe it would be better if I just disappear." Payton said he imagined picking up his gun, murdering those around him, then turning the weapon on himself. "Every day something like this comes into my head," he wrote. He was distraught over these persistent thoughts about wanting to "hurt so many others" and not thinking "it is wrong." Payton ended the letter by admitting that he needed help but that he had nowhere to turn.

In his late-night calls to Quirk, his voice was often soft and emotionless. She could usually tell what was coming. Doom. Gloom. "You won't see me when you get to the office tomorrow," he'd say. "Enjoy life without me." On one occasion Quirk picked up the phone and heard: "I'm ending it. I'm no longer going to exist. And if you think I'm not taking you with me, you're wrong."

"I usually chose to ignore those threats," Quirk says. "I never fully believed him. But it was definitely a cry for help."