It's hard to believe that 10 years ago last Sunday we lost Walter Payton.
For all of his accomplishments on the football field and in life, few people remember that he was also a gigantic racing fan. Shortly after his retirement from the NFL in 1988, he started hanging around the track at celebrity events and in 1992 made his professional racing debut in Trans-Am. By '95 he'd bought into Dale Coyne Racing as a co-owner in the CART Indy Car World Series, which eventually became Champ Car.
He loved to stand on the grid at the Indianapolis 500, tirelessly signing autographs and completely understanding what it meant to the racing world to have the then-all-time rushing leader walking the pits and rubbing elbows with the likes of A.J. Foyt and Al Unser Jr.
I started covering CART in the mid-1990s after the novelty of having Payton in the paddock had worn off. It was always amazing to me how you could find him hanging out in the Payton-Coyne pits or garage stall unbothered. The fact that the team wasn't very good had a little something to do with that. Most fans and media types were up at the other end of the paddock surrounding Team Penske or Ganassi Racing.
Once in 1997, I caught him at the Gateway International Raceway outside St. Louis. He was just sitting there watching the cars hammer by during the morning warm-up session. I nervously asked him if he could do a quick TV interview for "RPM2Night." He jumped up and said it'd be no problem.
What was supposed to be a couple of quick questions about his involvement in the sport turned into a lengthy conversation about racing in general, a talk that continued long after the camera had been turned off.
He told me that he wished he had gotten into racing when he was younger, but that he knew the Chicago Bears would've never let him do it. Payton talked about a flipping, fiery Trans-Am crash he had at Road America in which he suffered some minor burns that "weren't as big of a deal as everyone made it out to be." But it was clear that his lifelong feeling of invincibility had been challenged.
Then the conversation turned to stock car racing. "Hey, do you cover a lot of NASCAR races?"
I told him that I did, still consciously trying to keep my cool while my 20-something-year-old brain screamed, Dude! This is freaking Sweetness! "I always wanted to race NASCAR. Always," he said. "Just once I wish they'd let me run a few laps at Daytona. Wouldn't that be cool?"
I told him about the recently-founded Richard Petty Driving Experience school that was running out of the Charlotte Motor Speedway and his eyebrows went up. He wanted to know if I thought they'd open a franchise in Daytona.
Then he started to explain to me how he'd grown up a closet stock car fan as a kid in Mississippi, then gravitated toward NASCAR in the early 1980s, but shied away from getting involved in it because he didn't know if the sport was ready for an African-American to be "in a high profile position." Then he wondered aloud about looking into the possibility of purchasing a stake in a NASCAR team, repeatedly saying that he should call his fellow Hall of Famer Joe Gibbs, who had become a Cup Series owner in '92 and won the Daytona 500 in just his second try.
"You think they'd accept me as a team owner over there?"
"Yes," I told him, adding assurances that attitudes in the garage had come a long way since he was a kid. "Besides, I'm pretty sure that people accept
Walter Payton everywhere you go."
"Nope," he said, flashing the smile that sold a few zillion No. 34 jerseys. "Not at Lambeau Field."
That was it. My knee-knocking, I-can't-believe-this-is-happening conversation with Walter Payton -- and it was about racing, NASCAR racing. Two years later he was gone, stricken by kidney disease. Just this summer, Dale Coyne Racing finally won its first Indy Car race, a victory at Watkins Glen that came in Coyne's 558th try. I wondered if Coyne would mention Payton in Victory Lane. Of course he did.
During Sunday's Talladega race, the 10th anniversary of Payton's death, I couldn't help but think of him again, wondering if by now he would have been over here with us in NASCAR. When fellow footballers Gibbs and Reggie White joined forces to start their grassroots-level racing program to discover minority talent, the program that brought us Aric Almirola, I wondered if he would have been a part of it had he still been with us.
I'm betting yes.
Ryan McGee
