Word: payton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Meet Dawson, a Payton Award contender who is reticent in discussing anything but his team and the contribution he can make...
...football team or another wins most of its games every year, but this season more than last, more than many winters past, the actual football playing has seemed an adjunct to the celebration. Though they have their appealing characters, including the game's regal running back, Walter Payton, the Bears are far from the most comely players in the National Football League. In fact, beginning with a quarterback who cuts his own hair, young Jim McMahon, they could be the least glamorous people ever to dine at a Super Bowl, which may start to explain their charm...
...charged Ditka with restoring a mood. When he was a player, Ditka's style had been to pin teammates on the locker-room wall if they neglected to meet his standards. As a coach, he is hard on the furniture. "When the players walked in the first day," recalls Payton, "Mike was standing there with his arms folded. He nodded to [Assistant] Ted Plumb, who started calling roll. I thought, 'We're in the Army now.' "Ditka, 46, is from Aliquippa, Pa., and his people are from the Ukraine, Nagurski stock. A Canadian who has lived most of his rich...
...Even Payton, the teddy bear whose cloying nickname is "Sweetness," counts himself among the brutes. When Payton passed Jim Brown last season to become the leading rusher in league history (14,860 yds. to date), Brown gave him a blessing that the proud Cleveland runner would have withheld from Pittsburgh's Franco Harris. "Payton is a gladiator," he said. "Walter follows the code." Brown was a better runner; so was Sayers. But for running, blocking, throwing passes and catching them, Payton is all-around the most productive football player of the two-platoon era. "For most of his career, teams...
...Payton has endured these eleven seasons, physically and spiritually, still so near to the top of his game, is more than a wonder. He logged a record nine straight 100-yd. running games this season and led the team in receptions. After Chicago thrashed the Los Angeles Rams, 24-0, to take the National Conference championship, one Bear after another stopped by Payton's locker just to touch him. "Eleven years of climbing that mountain," he sighed, speaking not altogether figuratively. As the boy once ran the hot sandbanks by the Pearl River close to his home in Columbia, Miss...