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band. Alongside Johnson, who mastered the trumpet, Walter tried out as a drummer/bongo player. Both made the cut. “It was thrilling,” said Johnson. “The band gave us a way to travel and go places. The football team had a rigorous schedule, so the band did, too.” Walter was eleven years old at the start of his sixth-grade year, and up until that point he’d rarely left the Marion County limits. Thanks to band, on September 11, 1964, he traveled via bus to Jackson, where the Jefferson High Green Wave faced the Jim Hill High School Tigers. Years later, Walter remembered little of the on-field action—the score, the stars, the uniform colors. What he could not forget, however, was the feeling of being there; of performing music before a large crowd; of seeing people stomp and clap and cheer. It was true love.
    Though he never fully learned to read music, Walter could hear a song once or twice and immediately play it to perfection. Because Mississippi’s black high schools were spread out across the state, the marching band made its way alongside the football team north and south, east and west. “We went to Biloxi, we went to Picayune,” said Johnson. “We’d go to high-powered schools with great bands, and we’d show ’em how it’s done.”
    By the time Walter entered the seventh grade, Eddie Payton was officially a local star. He was popular, funny, cocky, and good with the girls. Decked out in his band uniform, Walter Payton couldn’t compete. He was merely a kid with a snare drum.
    Then, one day, a man holding a whistle changed his life.

CHAPTER 2
    LEARNING THE GAME
    HIS MEMORY IS FOGGY. UNDERSTANDABLY SO. IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FORTY years since Charles Boston initially laid eyes on the thirteen-year-old boy with the tears streaming down his cheeks. In the decades that followed, kids have come and kids have gone. Many have graduated college, some have dropped out of high school. Most are alive. Too many are deceased. There are parents and grandparents, doctors and lawyers and garbagemen and street sweepers and drug dealers.
    “Hard to keep track,” Boston said. “Time flies.”
    This, however, the former head football coach at John J. Jefferson High School remembers. This, he will never forget.
    “The first time I saw Walter Payton?” Boston said. “Well, it was pretty obvious he was no ordinary kid.”
    The year was 1966. Though it had been twelve long years since the United States Supreme Court had declared racially separate public schools to be unconstitutional, nobody in the state of Mississippi paid the ruling much mind. So Jefferson High School remained what it had always been—underfunded, lacking resources, and, to Columbia’s vast white population, irrelevant.
    Walter Payton was an eighth grader, known in small pockets of the school either for his drumming or, more likely, for his relation to Eddie Payton. The brothers were separated by three grades; by this time Eddie was a certifiable star and the talk of Jefferson High athletics. Unlike his demure sibling, Eddie had it all. He dated the prettiest girls, hung out with the coolest kids, walked with a can’t-touch-this swagger. Though he was known to goof off and crack jokes in class, Eddie was largely given a free pass by teachers—a nod to his status.
    In the summers, Eddie was signed by a couple of local black semipro baseball teams, the Columbia Jets and the Laurel Blue Sox, earning ten dollars a game in return for his line drives into the gaps and smooth glove at shortstop. He played varsity baseball and basketball at Jefferson, and excelled in both. “Truth is, in high school Eddie was faster than Walter and tougher than Walter,” said Charles Virgil, a classmate. “He was only about five foot six, yet he could stand flatfooted directly under the basket, jump up, and dunk the ball.” It was on the gridiron where Eddie Payton truly excelled, emerging as one of the state’s best half backs. Just how good was Eddie? Columbia