Let me start by saying that Walter Payton was my last childhood athletic hero. There had been Ditka and Butkus and Sayers before him, when I was a little-bitty kid, but I was 16 when Payton was a rookie. The Bears had been, well, dreck pretty much since I was 4 and there were no illusions of serious contention during his first few years either. But his prolific performances, particularly in his breakout 1977 season, let us stop grieving the early departure of Sayers and undoubtedly lifted the city's collective spirit. So I'm not about to pretend that I'm objective or neutral about Payton.

But as someone who grew up to become a sportswriter and understand the job requires a critical and unvarnished look at the men who are almost always somebody's heroes, I'm trying to understand the exact purpose of writing a book, 12 years after Payton's depressing death at 45, that goes to agonizing lengths to tell us essentially that Payton was flawed.

I'm not suggesting I don't believe Jeff Pearlman's reporting for "Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton;" Pearlman's a pro with two best-sellers to his credit. And he had on-the-record conversations with longtime Payton representative Bud Holmes and former personal assistant Ginny Quirk. The point isn't to question Pearlman's accuracy, but to question his purpose in writing the book. What's the literary mission here?

Walter Payton missed one game in 13 years, and that is a big part of his legacy. US Presswire

From what we've seen of the excerpts in Sports Illustrated, Payton's big sins seem to be he allegedly took a lot of painkillers, and he cheated on his wife. The easy rationale is that the NFL's primary citizenship award is named after Payton and you could spend years trying to hammer the NFL as being hypocritical, not that Payton ever asked for the award to be named for him. But what so much reporting, even detailed and accurate reporting, fails miserably at these days is providing context.

One of the reasons Payton is in the discussion for greatest player in NFL history is his durability. If you had told me at 27 years old, by which time I had started covering pro football for The Washington Post and had come to know Payton, that my one-time hero was self-medicating, perhaps illegally, with painkillers, my reaction would probably have been, "Yeah, I can see that."

Payton missed one game in 13 years, in a career that was celebrated because he essentially never ran out of bounds and believed his longevity was due to dishing out punishment as much as taking it. Either way, Payton had to be in a ton of pain for a great many years. One of the things we've come to know, as research tells us more about head injuries football players suffer, is that injuries were often kept from the players themselves and their ways of simply getting through the day and managing the pain was kept from pretty much all of us.

If Pearlman, when we have more than excerpts, deals with Payton's use of painkillers in the greater context of pro football in the 1970s and 1980s, then perhaps I'll drop the objection. Surely he won't suggest that Tylenol and Vicodin, nitrous oxide and Ritalin, which he says were Payton's favorites, weren't even eyebrow-raising for that period of time.

It wasn't rare, wasn't uncommon, might have even been pretty standard. Regrettable? Sure. But at that time and in the culture Payton operated in, it damn sure wasn't scandalous. I know too many players older than Payton and too many of his peers that confided over the years I covered the NFL that they had to take something for the pain, even as they looked away from the eyes of their wives, who had to help them out of bed every Monday and Tuesday at least.