On This Date: Walter Payton Broke the All-Time Touchdown Record, and the Front Page Led With the Strike (Sept. 20, 1987)

On this date in 1987, Walter Payton scored the 107th rushing touchdown of his career, breaking a record Jim Brown had held since 1965. It was a 1-yard run in the first quarter against Tampa Bay. The Bears won 20-3.

Open the Chicago Tribune sports section the next morning and you will not find it. The headline is "Bears get job done." The lead column is about a labor dispute. The record — the most rushing touchdowns any human being had ever scored — is a clause in somebody else's sentence.

The 24-Yard Afternoon

Payton went in from the 1 with 5:46 left in the first quarter. Kevin Butler kicked the extra point. That was the record.

The rest of his day: 14 carries, 24 yards. One point seven a carry. Two catches for two more yards. He added a 9-yard touchdown catch from Mike Tomczak in the fourth, so he scored twice and gained 26 yards from scrimmage doing it.

The back who actually ran the ball that afternoon was Neal Anderson — 23 years old, Chicago's first-round pick in 1986, drafted for the express purpose of replacing Payton. Anderson went for 117 yards on 16 carries and scored on a 27-yard run.

Bernie Lincicome put it plainly in the Tribune, and it is a hard thing to read:

Walter Payton is no longer a full-time player. He leaves the game on third down. On a day that Payton scored two touchdowns, one running, one catching, he seemed more an indulgence than a weapon.

"They're keying on Walter," Mike Ditka explained. Lincicome wasn't buying: "No more so than on Anderson... Maybe the difference is that Anderson has Payton blocking for him."

Bob Verdi, in the next column over, asked the question the whole city was circling: "Will No. 34 be Walter Payton or Walter Mitty?"

Twenty-Two Years, Four Extra Seasons

Jim Brown scored 106 rushing touchdowns in nine seasons and walked away at 29 to make movies. Nobody touched the number for 22 years.

Payton needed 13 seasons and 3,838 carries — more than anyone in the history of the sport had taken. Brown averaged 5.2 yards a carry for his career. Payton averaged 4.4. He didn't break the record by being better than Jim Brown. He broke it by not stopping.

Which is why it is perfect that the record play was a 1-yard dive into a pile, on an afternoon he could not run.

"Forward, Into the Void"

The reason nobody wrote about the record is that the players were about to walk.

The strike deadline was Tuesday, two days off. It is all over that Tribune page. Lincicome opened his column with three words — "Forward, into the void" — and filled it with Bears talking about money instead of football. Otis Wilson: "It don't make no sense. I don't want no strike. I don't want to lose money." Mike Singletary: "There is no chance that the Bears will not strike if the league strikes." Dan Hampton, already sour: "We've already got scab officiating."

Neal Anderson, the 23-year-old who'd just run for 117 yards: "It's a business matter. No one wants a strike, but you have to do what you have to do."

Even Don Pierson's straight game story is soaked in it. Tampa Bay, he wrote, were "Tampa Bay's local chapter in the brotherhood of football workers," who looked "more like accomplices than opponents." The officials, he said, "appeared to earn their union cards by ignoring penalties on both sides... as if to condone expressions of labor solidarity."

The players struck on Sept. 22. Week 3 was cancelled outright. Then the owners did something nobody had tried: they played the games anyway, for three straight weeks, with replacement teams assembled out of insurance offices and construction sites. In Chicago they were called the Spare Bears.

So Walter Payton set the all-time touchdown record, and the next thing that happened in the National Football League was three weeks of football played by strangers.

One footnote from that same afternoon: a rookie quarterback made his NFL debut for Tampa Bay late in the fourth quarter. Vinny Testaverde, the $8 million arm, first overall pick. One completion, one sack. He would still be playing in 2007.

The Last Season

When the real players came back, Payton was 33 and finishing. He carried 146 times for 533 yards, the worst season of his life, and scored three more rushing touchdowns to stop at 110.

He retired holding the NFL record for carries, rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, receptions by a running back, receiving yards by a running back, and total yards from scrimmage — 16,726 on the ground and 21,264 from scrimmage. Every one of those numbers was first, all time.

His last game was Jan. 10, 1988, a divisional playoff loss to Washington at Soldier Field, 21-17. He carried 18 times for 85 yards. Everyone in the building knew what it was.

They All Fall

Marcus Allen retired after 1997 with 123 rushing touchdowns. Emmitt Smith finished with 164. The rushing yards record held until 2002, when Smith took that one too.

Walter Payton died on Nov. 1, 1999. He was 45 years old.

And the run that put his name at the top of the list was one yard — behind a line, into a pile, on an afternoon when he gained 24 yards all day and watched a 23-year-old do what he used to do, while the men he played with argued about whether to come to work on Tuesday. He got the record the same way he got all of it: a yard at a time, taking the hit at the end of every one.

Which record do you think will never fall? Comments below.