THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 3, 1995 TAG: 9511030649
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
Fifty years is a long time to do anything. It's especially long if what you're doing involves dashing up and down a 100-yard field in the wind, the rain, the mud, the heat, even the occasional blizzard, with people shouting at you and calling you names.
So it was about time they honored Willie Payton at halftime of a high school football game Thursday night. Payton, of Virginia Beach, has been officiating schoolboy and college football since he came home from the South Pacific at the end of World War II.
At age 74, still lean as a fence post and strong as a leather strap, Willie Payton is the uncontested dean of football officials in Southeast Virginia.
His colleagues sprang a surprise on him at halftime Thursday of a game between Greenbrier Christian and Nansemond-Suffolk Academy. It had to be a surprise because Payton, a quiet and unassuming guy, probably wouldn't have had anything to do with it if he'd known in advance.
With dozens of his fellow officials from across the region looking on, they presented him with a game ball and honored him as ``more than just a ref.''
``You are an institution,'' said official Ken Berger. ``You are a great teacher and a positive role model to more people than you can imagine.''
Soon after, the teams came back on the field and Willie Payton went back to work.
The game, as he would tell you, is about the players, not the officials.
``Willie is just a remarkable individual,'' said Dick Bowie, commissioner of the Southeast Football Officials Association. ``He's probably in better shape than a lot of people 20 to 30 years younger. He really gets up and down the field.
``He's very low-key, and that's unusual in officiating, to a degree. He doesn't have a great big ego and all that. Which is probably why he managed to continue for such a long time.''
Good conditioning and an even disposition have kept him in the game all these years, but it was something quite painful that got him started. The story goes all the way back to the war years, when Payton and his older brother, James Cuthell ``Cutie'' Payton, played fullback and halfback for Hampton Institute, now Hampton University.
``All these years, it still troubles me to look at that,'' Payton said the other day, his ice-gray eyes scanning a page in a scrapbook in the den of his brick ranch house in Virginia Beach, a big, solid house built with his own hands.
The book was open to a yellowed 1942 clipping from the Chicago Defender, one of the premier national black newspapers of the day. Its bold, front-page headline told how Willie Payton's older brother had been killed in a car accident during a holiday vacation from campus.
``I graduated,'' Willie Payton said, ``went on into the Army, served all over the South Pacific, Guadalcanal, the Philippines.
``Then when I got back, they called me, asked me to come over and help those boys out.'' Hampton Institute wanted him to be a football official.
``And I said, ah, gee, I was just back from the service, had all these other things pressing. And then the man said, `You know, if Cuthell was here, he'd be out there.' ''
That was all it took. ``Well,'' Payton said, ``once you start working with youngsters it just gets into you. You want to see them excel.''
He started at $5 a game, with no expenses paid. Only now is he vaguely considering retirement after a career that has taken him to high school and college games across the country, from small fields like Thursday night's in Chesapeake to the Houston Astrodome, Yankee Stadium and Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.
As schools integrated in the 1960s, the officials' corps integrated with them, and with relative ease, Payton said. ``When they brought the schools together, they brought the officials together too, and they just assigned you to the games with no thought about it.''
On a wall, there is a framed picture of Willie Payton talking to a player during a game, his right hand on the yellow flag in his back pocket, looking for all the world like he's about to nail the kid with a penalty.
``Nah,'' Payton laughed, ``I had just asked him his SAT score. And I was telling him, `Now don't you lie to me!' I do that sometimes, ask them how they're doing, tell them they've got to get that education.''
It's ingrained in the family. Payton's mother attended Hampton Institute. Of her 10 children, seven finished college, one became a welder and another stayed with the service. Willie Payton's son, Ronald, teaches at Azalea Garden Middle School; his daughter, Florencia Miller, is a counselor at Granby High School.
Though he retired from the Postal Service in 1983 and quit working college games four years ago, Payton's not sure when he'll retire his whistle and black-and-white jersey. ``Maybe this will be my last year - but they might need me to school some of the younger fellows,'' he said.
``If my legs feel right, if my eyes eyes are all right, well, I might just stay with it a while longer.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by GARY C. KNAPP\ Willie Payton, who began his
career as an official after serving in World War II, was honored by
his fellow refs at halftime of a game Thursday.
by CNB