Sweetness and the ScoutRelentlessness. Intensity. Hard-headed commitment. The qualities that Chargers scouting director Kevin Kelly looks for in a prospect are the same he saw in his mentor, Walter Payton, with whom he struck up an unlikely friendship on a fateful night in an empty gym as an awestruck teenager
Kevin Kelly was 17 years old when he met Walter Payton. It was 1982, and the Bears running back had just finished his seventh NFL season—at age 27 already the fifth-leading rusher in NFL history. Payton was nearing the peak of his celebrity, elusive and powerful on Sundays, and unstoppable in the mind’s eye of 17-year-old boys on varsity football teams in Illinois. Kelly, who played at Barrington High in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, liked to train late at night during the offseason at a local 24-hour health club because the weight room was usually empty at that time. One Friday, Kelly arrived at midnight, scanned the room—and there was Walter Payton.
“He was the only person in the weight room,” Kelly says 22 years later in his home office in Avon, Ind., outside Indianapolis. “And of course, he was my hero. He was every kid’s hero.”
Kelly wondered why Walter Payton would be working out at midnight. He thought, He must be in here because he wants to be alone. So the kid steered clear of the star and began his routine on the other side of the room, while watching Payton out of the corner of his eye.
“After about 30 minutes I could feel him kind of walking across to me,” Kelly says. “So I gathered my stuff, and he’s like ‘Hey, where you going?’
“Look,” Kelly recalls saying, “I’m probably bothering you or something, so I’ll go do something else.”
Payton: “No, no, man. Look, I came over here to see if I can work out with you.”
Kelly: “Okay…”
Payton: “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Walter Payton.”
Source:
http://mmqb.si.com/2015/03/31/walter-payton-kevin-kelly-san-diego-chargers-scout/