Derrick Kosinski: The Walter Payton of the Challenge
Guess who’s back, back again. Or don’t since any discussion of Eminem with invariably lead me into talking ego vs id, and we’re here to talk football. I’ve already made y’all wait two weeks for this, so I won’t make you wait any longer.
Derrick Kosinski: The Walter Payton of the Challenge
Walter “Sweetness” Payton, a Bear’s running back, being compared to Derrick Kosinski, one of my favorite Challengers ever? How could this be? Well, if my supreme bias against a rival team can still recognize talent, you know it’s there. For those of you who don’t know much about Walter Payton, or have just heard his name from the Walter Payton Award, Walter Payton is one of the best (if not the best) running backs in the history of the game, as well as being known as one of the toughest players to ever play the game.
Never Die Easy
Walter Payton carried the aspects of “Never Die Easy” into every play, and every game. He once said, “It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.” On the field, he never deliberately ran out of bounds, chancing the harm to his body for any possibility of an extra yard. He was never the fastest running back, nor the biggest, but you can bet he was the one who was out there trying the hardest.
Derrick is the only other player I have seen come close to Walter Payton’s tenacity. This is seen best in his elimination vs Joss, when Derrick was just a mercenary. I’m not here to talk about whether or not it was the best elimination of all time (Derrick does that enough himself). But, watching Joss slam Derrick into the ground again and again, while Derrick keeps holding on, never giving up, proves just how much heart Derrick has. Even when he has no chance of winning the season itself, he will put absolutely everything into the challenge in front of him.
There’s No I in Team
Now, I already talked a bit about the Packers/Bears rivalry up top, but there is no way I can write a full article about a Bear’s player without getting some digs in.
There is no I in team, but when Walter Payton started with the Bears, there may as well have been. Now, the Bears have always struggled with quarterbacks (I’d say their best QBs were Jim McMahon and Jay Cutler, and that’s well… rough), but when Walter Payton was on the team, that barely mattered. From ’76 to ’82, he was basically the only player on the Bear’s offense, even putting up a record setting 278 yards against the Vikings in 1977 when he was running a fever of 101 degrees. He may not have won the Super Bowl, until he was with Jim McMahon, and the Bear’s historic 46 defense, but he carried the team for long before that.
Now Derrick’s team performances are hard to compare to a football team, but no one can tell me he didn’t pick his Gauntlet 2 team up and carry them on his backs for almost an entire season (quite literally at one point). Like Sweetness, his win didn’t come until a later season when he had a better team around him, but even on a season where he was up against the likes of Landon and Alton, Derrick was the MVP.
