Some context: Payton was one of three children born to Peter and Alyne Payton in Columbia, Mississippi. His father was a factory worker who had played semi-professional baseball. Payton was an active member of the Boy Scouts, Little League, and his local church. At John J. Jefferson High School, Payton played drums in the marching band, participated in the track team and sang in the school choir.
Throughout his life, Payton had claimed his date of birth as July 25, 1954, a date which is cited in many of his early biographies. However, while researching his biography of Payton, Sports Illustrated's Jeff Pearlman discovered his actual date of birth to be July 25, 1953. Pearlman found Payton's earliest use of the later date during his pursuit of the Heisman Trophy at Jackson State. Payton married Connie Norwood in 1976. During his rookie year, he resided in a home on the north side of Arlington Heights, Illinois. The couple had two children, Jarrett Payton (born 1980) and Brittney (born December 26, 1985) and resided in South Barrington, Illinois. A 2011 biography by Pearlman describes a tumultuous personal life very different from his positive public image. According to Pearlman's biography, Payton was a consistent adulterer, and a multiple drug user. His drug use began with painkillers provided to him by the Bears to cope with the punishment he absorbed during games, and continued after his football career ended. Payton did not cope well with life after his career, especially with issues of boredom and loneliness. His wife and family contend that the book is filled with factual misstatements, and paints too bleak a picture of his life. However, many reviewers of Pearlman's work have found it to have been "exhaustively" researched and documented by hundreds of interviews. The ghostwriter for Payton's autobiography called the book "an incredible, thoughtful, deep and profound read. It's exceptional work." Payton was inducted as a laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the state's highest honor) by the governor of Illinois in 1987 in the area of sports.
Did he get help for his drug use?
A:
Some context: Michael Bennett (April 8, 1943 - July 2, 1987) was an American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven. Bennett choreographed Promises, Promises, Follies and Company. In 1976, he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Choreography for the musical A Chorus Line.
Bennett was born Michael Bennett DiFiglia in Buffalo, New York, the son of Helen (nee Ternoff), a secretary, and Salvatore Joseph DiFiglia, a factory worker. His father was Roman Catholic and Italian American and his mother was Jewish. He studied dance and choreography in his teens and staged a number of shows in his local high school before dropping out to accept the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story. Bennett's career as a Broadway dancer began in the 1961 Betty Comden-Adolph Green-Jule Styne musical Subways Are for Sleeping, after which he appeared in Meredith Willson's Here's Love and the short-lived Bajour. In the mid-1960s he was a featured dancer on the NBC pop music series Hullabaloo, where he met fellow dancer Donna McKechnie. Bennett made his choreographic debut with A Joyful Noise (1966), which lasted only twelve performances, and in 1967 followed it with another failure, Henry, Sweet Henry (based on the Peter Sellers film The World of Henry Orient). Success finally arrived in 1968, when he choreographed the hit musical Promises, Promises on Broadway. With a contemporary pop score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, a wisecracking book by Neil Simon and Bennett's well-received production numbers, including "Turkey Lurkey Time", the show ran for 1,281 performances. Over the next few years, he earned praise for his work on the straight play Twigs with Sada Thompson and the musical Coco with Katharine Hepburn. These were followed by two Stephen Sondheim productions, Company and Follies co-directed with Hal Prince. In 1973, Bennett was asked by producers Joseph Kipness and Larry Kasha to take over the ailing Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields musical Seesaw. In replacing the director Ed Sherin and choreographer Grover Dale, he asked for absolute control over the production as director and choreographer and received credit as "having written, directed, and choreographed" the show.
Did he always stay in theatre?
A:
Some context: Deepak Chopra (born October 22, 1946) is an American author, public speaker, alternative medicine advocate, and a prominent figure in the New Age movement. Through his books and videos, he has become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. Chopra studied medicine in India before emigrating to the United States in 1970 where he completed residencies in internal medicine and endocrinology. As a licensed physician, he became chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) in 1980.
Chopra taught at the medical schools of Tufts University, Boston University and Harvard University, and became Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) (later known as the Boston Regional Medical Center) in Stoneham, Massachusetts, before establishing a private practice in Boston in endocrinology. While visiting New Delhi in 1981, he met the physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna, head of the Indian Council for Ayurvedic Medicine, whose advice prompted him to begin investigating Ayurvedic practices. Chopra was "drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day". He took up Transcendental Meditation to help him stop; as of 2006 he continued to meditate for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening. Chopra's involvement with TM led to a meeting, in 1985, with the leader of the TM movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who asked him to establish an Ayurvedic health center. He left his position at the NEMH. Chopra said that one of the reasons he left was his disenchantment at having to prescribe too many drugs: "[W]hen all you do is prescribe medication, you start to feel like a legalized drug pusher. That doesn't mean that all prescriptions are useless, but it is true that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit." He became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, one of the founders of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International, and medical director of the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. The center charged between $2,850 and $3,950 a week for Ayurvedic cleansing rituals such as massages, enemas and oil baths; TM lessons cost an additional $1,000. Celebrity patients included Elizabeth Taylor. Chopra also became one of the TM movement's spokespersons. In 1989 the Maharishi awarded him the title "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth" (Dhanvantari is the Hindu physician to the gods). That year Chopra's Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine was published, followed by Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide (1990).
Did he help people in the US as well?
A:
He became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine,