Her-schel Wal-ker
It all comes down to football among Southern men. At least since Grant humiliated Lee at Appomattox. Football is war by other means, and the blood ties and brown liquor that flow on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays in the Fall of the year throughout the Old Confederacy can make for lifelong relationships and a social lubricant with a new stranger. "Thomasville? You from Thomasville? William Andrews sure whipped our white suburban asses when we went down from Lakeside to play you in '75." And so from there backs are slapped and commiseration made. The deal gets done, the traffic citation becomes a warning, a social order remains intact. Don't call this a racial trope, black and white find common ground together on this subject. This is mostly the realm of our Scotch-Irish testosterone heritage, which plays out among all stripes this far down the generations.
I attended the University of Georgia as the 1980s were aborning, and happened to be enrolled in 1980, when Herschel Walker came, anointed and glowing in a mystical light, to save the day for Vince Dooley and the legions of the red and black. I watched him play his freshman year, in person, and I can say that it was the most miraculous play I've ever seen on a football field. The only things I would compare it to are possibly Gayle Sayers' rookie NFL season and maybe even Bo Jackson in the SEC just a few years later. But Walker, from tiny, dirt-farm Wrightsville in Johnson County, could run over, around or through anyone who tried to tackle him that year. The rest of the team was average by and large, but it didn't matter when all Buck Belue had to do was turn around and hand or toss it to Herschel. I can remember several games at Sanford Stadium that fall, swaying in the sun, the ice long melted in my Wild Turkey and Coke (I had begun to read Hunter Thompson by then), as 30,000 Bulldog fans shouted "Her-schel!" across the field to 30,000 more who shouted back "Walker!" Nirvana achieved Bodhisattva at the New Orleans Superdome that New Year's Day, when Herschel, who separated his shoulder on the opening drive, gutted it out and our defense stood and we whipped the Fighting Irish and won the mythical National Title. I was there that day screaming like one of Beowulf's own wingmen, waving a bucket-sized cup of Dixie Beer and paying homage to Her-schel. In short order he became National Champion, Heisman Winner, Multi-Million Dollar Player.
So it was that after all these years I ended up hanging out with him for a while the other day. He's on a book tour these days, with a fractured memoir about his lifelong suffering with dissociative personality disorder and I was able to talk a little football and reminisce. He looks like he could strap up and run over Bill Bates again today. He's always been an enigma to a world that has certain expectations of running backs or jocks in general. He's been reading and writing poetry since high school, he was his class valedictorian, he came back to school after turning pro to finish his degree. If you look him up you will find that if you roll his USFL numbers into his NFL numbers they stack up with anyone in history.
Usually around celebrities I am very nonchalant, but here was the Apollo of my youth himself. We talked a little about the 'Dogs. He's bullish on this year's team, thinks Thomas Brown will stick with the Falcons. His main point about writing about his personality disorder seems to be to convince anyone to get help who thinks they need it. I never ask for autographs. This time, though, I printed off the image above and had him sign it to me. "God is good," according to Herschel's inscription to me. There was a brief time on the gridirons across the South when Herschel was a God. He was a man among boys, as they say. It was great to see him the other day and shake his hand and see that he seems to have made it through better than most.
