Despite main within the polls, Herschel Walker faces the run of his life
I’ve scouted out again entries Walker may sneak in the best way he has in past appearances. So far, his marketing campaign workers had ignored my a number of requests for an interview. He’d talked solely to conservative shops like Fox News and Breitbart. Not discovering one other manner in, I’m on a bench by the doorway.
Walker, the previous football famous person endorsed by Donald Trump, has a seemingly insurmountable lead over fellow GOP contenders and is anticipated to win his celebration’s nomination within the May 24 major. He’ll face stiffer competitors, although, within the basic election come November towards the incumbent, Democrat Raphael Warnock
I’m right here, partially, as a result of I wish to see for myself if Walker’s marketing campaign in Georgia displays the nation’s new norm in post-Trumpian politics. Can sufficient superstar sparkle and Trump rhetoric, coupled with some distortion of information and sometimes a basic indifference to the actual wants of constituents, actually be the fact in GOP politics?
So right here I’m, after which there he’s. Walker rides shotgun within the black GMC Yukon that sidles as much as the cineplex. He climbs out, slides a blue sport coat over his black T-shirt and — flanked by his spouse, Julie, and an aide — makes his manner slowly up the steps. Two weeks shy of his sixtieth birthday, he shuffles like somebody tackled too many instances. I observe. Soon as he’s within the foyer, folks acknowledge Georgia’s most acquainted face and swoop in for selfies. Beloved as their football hero, he’s additionally been a observe star, Olympic bobsledder, Fort Worth Ballet visitor dancer, enterprise proprietor, combined martial arts fighter, taekwondo black belt and Food Network cooking present contestant.
After his half-hour behind closed doorways, Walker works the group again within the foyer — posing for extra selfies, leaning in to hear, sustaining regular eye contact — till by probability he’s standing subsequent to the place I’m seated on the bar. I introduce myself. He shakes my hand with a surprisingly heat and delicate grip and says, Yes, he’ll sit for an interview with me whereas I’m on the town. His aide provides me telephone numbers of contacts in Wrightsville, Walker’s hometown.
The older man sitting subsequent to me, a retired doctor and a greeter for the occasion, had earlier barked at me after studying I used to be a reporter, “This is a private event. Get out of here.” (I reminded him the bar was a public place.) Now he tells Walker, “I don’t need a photo with you. I’ll wait until you’re a senator.”
To perceive this race, you must know the area Walker occupies within the hearts of potential voters. “This guy’s a god in Georgia,” Shelley Wynter, a radio host on Atlanta’s conservative speak station WSB, advised me. “I don’t think people who don’t live in Georgia understand that.”
Walker was born in Wrightsville, Ga., a crossroads connecting a number of rural counties, the place Confederate and Trump flags nonetheless wave. It’s a neighborhood of three,600 named after an enslaver; a distant place the place as soon as clothes factories and kaolin mines offered jobs, however now a quarter of the storefronts amongst its four-block enterprise node are shuttered. It’s additionally a city the place the 110 college students in Walker’s 1980 senior class at Johnson County High School have been evenly cut up between Black and White, however racial tensions thrust Walker within the center.
Head south for 5 miles till you attain a lengthy drive on the left that rises to a single-story clapboard home amid giant pines. This is the place Willis and Christine Walker, who met choosing cotton, raised their seven kids, Willis pulling double shifts within the kaolin plant and Christine working her manner as much as supervisor on the garment manufacturing unit. They christened their fifth youngster Herschel Junior however known as him “Bo” at dwelling. (He would later construct his dad and mom the bigger brick Colonial you see immediately on the property that has expanded to 25 acres, together with the constructing the place Walker shops 45 vintage automobiles and a Harley-Davidson.)
The boys have been constructed like rocks, like their father. The two older ones, Willis Jr. and Renneth, could have been higher pure athletes than Herschel, however they lacked his drive. He did 5,000 sit-ups and 5,000 push-ups each night, he says, throughout industrial breaks of his favourite tv reveals. He ran laps on a path his father cleared for him and, later, the 5 miles to city — and again. At observe observe, he dragged a tractor tire his coach loaded with 10-pound photographs. “I never had a kid with his drive,” says that coach, Tom Jordan. “He was the most focused kid I ever dealt with in 51 years of coaching track and football.”
Walker was state champ within the shot put and 100-yard sprint. He additionally lettered 4 years enjoying basketball. But it was at what’s now Herschel Walker Field the place the townspeople gathered Friday nights, cramming the concrete bleachers and ringing the football discipline, to marvel on the 6-foot-2, 210-pound man-child performing herculean feats. In highschool, he ran for six,137 yards and scored 86 touchdowns — greater than half of every his senior 12 months — set a college file for tackles as a linebacker and led the Johnson County Trojans to the state championship. The college promptly retired his jersey quantity, which now hangs within the discipline home, and later the road outdoors was named after him.
Heralded because the nation’s finest highschool operating again by Parade journal, Walker grew to become essentially the most fascinating faculty prospect within the nation. He finally selected the University of Georgia in Athens, 100 miles up State Route 15, the place he burnished his legend. There he broke the NCAA freshman speeding file and powered the undefeated Bulldogs to the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 1981. On his second carry, Walker dislocated his shoulder, however a physician on the sidelines popped it into place. Despite the teeth-grinding ache, he carried the ball one other 30 instances, ran for 150 yards, scored two touchdowns and, as the sport’s Outstanding Player, secured victory and the nationwide championship for Georgia. “That was a miraculous performance,” says Loran Smith, a University of Georgia sports activities historian. “Nobody ever played hurt better than Herschel did in that game.”
With his world-class pace and wonderful energy, Walker outran defenders or ran over them. In his second season he broke the NCAA speeding file for sophomores and introduced his crew to inside 42 seconds of one other nationwide title. In his junior 12 months, his third season as an all-American, he received the Heisman Trophy. “He was no longer just an all-American or a superstar — he was a legend,” the narrator gushes in a 2014 ESPN documentary about Walker.
Walker could be enshrined within the College Football Hall of Fame and known as by some the most effective collegiate football participant ever. After solely three seasons, his 5,259 yards speeding ranked him third all-time.
In an period when it was unthinkable for a faculty participant to go away early, Walker signed a $4.2 million contract with the upstart United States Football League, making him the highest-paid skilled athlete of the day. It could be three years earlier than he started his 13-year NFL profession, not till he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and the USFL folded.
In Georgia, Walker’s reputation appears to have solely grown over time. At a dwelling recreation reuniting the 1980 Bulldogs crew this past fall, the coed part took up the mantra, “Herschel! Herschel!” — identical to previous instances.
A March Fox News ballot of Republican major voters in Georgia discovered Herschel Walker far forward of different candidates, with 66 p.c assist, in contrast with single-digit assist for different candidates.
The devotion of his followers runs deep. Take Sue Hall, who graduated in Walker’s class, nonetheless lives in Wrightsville and seems in one in all his marketing campaign commercials. When requested about Walker’s violent past, together with allegations that he threatened to kill his ex-wife, she advised me, “He’s probably like every one of us; he’s had his issues and had to grow. All of us have to adjust.”
When I stated, “Yes, but most of us haven’t threatened to kill someone,” she responded, “I believe in him. He’s a moral person. Even if he were not a former classmate, I’d vote for him because of his values.”
The evening after the Republican Jewish Coalition occasion, Walker is in Dahlonega, an hour drive north of Atlanta and county seat of Lumpkin County — a very White and poor county — for a fundraiser. A crowd of 150 has paid $20 apiece and crammed the parks and rec gymnasium. In Walker’s 35-minute speech he works the group’s feelings, telling tales about his mom, how he loves the flag and that communists imprison Christians — “Do you want a government like that?” He demonizes Warnock — “He’s a reverend but he believes in abortion!” — and President Biden, and he mocks the news media “that don’t want to tell the truth.” He additionally makes false statements, comparable to “Do you know 70 percent of the drugs coming into America go through Atlanta?” When Walker proclaims, “America does come first!” a man seated behind me shouts, “Alleluia!”
The efficiency echoes a Trump rally, which isn’t shocking because it was Donald Trump who inspired Walker to get into politics within the first place. The two have identified one another since 1984, after Trump purchased the USFL crew that lured Walker away from Georgia. Thinking of quitting football, Walker turned to the brand new proprietor for recommendation, and Trump, not eager to lose his crew’s star and the league’s marquee participant, talked him into staying. “Mr. Trump became a mentor to me,” Walker writes in his 2008 memoir, “Breaking Free,” “and I modeled myself and my business practices after him.”
Walker: ‘I want to be a leader like [Trump] when I get to that Senate seat to show everyone I love America.’
They maintained a friendship, touring collectively now and again with their households. Walker backed Trump early in his first presidential marketing campaign and stated in a video performed on the 2020 Republican National Convention, “Most of you know me as a football player, but I’m also … a very good judge of character,” earlier than extolling Trump’s ethical fiber.
So when Trump tweeted in March 2021, “Run Herschel, run!” Walker answered the decision. At a rally in Perry, Ga., on a Saturday afternoon in September, many within the viewers wore purple MAGA-knockoff caps with the slogan “Run Herschel Run” and greeted their favourite son with the Bulldog chant “woof, woof, woof!” When Trump took the stage, he known as Walker as much as “say a few words,” seemingly unaware Walker had already given a nine-minute speech. Walker awkwardly obliged, expressing his fealty to Trump and ending by telling the group, “I want to be a leader like him when I get to that Senate seat to show everyone I love America.”
Georgia has turn into a private battleground for Trump, nonetheless bitter about shedding the state in 2020. He has not solely backed Walker to regain the Senate seat Republicans misplaced to Warnock in a runoff election in January 2021, however he has backed David Perdue — who misplaced his Senate seat to Democrat Jon Ossoff within the state’s different runoff election — to oust Gov. Brian Kemp. After the 2020 presidential election, Kemp rebuffed the president’s admonition to search out 11,780 votes to reverse Georgia’s electoral outcomes (a grand jury in Atlanta is investigating Trump’s motion). Trump was again for one more rally in March, this one in Commerce, to assist seven candidates, together with Perdue and Walker. Trump renewed his assault on Kemp however fretted, “If Kemp runs, I think Herschel Walker is gonna be … very seriously and negatively impacted. … A vote for Brian Kemp, RINO, in the primary is a vote for a Democrat senator who shouldn’t be in the Senate.”
So is Trump exploiting Walker to slake his private vendetta? “[Walker] has positioned himself into being a useful fool for those who don’t have the best interests of Black people or this democracy at heart,” says Harry Edwards, a sports activities sociologist, civil rights activist and professor emeritus on the University of California at Berkeley.
It’s not clear how a lot Trump’s assist will serve Walker, although. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution ballot revealed in late January discovered 42 p.c of Georgia Republicans stated that a Trump endorsement would make them extra more likely to assist a candidate, whereas about as many — 43 p.c — stated they have been uncertain and the remaining 15 p.c stated they might be much less more likely to vote for a candidate with a Trump endorsement.
In the January 2021 runoff for the 2 U.S. Senate seats, Trump’s picks each misplaced to Democrats, partially as a result of his baseless complaints about not having the ability to belief the election course of appeared to discourage some Georgia Republicans from voting. Those identical voters may keep dwelling on this November’s basic election.
What’s extra, a important variety of college-educated White male voters in Georgia who solid their ballots for Trump in 2016 didn’t accomplish that once more in 2020. The widespread knowledge is that Walker will want their assist to beat Warnock. While that is likely to be doable with Biden’s slumping favorability, Trump’s stumping for Walker may, actually, damage his possibilities. “Trump is going to be all over Georgia,” says Charles S. Bullock, a professor of political science on the University of Georgia. “The more they’re reminded of what they don’t like about Trump will make [winning them back] problematic.”
Several days after I met Walker on the Republican Jewish Coalition occasion and he advised me he would sit for an interview, he known as to say he’d modified his thoughts. “Someone overheard you say you didn’t think I could win this thing,” he defined.
I hadn’t stated that, however he couldn’t be satisfied in any other case. Regarding Walker’s probabilities of profitable the overall election, many Republicans fear that Warnock, with his superior oratory abilities, expertise as a senator and data of the problems, will eviscerate Walker if he does win the Republican nomination and agrees to debate Warnock. Says Wynter, the radio host, “The overwhelming fear is that he wins the primary and flames out in the general election.”
Right now you’re educating children essential race idea,” Walker tells the principally White viewers in Dahlonega. “I don’t even know what that is.” They giggle.
“I just found out the other day I was Black.” They giggle louder.
But race has not been a laughing matter for Walker. His senior 12 months of highschool (1979-1980), racial tensions roiled Wrightsville. A pastor led weekly marches on the courthouse to protest the shortage of Black folks employed by the sheriff and native companies, and to demand sewers and roads in Black neighborhoods be repaired. On one event, a mob of White residents assaulted the marchers, who later claimed the sheriff had joined the assault. Another evening, a suspected member of the Ku Klux Klan fired a shotgun into a Black instructor’s trailer dwelling from his pickup, placing a lady inside. On yet one more evening, the sheriff raided a Black neighborhood and arrested 38 women and men, although none have been convicted of any crime.
The tensions inevitably reached the highschool, the place someday six Black college students pulled a jacket over the top of a White boy and beat him up. The two beginning guards on the all-Black basketball crew have been suspended after a battle with White college students. One day White dad and mom stormed the varsity to demand their kids come dwelling. Georgia State Patrol troopers have been despatched in to maintain peace. Nine of Walker’s observe teammates stop the crew as a part of the protests. The Black activists implored Walker to hitch them, however he demurred, partially dissuaded by his observe coach. “I told him, ‘Herschel, we have practice at 3 o’clock,’ ” Tom Jordan says. “You got to be here. You can’t be [leading marches].”
Walker’s refusal to make use of his nationwide platform to advocate on their behalf alienated him from a few of his Black neighbors, which he resented. “I never really liked the idea that I was to represent my people,” he writes in “Breaking Free.”
That stance — particularly now, coming from a Senate candidate — has drawn sharp criticism from Black leaders. “Herschel Walker won’t advocate for anybody, only for what’s in his best interest,” Harry Edwards says. “He’s irrelevant to the Black community, and we should treat him as such.” A consultant from Walker’s marketing campaign declined to deal with the feedback.
But Walker is likely to be not possible to disregard, calling the leaders of Black Lives Matter “trained Marxists” who don’t consider in American values, mocking the defund police motion because the brainchild of a drunk and testifying at a congressional listening to in 2021 towards reparations for slavery. He maintains that racism is a relic of the past, telling the congressional committee, “Slavery ended over 130 years ago,” and telling Glenn Beck in an interview the 12 months earlier than, “Racism is going back to the old days.”
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, says that Walker is ‘a clear and present danger to our health and democracy.’
“This is a person who has run away from issues of race and has not dealt with them,” says Kevin Harris, former government director of the Congressional Black Caucus. “If you are Herschel Walker and don’t understand how the racists are using you to give cover to their racism, then you are not qualified to serve in the U.S. Senate at this time.”
As such, within the basic election towards Warnock — a liberal champion of civil rights who inherited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit on the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — Walker is just not anticipated to curry many votes from Black residents, who make up practically a third of voters within the state and are predominantly Democrats. He won’t even carry Wrightsville. Walker “expresses too many views supportive of the past president,” says Curtis Dixon, a former neighbor who taught Walker world historical past in tenth grade and coached football. “He doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of the Black community.”
At the Dahlonega fundraiser, Walker tells the viewers, “The criteria for running for office in the United States should be you love America. The second should be you love the Constitution.” Those beliefs just about sum up his platform — that, and his love for Jesus. He pledged to the group in Dahlonega, “When I go to Washington, Jesus is coming with me.”
Walker has not delivered any clear methods for addressing the 4 high points Georgia voters recognized within the January Atlanta Journal-Constitution ballot — elections, the financial system, the pandemic and crime — aside from to make broad statements, comparable to supporting the police and that inflation is just too excessive. When he does get particular, it might get weird.
At a church in Sugar Hill, Ga., Walker stated in March, “At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not? Well, this is what’s interesting, though. If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”
In August 2020 Walker advised Beck, “Do you know, right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from covid as you walk through this dry mist? As you walk through the door, it will kill any covid on your body.”
In November and December 2020, Walker unleashed a flurry of #stopthesteal tweets supporting baseless conspiracy theories, saying complicit fraudsters ought to go to jail, seven states (together with Georgia) ought to toss out the preliminary election outcomes and vote once more, and that Georgia ought to refuse to certify Biden’s victory.
Personally, Walker appeared detached to taking part in democracy as a citizen for almost all of his life. He didn’t vote till the 2020 presidential election, when he was 58 years previous. He initially tried to register within the flawed county, in response to Texas state data.
At different instances, Walker has demonstrated a profound political incognizance. In a late January look on a Daily Caller podcast, Walker was baffled when requested, “Would you have voted for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill?” which Congress had handed two months earlier amid widespread media scrutiny. “Until I can see all of the facts, you can’t answer the question,” he stated. “And I think that’s what is totally unfair to assume someone like myself to say, ‘What are you going to vote for?’”
Such performances have alarmed some Republican leaders, who don’t wish to squander the chance to take again the seat held by Warnock. Walker “doesn’t have the breadth and depth of knowledge of the issues,” says Marci McCarthy, chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, emphasizing the necessity for a certified particular person. “They need to know policy, our top issues in the state.”
In a December interview, Walker confirmed he clearly didn’t know coverage or historical past when requested in regards to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The laws would restore elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Lewis, a civil rights icon and congressman — not a senator — from Georgia, helped craft. “You know Senator Lewis was one of the greatest senators there’s ever been and for African Americans was absolutely incredible,” Walker stated. “I think, then, to throw his name on a bill for voting rights, I think, is a shame. First of all, when you look at the bill, it doesn’t fit what John Lewis stood for, and I think that is sad for them to do this to him.”
Walker’s flagrant show of ignorance rankled many, together with Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, supposed to mobilize and empower Black voters. “There’s no crime in being ignorant,” Albright says, “but there is in not knowing you’re ignorant and going around boasting about what you don’t know. He’s a clear and present danger to our health and democracy.”
In October 1989, the Dallas Cowboys traded Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for 5 gamers and 7 draft picks, maybe essentially the most lopsided and worst commerce in NFL historical past. Nearly two years later, Walker had failed to satisfy the not possible expectations in Minnesota, and his football future regarded unsure. In May 1991 his spouse, Cindy, discovered him unconscious, slumped in his automotive, the engine operating, the storage doorways closed. She known as 911. After Walker was taken to the hospital, handled and launched, he advised reporters he had been listening to some music and fell asleep, that he was not suicidal.
Around that point, as he defined to Howard Stern in an interview in 2010, he began enjoying Russian roulette, seated within the kitchen of his suburban Dallas dwelling, loading a solitary bullet in a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, spinning the chamber, inserting the gun to his temple and pulling the set off. He did this greater than half a dozen instances over the subsequent decade, he stated, not as a result of he was suicidal however merely for the joys of competitors, a declare that shocked even Stern.
“At no point do you say to yourself, ‘I love living’? ‘I love life’?” Stern requested him.
“No, I don’t think I ever realized that,” Walker stated. “I just love to compete. And I thought that was the ultimate game of competition.”
In courtroom paperwork filed in 2005, nevertheless, Cindy claimed that Walker had “made threats to kill himself on numerous occasions.” As Walker’s skilled football profession led to 1997, his marriage got here undone. He admits in his memoir that he had an affair. And that he grew to become more and more violent. He had lengthy possessed an indignant streak, ever since he was bullied in elementary college as a chubby child who stuttered. He writes in “Breaking Free” that beneath his deferential demeanor was a “simmering anger” that tempted him to hitch the Marines as a substitute of enjoying faculty football. “I wanted to go into the Marines ’cause I wanted to kill people,” he says within the 2014 ESPN documentary.
Cindy — a runner at UGA, the place they met — advised a CNN reporter he held a gun to her head a handful of instances, that his eyes would get “evil,” which he has not denied. One time of their mattress, she stated, he threatened her with a straight razor.
Remarkably, Walker opens his memoir with the story of driving throughout city on Feb. 24, 2001, with the intent to shoot and kill the person who didn’t ship on time a automotive Walker had purchased. He wrote that he was “so angry that all I could think was how satisfying it would feel … the visceral enjoyment I’d get from seeing the small entry wound and the spray of brain tissue and blood — like a Fourth of July firework — exploding behind him.”
Spying a “Smile. Jesus loves you” sticker within the window of the supply truck stopped him, he wrote, and as a substitute prompted him to hunt assist from a former faculty observe opponent turned counselor, Jerry Mungadze.
Mungadze acquired to see Walker’s rage up shut on at the least two events. On Sept. 23, 2001, Mungadze known as the Irving, Tex., police to guard Cindy, telling them Walker was “volatile” and armed, in response to police experiences obtained by the Associated Press. He spent a half-hour of their suburban Dallas home making an attempt to calm Walker, who had “talked about having a shoot-out with police.” They didn’t arrest Walker however positioned his home on a “caution list” as a result of his “violent tendencies” and took away his 9mm Sig Sauer handgun. Another time, at his workplace, Mungadze needed to name the police to intervene when Walker threatened to kill Cindy, Mungadze and himself.
Cindy filed for divorce in December 2001. It was finalized in 2003, however Walker’s threats didn’t cease. In December 2005, whereas Walker and his ex-wife have been hashing out youngster custody preparations in courtroom, Cindy filed for a protecting order after Walker made repeated threats to kill her and her boyfriend. The earlier summer time, after she had declined to attend a July 4 celebration at Walker’s dad and mom’ home, Cindy’s father stated Walker advised him he was planning to shoot Cindy and her boyfriend. Cindy’s sister Maria Tsettos said in an affidavit that on Dec. 11, 2005, Walker advised her he had a gun and was on his strategy to meet his ex-wife and her boyfriend to “blow their f—ing heads off.” He later slowly drove by the couple, who have been standing outdoors a mall, and skilled his finger on Cindy like a gun. The courtroom issued a short-term protecting order and suspended Walker’s license to hold a hid weapon.
In 2001, when Walker turned to Jerry Mungadze for assist, the counselor advised him he had dissociative id dysfunction, a considerably controversial prognosis. In the fifth version of its Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association describes dissociative id dysfunction — previously a number of persona dysfunction — as “a disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states” accompanied by an amnesia that usually has a person unable to recall on a regular basis occurrences, private information or traumatic occasions. It is usually the results of childhood trauma. In his memoir Walker wrote of a dozen personalities, or alters — together with the Hero, the Judge, the Enforcer, the Sentry, the Daredevil and the Warrior — he cultivated to deal with the bullying he endured in elementary college.
But others expressed shock, even doubt in regards to the prognosis. “I know him better than anybody ’cause I raised him,” his father advised the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is my first knowing about that.”
Of greater than two dozen former classmates; highschool, faculty, skilled teammates and coaches; highschool academics; journalists and media administrators who interacted recurrently with Walker; and longtime buddies I interviewed for this text — not one stated the prognosis made sense in serving to them perceive Walker. On the opposite, all stated they by no means noticed indicators of something like dissociative id dysfunction.
Tom Jordan, the highschool coach who was a father determine to Walker, expressed skepticism after studying Walker’s memoir. “I didn’t agree with any of it,” Jordan says. “I think it’s some doctor trying to get rich. I didn’t see any of that in him growing up.”
Usually the dysfunction is recognized by a psychiatrist or psychologist. Mungadze has a doctorate of philosophy in counseling. (He didn’t reply to a number of requests for an interview.) The prognosis of a psychological sickness may additionally present a handy cowl for Walker’s past conduct. “It just does not ring true, and nobody has questioned it, but it’s an excellent excuse to use if you’ve pointed a gun at somebody — ‘That wasn’t me; it was somebody else,’ ” says retired Atlanta Journal-Constitution politics editor Jim Galloway.
Walker has tried to reassure voters he’s okay, telling Axios in December he’s “better now than 99 percent of the people in America. … Just like I broke my leg: I put the cast on. It healed.”
Details of Walker’s violent past and his outrageous statements already hassle the Republican cognoscenti. Some fear what extra may emerge from investigative reporting — or Walker’s personal mouth. “The unknowns associated with Herschel Walker, with his history and what his statements in the future may be, make him a foolish risk for Republicans,” says John Watson, former Georgia GOP chair.
At the second, although, he could also be protected by a cocoon of willful ignorance amongst his supporters. Several folks leaving the Dahlonega occasion had not heard in regards to the accusations that Walker made violent threats towards ex-wife Cindy and others — incidents not too long ago reported by the media. When advised in regards to the incidents, they brushed them off. “I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. We learn from our mistakes,” says Donna Brantley of Dahlonega, carrying an autographed “Run Herschel Run” yard signal. “He’s got the right morals.”
John Rosengren is the creator of 10 books, most not too long ago “Classic Baseball: Timeless Tales, Immortal Moments.”