Why They Vote For Herschel Walker

Several people have told me they cannot understand why so many would vote for Herschel Walker, an apparently mentally challenged former football player.

Why would they, when they could vote for Raphael Warnock, a comparatively normal Baptist preacher?

My disturbed friends and associates all seem to have a couple of things in common. They are not from the South and they are not old enough to remember the 1980 college football season. Or they never had anybody around the house tiresome enough to tell them about it.

I think I do understand, even though I am not from the South. I did live there temporarily, however. I was concerned then that it might turn out permanent.

I appreciate the Herschel Walker attraction because of my familiarity with a previously famous and currently dead guy who grew up in Moreland, Georgia, a town of 300 people or so in the western part of the state. His name was Lewis Grizzard, and he had a much more negative attitude about Chicago than I had about his part of the world. 

After a stint editing the sports section of the Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote a book titled, If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground.

When Grizzard did get back to Georgia, he became the South’s most popular columnist by far, for what’s now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also dabbled in stand-up comedy, which must have come in handy, because he had three ex-wives to finance.

He had a weak heart, and was once told by London doctors that he had to rest in England for six weeks to recover from a cardiac problem, or he would probably die. He flew home.

He risked death because it was September. There was no way he was going to let himself get stuck overseas during the college football season.

“The main difference between people in the North and people in the South is people from the North don’t understand our frenzy with college football,” Grizzard once said. “We’re serious about it.”

Grizzard wrote about how University of Georgia fans — and many other Georgians who had never been near a college — took pride in Walker, who gained an impossible, record-setting 5,097 yards in three years at the Athens campus. He may have been the best running back ever.

Their fascination with Walker was far beyond what Illinoisans may have felt for, say, Michael Jordan. 

That’s probably because when you walk around Chicago’s Loop, there’s likely to be something cool on every block. It’s not quite that way in Georgia’s biggest city, where one of the primary attractions is the Coca-Cola museum. 

About 85,000 fans crowd in to see each of the Georgia Bulldogs’ home games. During their undefeated year of 1980, there might have been a million or so more who would have gladly paid their way into Sanford Stadium.

Grizzard wrote about the last game of that season.

I was walking behind a friend and his wife as we entered the Superdome in New Orleans on January 1, 1981, to watch Georgia play Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.  If Georgia won, the Bulldogs would be the 1980 national collegiate football champions.

My friend, a fellow Georgia alumnus, was fraught with anticipation.  He was pale.  He was nervous.  He was perspiring profusely.  No, he wasn’t.  He was sweating like a Clemson fan trying to write a love letter.

His wife, noticing his condition, said, “Calm down, sweetheart.  It’s just a football game.”

He stopped dead.  He turned to his wife, who had not gone to Georgia – and went to Bulldog games with her husband simply because she thought it was her wifely duty – looked her squarely in the eye and said: “It is not just a football game.  It is our way of life against theirs.”

He meant that.  I knew the man well enough to know he did, in fact, mean that.

It had something to do with Southerners against Northerners.  Maybe it even had something to do with his Methodist upbringing and the pope.

Whatever, it was clearly Us versus Them.  Us won that day; tailback Herschel Walker leading Georgia to a national title.

After the game, the cry on Bourbon Street into the wee hours was “Us versus Them” again, as in: “Y’all got the hunchback. We got the tailback.”

An “Us versus Them” attitude in Georgia definitely existed, at least then. In 1979, driving a battered but attractive 1964 Bonneville on I-75 north of Valdosta, I was stopped by the Georgia State Patrol. I was instructed to sit on the side of the highway until it was decided what to do with me, a decision which was a long time coming. My crime? Illinois license plates. 

Georgia cars, post-national championship, sported bumper stickers thanking the Heisman Trophy winner’s mother for giving birth to him: “God Bless You, Mrs. Walker.”

On Twitter, several have noted that 88% of Georgia evangelical Christian voters backed Walker — accused credibly of encouraging girlfriends’ abortions — while the old tailback runs against an evangelical pastor, who, though pro-choice, hasn’t been known to personally purchase any pregnancy terminations.

Anti-abortion voters in Georgia are faced with a choice: an ex-athlete who arranged abortions but says abortion is wrong, and a pastor who didn’t arrange any but says abortion is right.

It’s no wonder the candidates finished in a dead heat Tuesday. Maybe it’ll get sorted out before the Dec. 6 runoff.

I think that Grizzard demonstrated decades ago that though southerners seem more religious than northerners, some may have a healthy suspicion of the wisdom of clergy. Grizzard’s most often-repeated joke is the one mocking the Mississippi preacher beset by a rising flood who refuses repeated offers to ferry him away because “God will provide.” 

He drowns, and St. Peter asks him what he’s doing in heaven: “It’s not time for you.” The preacher said he died while confidently waiting for God to provide.

“St. Peter said, ‘Hell, we sent two rowboats and a helicopter. What’d you want?’”