Whither Herschel Walker? I admit, I have watched the contest he’s participating in with fascinated horror, the same kind that attends rubbernecking. Who is this person, and what makes him think he’s qualified for this stage?
But of course he does believe he is qualified, because he has been at the pinnacle, in another arena. In his feats of athletic achievement, he endured media scrutiny. He’s not camera shy.
And he understands what the camera is for. He understands image. He knows that a public persona is crafted, an element that he shares in common with Donald Trump, his sponsor. And he understands that there are different audiences to which one can simultaneously appeal. In sport, he faced the fans, his coaches, the owner of his team; each needed to see a separate side of him for him to succeed. (This is not a joke about the Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis that he has proffered.)
So it is with that in mind that I approach Walker, would-be supplanter. Because he is not a serious figure. I cannot treat him in that light. However, I can do my level best to treat him seriously as a topic.
By the time I got into football, Herschel Walker was no longer playing, so I don’t have a rose-colored view of his past glory. I probably hadn’t even seen any clips of him until I did a recent search for him. I’m not a fan and am not bowled over by his celebrity. But I’m sure many would-be constituents are. I mean, I’m not a big Tom Brady fan these days, but if he came back to Michigan to campaign for local office, he’d be a shoo-in. Celebrity blinds people.
Anyway, I did a cursory search for him and concussion, because for Finnegan’s sake he was a running back. I didn’t come up with much, other than other folks speculating publicly (as I am currently doing!), but obviously at that position he took thousands upon thousands of subconcussive blows. Let’s take that as a given.
His head was part of his overall body apparatus as a player (unlike quarterbacks and kickers, who have special rules to protect them from certain kinds of contact). Walker’s forehead took much punishment, helmet notwithstanding.
A segment from WDIV-TV in Detroit aired just two weeks ago about the sheer physical forces involved in concussion.
The example provided by the machine, which clearly can be seen at around 0:30, is showing blunt force coming in at a mere 12 miles an hour. In the NFL, players are known to regularly smash into other players at upwards of 40 miles an hour. Tight ends and wide receivers have spatial advantages of dodging that running backs just don’t. The pocket closes and they have to lean in and put their shoulder into it. As nimble as Walker may have been at the top of his career, he couldn’t dance away from all of them. Can’t dodge raindrops, and you certainly can’t slip every charging tackle.
Does he have CTE? I don’t know. Even if he does, even if his doctors know it, they can’t officially diagnose it while he is alive. It is confirmed upon autopsy. So, I won’t speculate on that one condition specifically. But there are other things we already know about the brain.
The brain is very fragile and susceptible to injury. From within, it’s protected by the blood-brain barrier, and outside it has this hard headcase of a skull; but if you get an internal head injury, the brain can begin to swell without having any real estate to expand into. So then compression can set in; neurons can get reduced blood flow in some cases; and the tissue itself can become bruised or even begin to necrose, under certain circumstances.
Even mild concussions can lead to serious complications with regards to altered consciousness (i.e., coma, etc), which is why people are advised not to fall asleep if they suffer such an injury in, say, a slip and fall.
Though I won't speak on CTE, another prefrontal injury was widely acknowledged decades ago. It’s known as Dyscontrol Syndrome. Not the catchiest name! CTE has three strong stresses and alliteration. Still, the two disorders share some symptoms, especially considering that DS historically was described in relation to dementia pugilistica (i.e., punch-drunk syndrome), itself the precursor to CTE.
These are some of the known contingencies of DS, described by one medical professional (Elliott, 1976) as “one of the causes of wife and child battery, motiveless homicide, unprovoked assault on friends or strangers, sexual assault, dangerously aggressive driving, and senseless destruction of property.”
Another take (Ratner & Shapiro, 1979) said that
there is general agreement that in many cases a structural or functional brain defect is a necessary element of the total picture. Such a defect is presumably operative at the level of the limbic system and may be secondary to a wide variety of causes including, for example, physical trauma to the head, perinatal hypoxia, stroke, and encephalitis.
Head trauma is a known risk factor for the disease. “The contre coup lesions of closed head injuries show a predilection for the tip and orbital surface of the frontal lobe,” Elliott said, also citing the temporal lobe and anterior hypothalamus, brain areas “known to be ... particularly vulnerable to severe closed head injuries,” adding that “multiple minor head injuries can have a cumulative effect, as in the ‘punch drunk syndrome’ in which explosive rage is not uncommon.”
“Much of this work has as its point the notion that in many, if not all, cases of episodic violence, ascertainable brain damage of a structural or functional nature is present,” said Ratner and Shapiro. Of one case, they detailed,
the primitive and uncontrolled nature of the violence, i.e., repeated stabbing and stomping on top of strangulation, is quite characteristic of a dyscontrol act.
Even personality changes are included as a potential sequela of the disease.
Now, Herschel Walker has admitted openly that he has committed violent acts in the past. Of course, on the football field, he encountered physical violence as a matter of course. But he carried his temper into other areas of his life. He is currently going on what appears from the outside looking in as a redemption tour, as he courts Christian fundamentalists with a healed-by-faith story, a bad boy gone good. Yet trailing behind we hear from his victims: his ex-wife, several prior girlfriends, even his teenaged son.
David Corn, for Mother Jones, wrote of Walker:
He has acknowledged his personal history of violent and dangerous behavior. He played Russian roulette with a loaded gun and fantasized about shooting a delivery man who was late. [...] And his ex-wife reports that he once held a gun to her head—an episode Walker says he doesn’t remember.
Amnesia is a symptom of DS, too.
Walker himself has told us of these daydreams. As Corn relates, Walker confessed:
“It would be no different from sighting at the targets I’d fired at for years—except for 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,” Walker wrote in his 2008 book Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Corn flatly states, “This is disturbing.” That’s because Herschel Walker has acknowledged a sense of pleasure in this recounting. By his own words, he said he’d expect a “visceral enjoyment.” How do you explain that away?
Oh, that’s just artistic license, some might say. An exaggeration. Not much different from an infamous book title, “If I Did It,” a hook to get the audience’s attention, possibly.
This is a confession.
Walker: I’ve gotten better because I’ve been to a hospital. Because today I can see the light. Before, I was in the darkness. Before, I probably wouldn’t be here. Because I can guarantee you one thing: if I’m not going to a hospital, I would have killed my wife.
Note the casualness in his voice.
Herschel Walker admitted this, into a live microphone in front of a crowd, in 2012. The GOP still put him up as a candidate ten years later.
Now, this isn’t to say that people can’t redeem themselves. In fact, it’s upon just that theme that Walker and his handlers put all of their chips, hoping to persuade the redemption crowd that, with faith, all things are possible.
But Aquinas famously said that even God couldn’t make a triangle with more than 180 degrees. Some things are not possible, because they would break some other, more fundamental rule. In this case, it’s that neurons once crushed do not regenerate. This is not mere neuroplasticity that’s at stake here. Humans, unlike shrews, cannot regrow a ravaged brain.
Walker, like the rest of us, is subject to the Pottery Barn rule.
I hadn’t heard of Steve Hofstetter on YouTube before I looked for information about Walker’s past, but his was one of the few that spoke specifically about Walker’s violent ideations. He’s got some snark.
Hofstetter: I want to be clear here. Mental health issues [like dissociative identity disorder] are real, and they are important. But Walker blames his holding a razor to his wife’s throat, for playing Russian roulette, and for being tempted to kill a man for the egregious sin of being late while delivering his car.
Walker has “a personal history that, ten years ago, maybe it would have been a problem. Twenty years ago, it would have been a bigger problem. I don’t think it’s a problem today,” Donald Trump months ago said to Maggie Haberman. And that was the bet that the GOP made: that the political calculus had so changed in recent years that someone who openly pines for murder might ascend to high office.
Are we so cynical?
“I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” Dana Loesch, conservative personality, said back in October. “I want control of the Senate.”
Thankfully, that will not come to pass, no matter what happens in the Georgia runoff race: the Senate is firmly in control of Democrats this session.
Rather, this comes down to what are we doing, and at what cost?
Herschel Walker, no matter his affliction—whether it’s DID, dyscontrol syndrome, or some other malady—is ginger enough that, given certain taxing or stressing situations, not only might he not have the capacity to fulfill a statesperson’s duties, he also may experience a further break in his mental integrity.
None of us should feel good about sending a person under that kind of strain into such a pressure cooker as the U.S. Senate. It’s not fair and it’s not right. He’s a person. He should not be set up to fail like that, not only because his failures would become our hand-me-downs, but because we can see the pitfalls where he cannot. He’s too close to the situation, but we notice the tripwire and see the Rube Goldberg trap ready to come down.
Help this man who obviously cannot see the trouble under his own feet. Return Rev. Raphael Warnock to the Senate and let Walker seek help in private peace. If you are a Republican in Georgia who has somehow stumbled onto this essay, please consider staying home instead. Don’t spur this man to a margin where he tries a Trump or a Kari Lake.
Gordon Johnson, in his opinion piece “Herschel Walker, Brain Damage, and Football,” wrote nearly fifteen years ago (with my emphasis):
If you are old enough to remember Earl Campbell, you would argue that no modern running back could carry his helmet. Yet, he went from absolutely amazing to positively mediocre, almost overnight. In 1983, he gained 1301 yards. In 1984, he had only 468. Even playing for his beloved coach Bum Phillips in New Orleans in 1985, he could only muster 643 yards, and then he was gone. [...]
Well, this week’s news has another story of a legendary running back who went from All World, to worst trade in history in a short span, Herschel Walker. Walker went from 1514 yards in 1988 to 915 yards in 1989. While there are those who will say that this had to do with the way in which he was used after he left the Cowboys for Minnesota, true football fans will know that he just never had the same special quality after leaving the Cowboys. Like Earl Campbell, Walker used his amazing strength and power to punish defenders. [...]
I am not an expert in football or boxing although my first career was as a sport writer. I am not a medical doctor, so technically I am not an expert in brain injury either. But I do know both sports and brain injury and I know enough to recognize the patterns that point to brain damage. Is there enough force, is there evidence of injury and is there a change in the person? Emmitt [Smith] I am suspicious about, especially the short term effect of the season he landed on his head. Of Earl, Herschel and Mike Tyson, I have no doubt.