Herschel Walker: From football stardom to troubling Senate candidate

Covering Herschel Walker in Dallas was like being Superman's stenographer. He looked and carried himself like someone who played football as a hobby when he wasn't saving the world.

Improbably muscular and fast, Walker benefited from and perpetuated every myth surrounding him — that he was his high school valedictorian (he wasn't), that he graduated from the University of Georgia (he didn't), that he performed 5,000 pushups and situps every night as a youth during sitcom commercials (mathematically and probably physically impossible).

Covering Walker in Minnesota was like being Clark Kent's therapist. He was miscast as the player who could elevate a talented team to the Super Bowl, introduced midseason to an offense into which his skills did not fit, and frustrated as his prowess waned.

I covered Walker briefly for the Dallas Morning News, then moved to Minnesota to cover the Vikings for the Star Tribune. I got to know Walker a bit in Dallas and covered him intensively in Minnesota. Once, he vented to me in a long interview about being scapegoated over a trade he did not request, one that cost the Vikings a slew of draft picks and players and remains one of the most-criticized deals in NFL history.

In Minnesota, Walker transformed from a beloved national figure into a symbol of Vikings woes and mismanagement. Now he is leveraging his still-remarkable popularity in his home state of Georgia, where he was a high school and college star, into a run for the U.S. Senate.

Minneapolis-based author John Rosengren recently traveled to Georgia to meet Walker, who has no experience in elected office, and wrote an in-depth article for the Washington Post. Simply by recounting Walker's post-playing behavior and gauging the reaction of many Georgians to his candidacy, Rosengren's piece reads like a modern horror story:

In the Republican primary on Tuesday, he is favored to become the GOP candidate to run against incumbent Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, for the Senate.

Rosengren quoted two women in Georgia who defended Walker. One said: "He's got the right morals.'' Another said: "He's probably like every one of us; he's had his issues and had to grow."

Said Rosengren: "This is a person who has a violent past and that's troubling on that plane alone. But there are many, many other reasons, I think, to be concerned about Herschel Walker as a Senate candidate.''

Rosengren interviewed Georgians who did not know about Walker's threats of violence. Their response when he informed them?

"They said, 'Well, you know, he's still a good person," Rosengren said.

Will Walker's still-overwhelming popularity as a sports figure in Georgia help him? "This guy is grossly unqualified, and yet he has the support of about 60 percent of the Republicans in Georgia," Rosengren said.