Something So Lopsided

When I first heard that Hershel Walker was running for a US Senate seat in Georgia, I went rooting through my old, faded newspaper clippings.

Long before newspapers started keeping electronic files, and in a day when I was still pecking at an Olympia typewriter, I went into the offices of the Newburyport Daily News for the first time ever with a commentary on the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.

Not to the editorial desk, but to the sports desk when I introduced myself to the late Kevin Doyle who accepted my take on Walker’s decision to join the newly-formed United States Football League rather than the long-running NFL.

Can’t recall the headline when it appeared in print, but according to my own log, the headline I submitted was “The Tragedy of Hershel Walker.”

In a writing class I taught at South Dakota State University a year earlier, a star of the Jackrabbits football team wrote of a similar decision. A far smaller scale of money or tragedy, but it was a lens for comparison that Doyle found clear and convincing.

As for Walker, it seemed shameful to me that a player who led Georgia to a national championship in 1980, and whom some jocks were calling the greatest running back ever to play in college, would turn down a chance to rival and set running records–and to play with and against the best players–for the sake of a slightly higher than already very high contract offer.

Oddly, the USFL had already pledged not to draft underclassmen when that was still a heated issue, but the owner of the New Jersey Generals, one the dozen new franchises, never cared much for rules or ethics and could not resist Walker. His name was–and still is–Donald Trump.

The league caught on briefly, and other college stars, including Boston College Heisman winner, Doug Flutie, would sign. Jocks both in print and in broadcast called the Generals the USFL’s “glamor team,” though the Philadelphia-turned-Baltimore Stars dominated the league.

Walker was the highest paid player in all of pro-football, though his team never won a playoff game. When the USFL folded in 1986, he joined the NFL for 13 seasons during which, in 1989, he was traded from the Dallas Cowboys to the Minnesota Vikings for five players and six draft picks.

The stunt failed Minnesota who thought he was all they needed. Walker was good but not that good, and those draft picks would eventually propel Dallas to three Super Bowl victories in 1993, 1994, and 1996.

As one of the network commentators for NFL games implied just this past weekend, Hershel Walker is best remembered not for his play on the field, but for being on the losing side of the most lopsided trade in the history of professional sports.

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I never found it. Perhaps because it wasn’t a column for the editorial page, but a feature for the sports page, I was careless in filing it.

And in February of 1983, it was five months before the Daily News initiated its guest column feature called “As I See It”–at a time when many newspapers and magazines were following the lead set by Newsweek magazine’s “My Turn” feature open to freelancers from all walks of life, including Yours Unruly in June of 1986.

Sports Editor Doyle made sure I stopped to chat with the editorial desk to see if I’d join the team they planned to launch that summer.

Today, I’m one of just two remaining originals writing for “As I See It.” This morning I bet I looked at every one of over 400 columns I’ve had in print trying to find that forerunning commentary that led to it all.

No luck, but I still revel in the idea that, four decades later, the same guy is yet again on the wrong side of something so lopsided. Can anyone not laugh at his performance in the debate with Rev. Warnock? Following that embarrassment, he now declines to debate Warnock a second time.

Several weeks ago, Walker refused a debate because, he claimed, everybody would be watching Sunday Night Football. The debate was scheduled for a Thursday night.

What more clear and convincing lens could any writer ever find?

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