21

HERSCHEL WALKER’S

LONGEST RUN

For this Trump-endorsed candidate, does a

troubled past even matter?

STORY BY JOHN ROSENGREN

mixed martial arts fighter, taekwondo black belt and Food

Network cooking show contestant.

After his 30 minutes behind closed doors, Walker works the

crowd back in the lobby — posing for more selfies, leaning in to

listen, maintaining steady eye contact — until by chance he is

standing next to where I’m seated at the bar. I introduce myself.

He shakes my hand with a surprisingly warm and soft grip and

says, yes, he will sit for an interview with me while I’m in town.

His aide gives me phone numbers of contacts in Wrightsville,

Walker’s hometown.

The older guy sitting next to me, a retired physician and a

greeter for the event, had earlier barked at me after learning I

was 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.”

T

o understand this race, you have to know the space Walker

occupies in the hearts of potential voters. “This guy’s a god

in Georgia,” Shelley Wynter, a radio host on Atlanta’s conserva-

tive talk station WSB, told me. “I don’t think people who don’t

live in Georgia understand that.”

Walker was born in Wrightsville, Ga., a crossroads connecting

several rural counties, where Confederate and Trump flags still

wave. It’s a community of 3,600 named after an enslaver; a

remote place where once clothing factories and kaolin mines

provided jobs, but now a quarter of the storefronts among its

four-block business node are shuttered. It’s also a town where the

110 students in Walker’s 1980 senior class at Johnson County

High School were evenly split between Black and White, but

racial tensions thrust Walker in the middle.

Head south for five miles until you reach a long drive on the

left that rises to a single-story clapboard house amid large pines.

This is where Willis and Christine Walker, who met picking

cotton, raised their seven children, Willis pulling double shifts in

the kaolin plant and Christine working her way up to supervisor

O

n a Sunday afternoon in late February, I’m waiting

for Herschel Walker. Outside the Springs Cinema &

Taphouse, where he’s scheduled to take part in the

Republican Jewish Coalition of Atlanta’s “job inter-

view” of U.S. Senate hopefuls. It’s invitation only,

closed to the news media — a point the two middle-aged women

standing sentry in front of Theater 4 reiterated to me. This, per a

directive from Walker’s campaign, was a condition of his

participation.

I’ve scouted out back entries Walker could sneak in the way he

has in past appearances. So far, his campaign staff had ignored

my multiple requests for an interview. He’d talked only to

conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart. Not finding

another way in, I’m on a bench by the entrance.

Walker, the former football superstar endorsed by Donald

Trump, has a seemingly insurmountable lead over fellow GOP

contenders and is expected to win his party’s nomination in the

May 24 primary. He’ll face stiffer competition, though, in the

general election come November against the incumbent, Demo-

crat Raphael Warnock.

I’m here, in part, because I want to see for myself if Walker’s

campaign in Georgia reflects the nation’s new norm in post-

Trumpian politics. Can enough celebrity sparkle and Trump

rhetoric, coupled with some distortion of facts and often a

general indifference to the particular needs of constituents, truly

be the reality in GOP politics?

So here I am, and then there he is. Walker rides shotgun in the

black GMC Yukon that sidles up to the cineplex. He climbs out,

slides a blue sport coat over his black T-shirt and — flanked by

his wife, Julie, and an aide — makes his way slowly up the steps.

Two weeks shy of his 60th birthday, he shuffles like someone

tackled too many times. I follow. Soon as he’s in the lobby, people

recognize Georgia’s most familiar face and swoop in for selfies.

Beloved as their football hero, he’s also been a track star, Olympic

bobsledder, Fort Worth Ballet guest dancer, business owner,

PHOTO: HYOSUB SHIN/ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/ASSOCIATED PRESS