22 MAY8, 2022
prospect in the country. He ultimately chose the University of
Georgia in Athens, 100 miles up State Route 15, where he
burnished his legend. There he broke the NCAA freshman
rushing record and powered the undefeated Bulldogs to the Sugar
Bowl on Jan. 1, 1981. On his second carry, Walker dislocated his
shoulder, but a doctor on the sidelines popped it into place.
Despite the teeth-grinding pain, he carried the ball another 30
times, ran for 150 yards, scored two touchdowns and, as the
game’s Outstanding Player, secured victory and the national
championship for Georgia. “That was a miraculous performance,”
says Loran Smith, a University of Georgia sports historian.
“Nobody ever played hurt better than Herschel did in that game.”
With his world-class speed and amazing strength, Walker
outran defenders or ran over them. In his second season he broke
the NCAA rushing record for sophomores and brought his team
to within 42 seconds of another national title. In his junior year,
his third season as an all-American, he won the Heisman Trophy.
“He was no longer just an all-American or a superstar — he was a
legend,” the narrator gushes in a 2014 ESPN documentary about
Walker.
Walker would be enshrined in the College Football Hall of
Fame and called by some the best collegiate football player ever.
After only three seasons, his 5,259 yards rushing ranked him third
all-time.
In an era when it was unthinkable for a college player to leave
early, Walker signed a $4.2 million contract with the upstart
United States Football League, making him the highest-paid
professional athlete of the day. It would be three years before heat the garment factory. They christened their fifth child Herschel
Junior but called him “Bo” at home. (He would later build his
parents the larger brick Colonial you see today on the property
that has expanded to 25 acres, including the building where
Walker stores 45 antique cars and a Harley-Davidson.)
The boys were built like rocks, like their father. The two older
ones, Willis Jr. and Renneth, may have been better natural
athletes than Herschel, but they lacked his drive. He did 5,000
sit-ups and 5,000 push-ups every evening, he says, during
commercial breaks of his favorite television shows. He ran laps on
a path his father cleared for him and, later, the five miles to town
— and back. At track practice, he dragged a tractor tire his coach
loaded with 10-pound shots. “I never had a kid with his drive,”
says that coach, Tom Jordan. “He was the most focused kid I ever
dealt with in 51 years of coaching track and football.”
Walker was state champ in the shot put and 100-yard dash. He
also lettered four years playing basketball. But it was at what is
now Herschel Walker Field where the townspeople gathered
Friday nights, cramming the concrete bleachers and ringing the
football field, to marvel at the 6-foot-2, 210-pound man-child
performing herculean feats. In high school, he ran for 6,137 yards
and scored 86 touchdowns — more than half of each his senior
year — set a school record for tackles as a linebacker and led the
Johnson County Trojans to the state championship. The school
promptly retired his jersey number, which now hangs in the field
house, and later the street outside was named after him.
Heralded as the nation’s best high school running back by
Parade magazine, Walker became the most desirable college