26 MAY8, 2022
placing the gun to his temple and pulling the trigger. He did this
more than half a dozen times over the next decade, he said, not
because he was suicidal but simply for the thrill of competition, a
claim that shocked even Stern.
“At no point do you say to yourself, ‘I love living’? ‘I love life’?”
Stern asked him.
“No, I don’t think I ever realized that,” Walker said. “I just love
to compete. And I thought that was the ultimate game of
competition.”
In court documents filed in 2005, however, Cindy claimed
that Walker had “made threats to kill himself on numerous
occasions.” As Walker’s professional football career ended in
1997, his marriage came undone. He admits in his memoir that
he had an affair. And that he became increasingly violent. He had
long possessed an angry streak, ever since he was bullied in
elementary school as a chubby kid who stuttered. He writes in
“Breaking Free” that beneath his deferential demeanor was a
“simmering anger” that tempted him to join the Marines instead
of playing college football. “I wanted to go into the Marines
’cause I wanted to kill people,” he says in the 2014 ESPN
documentary.
Cindy — a runner at UGA, where they met — told a CNN
reporter he held a gun to her head a handful of times, that his
eyes would get “evil,” which he has not denied. One time in their
bed, she said, he threatened her with a straight razor.
Remarkably, Walker opens his memoir with the story of
driving across town on Feb. 24, 2001, with the intent to shoot
and kill the man who did not deliver on time a car Walker had
bought. He wrote that he was “so angry that all I could think was
how satisfying it would feel ... 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.”
Spying a “Smile. Jesus loves you” sticker in the window of the
delivery truck stopped him, he wrote, and instead prompted him
to seek help from a former college track opponent turned
counselor, Jerry Mungadze.
Mungadze got to see Walker’s rage up close on at least two
occasions. On Sept. 23, 2001, Mungadze called the Irving, Tex.,
police to protect Cindy, telling them Walker was “volatile” and
armed, according to police reports obtained by the Associated
Press. He spent a half-hour in their suburban Dallas house trying
to calm Walker, who had “talked about having a shoot-out with
police.” They did not arrest Walker but placed his house on a
“caution list” due to his “violent tendencies” and took away his
9mm Sig Sauer handgun. Another time, at his office, Mungadze
had to call the police to intervene when Walker threatened to kill
Cindy, Mungadze and himself.
Cindy filed for divorce in December 2001. It was finalized in
2003, but Walker’s threats did not stop. In December 2005,
while Walker and his ex-wife were hashing out child custody
arrangements in court, Cindy filed for a protective order after
Walker made repeated threats to kill her and her boyfriend. The
previous summer, after she had declined to attend a July 4
celebration at Walker’s parents’ house, Cindy’s father said
Walker told him he was planning to shoot Cindy and her
boyfriend. Cindy’s sister Maria Tsettos stated in an affidavit that
on Dec. 11, 2005, Walker told her he had a gun and was on his
way to meet his ex-wife and her boyfriend to “blow their f---ing
heads off.” He later slowly drove by the couple, who were
standing outside a mall, and trained his finger on Cindy like a
gun. The court issued a temporary protective order and
suspended Walker’s license to carry a concealed weapon.
I
n 2001, when Walker turned to Jerry Mungadze for help, the
counselor told him he had dissociative identity disorder, a
somewhat controversial diagnosis. In the fifth edition of its
Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association describes dissociative identity
disorder — formerly multiple personality disorder — as “a
disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct
personality states” accompanied by an amnesia that often has an
individual unable to recall everyday occurrences, personal
information or traumatic events. It is often the result of
childhood trauma. In his memoir Walker wrote of a dozen
personalities, or alters — including the Hero, the Judge, the
Enforcer, the Sentry, the Daredevil and the Warrior — he
cultivated to cope with the bullying he endured in elementary
school.
But others expressed surprise, even doubt about the diagno-
sis. “I know him better than anybody ’cause I raised him,” his
father told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is my first
knowing about that.”
Of more than two dozen former classmates; high school,
college, professional teammates and coaches; high school
teachers; journalists and media directors who interacted
regularly with Walker; and longtime friends I interviewed for
this article — not one said the diagnosis made sense in helping
them understand Walker. On the contrary, all said they never
saw signs of anything like dissociative identity disorder.
Tom Jordan, the high school coach who was a father figure to
Walker, expressed skepticism after reading Walker’s memoir. “I
didn’t agree with any of it,” Jordan says. “I think it’s some doctor
trying to get rich. I didn’t see any of that in him growing up.”
Usually the disorder is diagnosed by a psychiatrist or
psychologist. Mungadze has a doctorate of philosophy in
counseling. (He did not respond to multiple requests for an
interview.) The diagnosis of a mental illness could also provide a
convenient cover for Walker’s past behavior. “It just does not
ring true, and nobody has questioned it, but it’s an excellent
excuse to use if you’ve pointed a gun at somebody — ‘That wasn’t
me; it was somebody else,’ ” says retired Atlanta Journal-Consti-
tution politics editor Jim Galloway.
Walker has tried to reassure voters he’s okay, telling Axios in
December he is “better now than 99 percent of the people in
America. ... Just like I broke my leg: I put the cast on. It healed.”D
etails of Walker’s violent past and his outrageous state-
ments already trouble the Republican cognoscenti. Some
worry what more could emerge from investigative reporting —
or Walker’s own mouth. “The unknowns associated with
Herschel Walker, with his history and what his statements in
the future may be, make him a foolish risk for Republicans,” says
John Watson, former Georgia GOP chair.
At the moment, though, he may be protected by a cocoon of
willful ignorance among his supporters. Several people leaving
the Dahlonega event had not heard about the accusations that
Walker made violent threats toward ex-wife Cindy and others —
incidents recently reported by the media. When told about the
incidents, they brushed them off. “I’m not the same person I was
20 years ago. We learn from our mistakes,” says Donna Brantley
of Dahlonega, carrying an autographed “Run Herschel Run”
yard sign. “He’s got the right morals.”John Rosengren is the author of 10 books, most recently “Classic
Baseball: Timeless Tales, Immortal Moments.”