A man's stride betrays
whether he has found his own way...I love to run swiftly. And though there are
swamps and thick melancholy on earth, whoever has light feet runs even over mud
and dances as on swept ice.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
It was the early spring of 1974 and the
kudzu vines began to leaf and spread. Menfolk in Wrightsville, Ga.,
put up their long guns and, hearing frogsong, broke out the bass gear. Baseball
season opened. Things burgeoned.
The local track and field coach was
stirred, as only an athlete-outdoorsman can be, by the warming weather. Tom
Jordan was glad to be back outside, in the sun, with his track team. A strong,
able-bodied, accessible man, he was accustomed to questions from Wrightsville's
youngsters with a yen for self improvement and he took their questions
seriously, even though he knew most of his suggestions would be followed
briefly, if at all. He remembers one of those youngsters—Herschel Walker—with
special clarity.
"Herschel was 12 when he came to me
wanting to know how to get big and strong," Jordan says, "and I told him
what I told the other kids who asked me. 'Do push-ups, sit-ups and run
sprints,' I said. He just thanked me quietly and walked away. To be honest, I
didn't give it much thought. Herschel was short for his age [about 5'3",
100 pounds], and he wasn't particularly fast, even though he had some older
brothers and sisters who were excellent athletes.
"The next time I paid him any mind
was that coming fall. I hadn't seen much of him during the summer and when I
saw him in September I was amazed at how he'd muscled up. I asked him what he'd
been doing and he smiled and said, 'Just running, Coach, and doing my
push-ups.' He was getting faster, too, but back then I mainly remember how
strong he was for a boy his age. Later that year, when he was 13, we had the
tumbling mats out one day and he and I got to wrestling, and damned if he
didn't flip me once, big as I was."
But though young Herschel had grown
larger, stronger and faster, he was still shorter than most of his classmates,
weaker than his father and two older brothers and slower than not only a half
dozen or so of the boys his age at school but also slower than one of his
sisters, Veronica, 18 months his senior, who's now a sprinter for Georgia. Yet
he was not discouraged, because he was gaining on them, and because he felt he
knew how to gain still more. Coach Jordan had told him how, a year
before. Push-ups, sit-ups and sprints. Push-ups, sit-ups and sprints.
During that first year Walker had done these exercises every day,
unless rain kept him from sprinting along the road leading from his house down
to the highway. Jordan
had never said how much to do, just to do those three things,
regularly. To Herschel, "regularly" meant every single day, and by
the end of that critical first year he had done more than 100,000 push-ups,
more than 100,000 sit-ups and had sprinted nearly half a million yards. He
almost always did his push-ups and sit-ups in the evening, while he was either
studying or watching television or, more usually, both. During every commercial
break he would pump out a quick 25 push-ups and 25 sit-ups or would alternate
the push-ups and sit-ups, doing 50 push-ups during one break, then 50 sit-ups
during the next, until he had accumulated approximately 300 of each.
As for his running, throughout each
summer and on almost every school day in clement weather he would run series
after series of short sprints, most of them 30 yards or less, most of them up
the hill to his house. Many of them were run against Veronica or, later, his
younger brother Lorenza. "We'd wait till the sun set in the
summertime," says Veronica, "and then we'd race."
Throughout junior high Herschel was to
follow this remarkable regimen every day, every year. He grew taller, and by
the ninth grade he stood about 5'10" and weighed 185 pounds, and the
muscles of his chest and shoulders and thighs were thick and full. But a couple
of boys in his grade still could outrun him. And he had yet to beat Veronica.
The prescription? Push-ups, sit-ups and sprints; push-ups, sit-ups and sprints.
And prayer.
"One of the things I used to pray
for every night was for God to let me beat Veronica," Walker recalls. "I promised that I'd
train hard and live a Christian life if only He'd let me get faster."
Finally, after his sophomore year in high school, he (and maybe He as well)
raced Veronica for perhaps the thousandth time, and this time Walker beat her. And then he beat her again.
"I was crushed," she recalls.
"I'd always been able to beat old Bo and I wasn't planning ever to let him
outrun me. I cried all night and then decided to quit track, but Mama talked to
me and helped me see that it had to come sometime, Herschel outrunning
me."
And, of course, as everyone knows by now,
in his junior and senior years Herschel out-or overran everybody else in Georgia. But
even during the heaviest workouts of his track and football seasons, he never
failed to do his push-ups and his sit-ups and, when he had the time and the
light, his sprints. He never lacked the will. Later on, he even added a little
distance work. Says Jordan
now, "I remember telling him one day early in his senior year that we were
concentrating so much on his sprinting, he'd have to get any distance work on
his own. Then, a few months later, I called out to his house late one evening
and his mother told me he was out for his after-supper run—about four miles.
He'd been doing it for months, she said. And all I'd done was mention it."
When assessing the path to his present
eminence, the one phrase with which Walker
is most comfortable is Hard Work. "I keep hearing and reading about all
this talent they say I've been blessed with," he says, "but I don't
see it that way. For a long time I never understood I was blessed, except for
having such a good family and all. But I do see I have been blessed, though not in the way
people think." He pauses, then points to his head. "This is where I've been blessed. Not in my
body. People can't believe how little and slow I was. But I was, and I remember.
And I know Coach Jordan
showed me the way and God gave me the strength to carry on through all those
years.
"My mind's like a general and my
body's like an army. I keep the body in shape and it does what I tell it to do.
I sometimes even feel myself almost lifting up out of my body and looking down
on myself while I run sprints. I'll be coaching myself from up above. 'Come on
Herschel,' I'll say to myself out loud, 'pick up those knees. Pump your arms.'
If an army stopped training it wouldn't take long for it to fall apart. An army
needs discipline, just like a man does."
One of the ways Walker trains his almost frighteningly
disciplined mind is through the practice of karate. "I got into it from
watching those Bruce Lee films, just like everybody else," he says,
"but once I began reading and thinking about it, I saw it as a way to
discipline myself, my power. Sometimes I train with a local instructor in Athens, but I always do
it for an hour or so every night in my room, by myself. I never miss. I think
it helps me in sports as well as in my studying. At first I did it because I
wanted to be tough, but I think I can say I'm beyond all that now."
If Walker has gone beyond the "get
tough" stage—and both his subsequent behavior and his face, which in repose
is so very still as to seem somehow Oriental, would tend to support his
assertion—he is one of the few Westerners to have so quickly internalized the
Zen foundations of karate and transcended the initial generative hostility of
most American boys to whom the activity appeals.
His karate teacher, Lawrence Huff,
observed recently that while Walker
enjoyed the repetitive forms—thekata—of karate, "he also likes to
spar. And man, he could definitely become a world champion if he had more time
to train. I think he could be a world champion in ballet if he really wanted to be. And he
still has an urgent need to better himself."
The words of another teacher are perhaps
instructive here. "He's the most unique athlete I've ever coached,"
Georgia Football Coach Vince Dooley said recently. "His combination of raw
talent and dedication is unbelievable. You'd think that he might rest on his
superior ability from time to time, but he never does. He's amazingly
disciplined. He always sits in the exact same chair in our team meetings and he
sits up straight and doesn't fidget. He pays close attention to everything
that's said and he never forgets a thing. Also, he's often the first one to the
workouts, and he always does more than he's asked to do in practice or in a game.
"I think that what happened back in
Wrightsville when he was a boy—being outrun by Veronica and being small and
everything—might have been the best thing that could have happened to Herschel.
That feeling he had of not being the best may have given him just enough of a
complex to instill that powerful drive to succeed."
The idea gives pause. Physiologists and
sprint coaches agree on one thing—the ability to run truly fast is a natural
gift; training is said to only marginally enhance performance. A physically
mature individual can expect training to provide little more than a 5%
improvement in sprinting speed—from a 10 flat 100-yard dash to a 9.5, for
example. So, unless the experts are all mistaken. Walker was born with a genetic predisposition
for extraordinary speed. Other premier sprinters almost without exception
remember having always been faster than their age-mates.
What distinguishes Walker's background from those of other
world-class sprinters is on the one hand his size and his relatively late maturation,
and on the other the fact that he just happened to grow up with a bunch of kids
who could really burn it. "It was freakish, really," recalls Jordan.
"In Herschel's small graduating class there were four or five others who
were 10 flat or under at 100 yards. Those kids had always been in Herschel's
grade as he grew up, and they'd always been fast."
Compared to his swifter schoolmates, Walker had unusually
large bones, and it seems possible that he simply matured later than other
world-class sprinters because of his heavy bone structure, as a bullmastiff
will mature more slowly than a whippet. And when such an athlete comes from a
loving, religious family led by a mother who always asked "one hundred and
ten percent" of her children, and grows up in an environment in which not
only many of his classmates but also his own sister can outrun him, that
athlete just may feel sufficiently marginal physically to develop those sorts
of compensatory psychological mechanisms usually possessed by the non-gifted or
the actually inferior, improbable as it seems.
Although the whole concept of
"complexes" is currently in disfavor with some psychiatrists, it's
interesting to note that Dr. Albert Adler, one of the analysts most closely
associated with these sorts of theoretical constructs, has argued that people
with real or imagined inferiorities might well, if they had understanding,
encouraging parents, compensate and transform their weakness into strength.
In any case, whether or not one
subscribes to the notion that Walker was first given an All-Universe pair of
designer genes and then, compensating or not, provided the "Hard
Work"; or to the notion that God simply rolled up His sleeves on March 3,
1962, spit on His hands and decided to show folks what would happen if He
really tried, the secret is out: Herschel Walker is one of a kind.
As to just how rara an avis he is, consider that Norm Van Brocklin
once said that Walker
could join any NFL team, that day, and be a starter. Walker was 17 years old. Consider also that
at a height of between 6' and 6'1" and a weight of approximately 222
pounds, he has had a vertical jump, without a run, of 40½". (One way to
determine the output of physical power: multiply the subject's weight in
kilograms by 2.21, and then multiply that product by the square root of the
subject's vertical jump measured in meters. Walker's leap of 40½" [1.03 meters] at
his body weight of 222 pounds [101 kilos] produced one of the highest power
outputs ever recorded—226.5.)
No wonder the crowd in Wrightsville used
to leap to its collective feet in roaring anticipation every time Walker, who
was an excellent high school basketball player, broke free near the goal for a
stuff. No wonder Gary Phillips, Walker's high school football coach, recalls
with a smile how college recruiters would begin to whine, salivate and pray for
Mephistopheles to show up as Herschel would thrust his incredible 17-year-old
body so heartstoppingly high into the air that his head seemed even with the
rim.
Consider also that even though Walker has a physique
that many bodybuilders would commit any number of unspeakable acts to possess,
he developed this heroic structure without the benefit of one of the most
ubiquitous aspects of major college football—weight training. Few people who have
seen him line up in the starting blocks of a sprint—a lion among cheetahs—or
who have looked closely at his combined size and muscularity can believe that
he became what he is without frequent doses of iron. Even the handful who
realize the magnitude of his push-up workouts—by now he may actually have done
1,000,000—suspect that he must have done at least some work with the weights.
Fact is, he has done some lifting, although not since high school, and even
then it was infrequent and haphazard, only done during part of the football
season in his senior year.
There were no weights at Johnson County
High in Wrightsville until the beginning of Herschel's senior year. Coach
Phillips recalls, "We finally scraped together enough money to get a few
weights, and naturally I was curious to see how much Herschel could lift. I'd
hoped to use 250 pounds as a sort of goal for all the bigger players on the
team, but I remember watching in amazement that first day as Herschel took that
250-pound barbell and pumped it up and down, up and down, like it was made of
Styrofoam. After he was finished he looked over at me, genuinely puzzled, and
said, 'Coach, 250 ain't heavy.' "
Phillips estimates that Walker spent no more than six or eight hours
in the weight room that fall. That's all, folks. Since going to Athens and bursting upon the consciousness of Bulldog
football fans, Walker
hasn't trained with weights at all. But he has been strength-tested with the
rest of the football team, and his natural strength, augmented by those
hundreds of thousands of push-ups, have allowed him to bench-press 375 pounds
once and 225 pounds—his approximate body weight on his last test day—for 24
repetitions. Only a seasoned lifter can appreciate how astonishing those
figures are, and how much training it would normally take for a 225-pound man
to be able to match Herschel's ability to chin himself with either hand. Or,
for that matter, how unlikely it is for anyone to have a percentage of bodyfat
estimated at under 5%, especially in a body fueled almost exclusively by
hamburgers.
Of course, one of the reasons Walker
doesn't follow Georgia's long-established weight program is that rather than
participate in the team's winter and spring workouts, he runs track, indoor and
out. But, one wonders, don't most Georgia track athletes train some
with the weights in season? Yes. Does Walker?
No. And doesn't the Georgia
football team have an in-season maintenance program with the weights? Yes. Does
Walker take
part? Well...no. The reluctance of conditioning coaches to put Herschel on a
weight program is understandable. They no doubt realize that a weight-room
injury to their wunderkind could quickly result in his becoming an assistant B
team coach at the Christian Country Day School
in Katmandu.
Moreover, the coaching staff reasons, with some justification, that because the
purpose of a weight program is to make an athlete strong, and because Walker is already strong
as a thousand-dollar mule, why tempt fate?
Dooley says forthrightly that Georgia's policy is for Walker to design his own program during the
season. Dooley knows how hard Walker
works, and he feels much as the owner of a perfectly tuned, frequently needed
Maserati would feel were someone to suggest that perhaps the car would go even
faster if it had some major work on the motor.
To lift or not to lift, that's the
question for Walker,
free to choose his own training program. His answer is startling. "Nobody
ever really asked me why I don't lift. They only ask me how I got so big without lifting. The truth is, I knew weights
would help me. I've seen them help too many football players and too many track
men. But up to now my body's gotten stronger and faster every year on my old
program, and what I reckon I'll do is to try and see how long I can keep improving
without the weights. One thing's sure. Soon as I don't make gains, I'm going on
a good weight program. The way I figure it, all the other guys my age have
lifted for years and they've already just about reached their physical
potential. I figure that when I kick in with a weight program, it ought to add
some solid weight and really give me a lot more power." He smiled as he
finished this distinctly thought-provoking statement, made at least partly to
himself. Scores of defensive players can testify to the percussive force
Herschel already produces, especially when he has the
time to take a step or two. When those opponents are either overcome by, or
forced to gang up to contain, the shock of a head-on hit by Walker, they at
least have the satisfaction of knowing they were bested by a man whose combined
size and speed—whose power—is unmatched in history. And is growing, because of
a continued genetic flowering and further refinements, zealously pursued, in
his basic exercise program. To his regular push-ups Walker has added hand-stand press-ups and
push-ups done with someone on his back to increase the resistance. During the
past summer he also has included sprint swimming in his routine of upper-body
work. The swimming was added when Walker,
in the pool by himself one day, noticed that a modified form of the
breaststroke, in which his body surges more upward than forward, gave his
chest, shoulders and upper back a terrific workout. This past summer he swam
every day he was able to get to a pool.
One thing is certain: When Walker decides
the time has come to lift, he will lift. And lift. Even his oldest friends
can't remember when he wasn't a worker. "I recollect old Herschel way back
in junior high doing all those push-ups," says Milton Moorman, Walker's good pal since
elementary school. "He'd do 'em and do 'em. And run? I remember when he
used to drag me over to the track on Sunday afternoon, our one day off, and
we'd pull the tire till I couldn't pull it no more. But Herschel, he'd be
pulling on it till it got slap dark."
The tire was a device rigged up by Jordan; it
involved putting a 16-pound shot inside a truck tire and attaching the tire to
a 15-foot steel cable, which was then tied to a leather belt around the
runner's waist. Dragging the tire developed Herschel's leg and hip power, as
did his run-without-ceasing assault on the slight grade leading 110 yards up to
his house from the highway. "I wish I had a dollar for every time Herschel
ran up that hill," his mother says. "Him and Veronica and the other
children would race and race. Even me and my husband would get into it. Later
on, some of the time when Herschel couldn't get nobody to race him, he'd go out
back to the field and chase those horses around. Herschel wanted to be good
mighty bad."
The influence of his big, solid family,
and especially of his mother and their shared religious faith, cannot be
overlooked in any explanation of Herschel's character. "Last year in Athens I asked Herschel
if he ever heard Mama talking to him while he was doing something like running
or studying, and he laughed and asked me was I crazy, that Mama was down in
Wrightsville," Veronica said recently. "But when I told him I was
serious, he said, 'Yes, I do, Veronica. I hear her all the time. I can feel her
with me just as plain as day.' She always told us to strive, to always give one
hundred and ten percent. That's what she always said, a hundred and ten
percent. And that's what we still hear her say."
The training Walker got from Christine Walker still shows
in small but revealing ways. "The other day I got up even earlier than
usual because I had an early appointment," he told a visitor not long ago,
"and I left my room without doing something I always do—making my bed.
Well, all morning I had that bed on my mind, all rumpled up back there in my
room. Finally, just before noon, I couldn't stand it anymore and I went back to
the dorm and made it up." But lest the unkempt among us feel at all sorry
for a person in whose life regularity is so paramount, we should remember that
Picasso worked hard at his craft almost every day of his long life and that
Kant was so systematic in his daily walks in Königsberg that the hausfraus were
said to set their clocks by his passing.
One of the things this passion for
scheduling has allowed Walker to do is to excel in the classroom—he has at
least a solid B average as a criminology major—while maintaining his athletics,
his personal conditioning program and an interview calendar that would have
daunted Hubert Humphrey. Herschel is proud of his schoolwork, understandably
so, and resents any suspicion that his good marks result from his prowess on
the playing field. He goes to class every day he's in Athens and he keeps up with his work. He
graduated as president of the honor society in his class in high school because
he lugged an armful of books home every evening after practice and studied late
into the night.
Of course, the fact that he thrives on
half the normal amount of sleep does give him a daily four-hour advantage over
the rest of us. And this with no alarm clock. When asked what would happen if
he went to sleep at 10 p.m. or so, he replied, "I've tried that a couple
of times, but I just wake up at two or three the next morning." Although
he lionshares certain traits with his siblings, such as thick bones and speed
afoot, his sleeping patterns, consistent since his midteens, are his alone.
Many explanations exist for such a
condition. One of particular interest centers around the fact that many
strength athletes who have used large amounts of injectable testosterone, the
male hormone, to improve their performances have noticed that one of its side
effects was that they were rarely able to sleep for more than four or five
hours at a time. The point of this observation is most definitely not to
suggest that any reason exists to even suspect that Walker would use testosterone, but merely to
speculate as to whether or not he may, as part of his genetic makeup, have a
level of natural testosterone far beyond the norm. Were this so, it might even
help explain his upper body, which looks rather like a dark brown, triangularly
shaped nylon sack filled with just the right number of 16-pound shots.
But whether it is his body or his mind
that wakes him early each morning. Walker
fills his days with a sense of purpose far beyond his years. "I know I've
been called to do something special," he says softly, sounding for all the
world like Frodo Baggins agreeing to bear to Mordor the Ring of Power,
"but I'm not sure what it will be. Maybe it will be in football, but
football's only part of my life. All I know is that my part is to strive to do
my best. To try and not to quit. If I can just do that, I reckon I'll be shown
the way."
Sometimes when he says such serious
things it is easy to be cynical, to suspect disingenuousness. But too many
people of too many perspectives will testify to the fact that Walker's maturity and sense of mission are
genuine, though not so cloying that he lacks either youthful high spirits or
humor. His love of dancing, for instance, is such that he will break into the
wave, say, or the gigolo at the first sound of a record he likes, regardless of
where he is; he's as subject to music as wheat is to wind. In addition, he has
a subtle wit, sometimes self-deprecating, as revealed in his description of his
role as a tree in a high school play. Burt Reynolds had dropped by to watch
practice one day, leading an interviewer to ask whether acting was something Walker had ever
considered. "I was in a play when I was a senior," he said.
"A play?"
"Yeah. I was a tree."
"A tree? Did you have any
lines?"
"No, but I was an awesome
tree."
Or tongue in cheek, as evidenced in a
televised interview following the recent Clemson game. It seems that one of the
Clemson players had been quoted in a South
Carolina paper as saying he'd been "dreaming of
hitting Herschel." This quote, as such quotes are wont to do, found its
way to the bulletin board of the Georgia training room. And, as fate
would have it, the Clemson player responsible for the quote was the one whose
body was crumpled by an oh-so-replayable block Walker threw early in the second half. All of
which gave Walker
the opportunity, when asked by the commentator about the block, to refer to the
newspaper quote and say, with a small smile, "Well, I'm glad I was able to
help make his dreams come true."
It is to be hoped that the future will
find him increasingly willing to make such fine comments. A good sign is that
he does seem to have gradually become more plainspoken. He has never lacked confidence,
but he has the rural Southerner's deep-seated dislike of the loudmouth. And to
this natural repugnance has been added supporting advice from people such as
Ford dealer Bob New-some, his advisor and former employer in Wrightsville, a
man who has given much to, and received much from, his relationship with Walker.
"I guess I've told Herschel a lot of
times that he'd do well to let his ability speak for him, at least at
first," Newsome says. "And I'm so proud of him, of how he's done, and
how he's handled the celebrity business. I probably give him too much advice,
but I can't help myself. I think of him the same way I do my sons. I do. And I
used to be bad on the race question. I was wrong and I know it because of what
Herschel has meant to me. Ten years ago, if anyone had told me I'd feel toward
a black person like I've come to feel toward Herschel, I'd have just laughed.
But he's helped me see past all that, and I'm thankful to him."
In lifting himself so far, Walker has lifted others,
and not just other athletes. The chaplain of the Georgia
football team, the Rev. Claude McBride, describes many instances of Walker's sensitivity and
care in ministering to the needs of those around him, white and black. To many
people ensnared in racial dilemmas, Herschel seems to walk a tightrope, but
perhaps race is one more area in which he doesn't share the limitations of
others. He has a serious romantic relationship now—the first of his life—with a
former half-miler for Georgia, Cindy DeAngelis, a woman his own age from New York, whose father
is Italian and whose mother is Argentinian. They are in love.
Herschel Walker is already a world-class
sprinter, a football player of unprecedented ability and potential and a young
man preternaturally wise. It is going to be fascinating to watch as he follows
his calling, wherever it leads him. It will be especially fascinating to watch
him confront the many pitfalls sure to lie in his path—the Balrogs and the
Wizards and, most crucially, his own growing power. May he outhit, outwit or
outrun them all.
NU