I Dislike Your Favorite Team

[updated] Um. Yeahbutwhat?

ATLANTA (AP) -- Georgia football great Herschel Walker has multiple personalities -- a revelation in an upcoming book that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.

"That's all news to me," former Georgia coach Vince Dooley said in Friday editions of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "All I know is whatever personality he had when he had the football was the one I liked."

"Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, a publicist at Simon & Schuster.


This is a confusing revelation, no? I mean, Walker has been in the public eye for decades (he was on Pros. vs. Joes last year, even). He was playing a sport that necessarily demanded that he be around several dozen people almost every single day of his life. No one noticed this before? Were all his personalities people who loved playing football? I don't know a thing about this disease beyond what decades of watching Law & Order have taught me. But the idea that it could afflict someone very much in the public eye, always surrounded by lots of people, and no one knew? That's shocking. Perhaps that quote from the coach is more telling than he meant it to be. No one cared if he sounded different as long as he pounded that rock. But that suggests a level of callousness that I'm not sure I'm willing to believe (even with the sad Dexter Manley story on my mind forever).

So what the hell is going on here?

Update: Got a missive from a Brain Doctor I know on the subject. He says, "Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka mult. personality disorder) remains perhaps the most controversial diagnosis out there. Dissociative symptoms in general are often linked to specific (often trauma related) triggers, so I guess it would be possible for the most blatant DID symptoms to be very context specific for a particular individual, and therefore not readily apparent to those around them. Then again, maybe this represents some kind of an exaggeration of severe mood swings, etc. Its impossible to judge a case like that based on the limited information available (and filtered through the media to boot)."

So essentially, it is possible that if Walker was at his most comfortable, most happy on the footfall field, the symptoms may have never presented themselves, or seemed to the outward observor as just Walker being moody. Interestin'.