In his book, Walker wrote that his life began to unravel after he retired from football in 1998. But he didn’t know the cause.
The Heisman Trophy winner said he reached a breaking point in February 2001. Furious with a man who was late delivering a car, Walker hopped in his Mercedes sedan with a loaded gun to hunt him down.
“The logical side of me knew that what I was thinking of doing to this man — murdering him for messing up my schedule — was not a viable alternative,” Walker wrote. “But another side of me was so angry that all I could think about was how satisfying it would feel to step out of the car, pull out the gun, slip off the safety, and squeeze the trigger. It would be no different from sighting at the targets I’d fired at for years — except for 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.”
As Walker drove to find the man, he said an internal struggle played out in his head. He pulled to a stop after seeing a “SMILE JESUS LOVES YOU” sticker on the back of a truck.
“Something was clearly wrong with me and I had to figure out what it was,” he wrote.
Walker went to see Jerry Mungadze. The two had met decades earlier at a track meet and reconnected at a Dallas dinner party. Mungadze now said he specialized in treating trauma patients. Mungadze worked with Walker over the next weeks, then handed down a diagnosis: dissociative identity disorder.
Walker said he had 12 alternate personalities — or alters — including the warrior (who played football), the sentry (who avoided emotional attachments) and the thrill seeker (who played Russian roulette with a loaded gun).