Herschel Walker: Football Superstar, Terrible Businessman?

Herschel Walker is a retired NFL player, a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, and as the Daily Beast reported, a really bad businessman.

Walker played many sports, appeared in the 1992 Winter Olympics where he competed in the two-man U.S bobsled team and is an undefeated MMA fighter, according to his website.

His businesses are another matter. 

The Donald Trump-backed candidate entered the suit-and-tie world shortly after retiring from the NFL in 1997, founding Renaissance Man Inc., a health-and-wellness food company geared at selling health-conscious products. Its flagship drink, aptly named Aloe-Lu-Ya (a play on the word Hallelujah), launched in 1999 but never garnered success.

“This product launch was a failure.” the company noted in a 2002 SEC filing.

This was just the beginning of a turbulent journey filled with exaggerated boasts and claims of success.

Walker founded what would become an umbrella corporation named H. Walker Enterprises in 2002, headquartered in Savannah, Georgia.

One of his companies, named Renaissance Man Food Services (RMFS), claimed to be the largest minority-owned food company in the U.S. Walker was recorded telling Fox News in 2018 the company owned a chicken processing plant that employed 600 people.

Alas, a COVID-19 pandemic court filing shows the company reported just eight employees and applied for two Paycheck Protection Program loans totaling $180,000.

The company didn’t own a chicken processing plant, either. Instead, poultry manufacturers supply chicken to RMFS, which the company then sells to other retailers.

The truth came to light in 2018 when RMFS was sued, causing Walker to retract previous statements that the company owned production centers.

“I don’t mean to speak of ‘own’ in a technical sense,” he told the court.

In 2020, Walker claimed the upholstery company, Renaissance Manufacturing, also known as Renaissance Hospitality, was the largest minority-owned apparel company in the U.S. It was not.

And then there is the matter of ownership.

"According to a review of business records, that company — either Renaissance Manufacturing or Renaissance Hospitality, depending on the telling (though both are now dissolved) — was not his [Walker's] in any common sense of ownership; it was part of a business arrangement with the true owner," stated The Daily Beast. Both businesses are now dissolved.

And if that wasn’t enough to blur the perception of an otherwise upstanding member of society, Walker claimed he graduated valedictorian of his high school and received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Georgia — neither of which is true.

Walker, who is currently trying to unseat Sen. Raphael Warnock, skipped a recent GOP primary debate indicating he will not participate in primary debates, perhaps in response to the recent investigations and the revelations of his failed business ventures.

It would make sense that ex-President Donald Trump, who lives by the principle of truthful hyperbole, would endorse a like-minded individual such as Walker.

Photo: U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Samuel King Jr., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons