I don’t know what it is about contract offers on the eve of national championship games, but it turns out that Herschel Walker was wrestling with a $1 million dollar check from the owner of the USFL New Jersey Generals the night before the 1983 Sugar Bowl. Like Vince Dooley two years before with an Auburn job offer, Walker had second thoughts and wanted to walk away.
Unfortunately, unlike Dooley, Herschel was an amateur and couldn’t.
“(Walker) got into a trap and couldn’t get out of it,” Dooley said. “He tried his best to get out of it. They tore up what he had signed, which is what they said they would do. He said he didn’t want to do this and they said ‘If you’ll sign it, if you don’t want to do it by 7 a.m., we’ll tear it up.’
“And guess what happened? They put all this pressure on him all night long, but the guy tore (the document) up and flushed it down the commode. But somebody made a copy of it and released it to the Boston Globe, and that’s how it all jumped out of there.”
Somebody made a copy and released it, hunh. How convenient for the Generals.
So Walker never takes the money, cancels the contract and still wound up having his college eligibility terminated. I bet that rankled. Maybe that explains why Dooley wound up suing the NCAA a few years later over its control of television.