Carolina's outstanding tight end is who he is—a good ol' boy and a money player
By Alan Shipnuck
"Maybe I play the whole good ol' boy thing up a little too much," says Panthers tight end Wesley Walls, who was born and raised in the backwaters of Mississippi. "I know everyone thinks of me as kind of country. But what can I do? I am who I am."
And who, exactly, is that? He's an All-Pro whose soft hands and hard head got him 61 receptions and 10 touchdowns last year. He's an eight-year veteran who is the key to the Panthers' short passing game. He's a team leader whose fun-lovin', easygoing style helped turn the Carolina locker room into one of the most harmonious in football. And he's every deer's worst nightmare.
"In the hunting world, running dogs after deer is kind of redneck," says Walls in a drawl as thick as river mud. "Well, where I come from, we'd turn the dogs loose. Me and my daddy would jump in a pickup truck and go like 60 miles an hour down some old gravelly dirt road tryin' to head off the deer. Man, it was so much fun."
Walls no longer employs the pickup method, but he is still a die-hard hunter. Last September, after catching a touchdown pass against the Falcons in a Sunday-afternoon game, he dropped to his knees in the end zone and shot off a few rounds from an imaginary rifle. "Dove season started the next day in North Carolina, and I knew I wouldn't be able to go," he explained later. "I figured I'd better go ahead and get me a few birds while I had a chance."
Walls has shaped his career by seizing the moment. He grew up in Pontotoc and played his first three years of high school ball as an option quarterback at South Pontotoc High. Feeling stymied in his quest for a college scholarship, he transferred midway through his junior year to crosstown powerhouse Pontotoc.
It was a move akin to a Montague's marrying a Capulet. To make the move legitimate under Mississippi's byzantine eligibility rules, Charlie Walls, a general maintenance man with a local electric company, and his loving wife, Betty, a BellSouth operator, had to obtain a legal separation. Then Charlie and Wesley had to move to the Pontotoc school district, into an apartment "the size of a bathroom," says Wesley.
Problem was, they take their football seriously in Mississippi. South Pontotoc raised all manner of unpleasantness about the move, and the whole affair wound up in court. Walls was stripped of his eligibility for the basketball and baseball seasons of his junior year but was O.K. to hit the gridiron as a senior. "I'll never forget the South Pontotoc principal looking me in the eye and saying, 'Son, you'll never play college football,'" Walls recalls. "Every time I get a game check, I think back to him."
Walls became an all-state fullback his senior year and earned a free ride to Ole Miss. He spent his first three years there at defensive end, but as a senior he was moved to outside linebacker. Shortly before the season started, he was also installed at tight end. In the season opener, against Memphis State, he started both ways, catching a 17-yard pass and making one unassisted tackle. "By halftime I was flat beat," he says. So for the rest of the season he kept his starting tight end duties and became a bloodthirsty third-down pass rusher. "It was great, man, just hittin' and runnin' over people and hurtin' folks," Walls says, a tad too enthusiastically. His smash-mouth style earned him All-America honors at tight end and made him a second-round draft choice of the 49ers in 1989.
Ask Walls for the highlight of his time at Ole Miss and he'll tell you it was meeting the woman of his dreams, the former Christy Washington, a traffic-stopping beauty who had bagged her first deer before she got her driver's license. Ever the romantic, Walls sweet-talked his intended into walking down the aisle during his rookie year with this irresistible proposition: "Let's go to Tahoe and play some blackjack, and while we're there, let's get married." He hit the jackpot again at the end of his first pro season by catching a nine-yard pass in the second quarter of San Francisco's victory over Denver in Super Bowl XXIV.
But Walls's remaining four years in San Francisco came up snake eyes. He was stuck on the depth charts behind All-Pro Brent Jones and suffered a series of what he calls "freakish" injuries to his shoulders. Walls spent all of the 1992 and '93 seasons on the injured reserve list, though he says he was good to go in '93. "I really believe they stashed me on injured reserve just so I could be Joe's personal workout boy," he says of a certain quarterback named Montana. "In '92 I caught the first 10-yard out he threw after his elbow surgery—most media attention I ever got in my life. I came off the field, had 100 guys shoutin' at me, 'How'd Joe throw?' It was cool, man. I made 250 grand that year to play catch with Joe Montana."
That off-season, during a hunting trip cum vision quest, Walls decided it was "do-or-die time, man." So the unrestricted free agent lit out for the New Orleans Saints. "I've made a lot of life decisions sitting in a deer stand, holding a gun," he says. "It comes to you so much clearer out there."
Walls had a solid season in the Big Easy in 1994, catching 38 passes, but he really broke through the following year, when he set a team record for tight end receptions, with 57. Carolina then wooed him with a three-year, $4 million deal that now looks like a bargain.
"He's a money player," says Bill Polian, the Panthers' general manager, referring to Walls's clutch receiving skills. But he could just as easily be describing his status as a pool shark.
At a recent golf tournament, Walls and his partner, Panthers quarterback Kerry Collins, took on all comers in a late-night pocket billiards marathon to the tune of $100 a game. The game lasted well into the night. What was the duo's take? Let's just say Walls did O.K. for himself as well as his partner.
"You gotta take care of your quarterback, man," says Walls, laughing.
Collins has some kind words for his pool partner. "What I like most about Wesley as a receiver is that he's smart," he says. "He understands what we're trying to get done. He can read a defense and know immediately what he has to do to get open."
"I'm a lot smarter than you think," says Walls. "Don't ever underestimate me.
I had a 3.41 in engineering at Ole Miss. And I was valedictorian of my high school class."
He pauses for effect. "Of course, that was in Mississippi. I only had to beat out, like, four guys."
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