Abstract
A bijection is given between fixed-point free involutions of {1,2,...,2N} with maximum decreasing subsequence size 2p and two classes of vicious (non-intersecting) random walker configurations confined to the half-line lattice points l⩾1. In one class of walker configurations the maximum displacement of the rightmost walker is p. Because the scaled distribution of the maximum decreasing subsequence size is known to be in the soft edge GOE (random real symmetric matrices) universality class, the same holds true for the scaled distribution of the maximum displacement of the rightmost walker.