Nouvelle arrivée
American Kings
The Sports Plus take
What it really takes to be a quarterback, from Pop Warner to the Hall of Fame.
ESPN's Seth Wickersham follows the quarterback's life from backyard dreams through high school, college, the NFL and retirement. He talked to the greats, from John Elway and Peyton Manning to Steve Young and Warren Moon, and to young players like Arch Manning still trying to make it. It's about the pressure and the price as much as the glory. A must for anyone who played QB, or raised one.
Shelf
How it reads
Moderate
Best for
- Football fans
- Quarterbacks and their parents
- Broncos fans (John Elway is in it)
About this book
- Author
- Seth Wickersham
- Publisher
- Hyperion Avenue
- Published
- September 9, 2025
- Format
- Hardcover
- Pages
- 416
- ISBN-10
- 1368099181
- ISBN-13
- 978-1368099189
Book description
Pull back the curtain on the most powerful position in all of sports. The New York Times bestselling author of It's Better to be Feared examines football's QB lifecycle: high school, college, the NFL, retirement--and all that comes with it.
*** The Instant New York Times bestseller ***
A Boston Globe and NPR pick for Best Books of 2025
"A MUST BUY" -- New York Times / The Athletic
"The definitive treatise on the pinnacle of sport." -- Esquire
"An instant classic--not just a great sports book but a great cultural history."
--Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life
The quarterback: the American equivalent of royalty, long glamorized, mythologized, and worshipped. Still, long before the Super Bowl trophies, massive contracts, brand deals, and millions of social media followers comes the dream. From the backyard to Pop Warner, from high school to college, from the NFL to the Hall of Fame, becoming the country's ultimate idol requires single-minded focus while navigating a maze of bad breaks, insecurities, jealousy, pressure, and fame.
Long known as the outsider's guide into this elite world, Seth Wickersham's fresh reporting goes deep into the quarterback journey, measuring the distance between what the men who have traveled it expected and what they found at the end of the road. Through unprecedented access into the lives of dozens of quarterbacks and generational greats such as Johnny Unitas, John Elway, Peyton Manning, Warren Moon, Steve Young, and others, as well as those figures striving to be remembered, like Caleb Williams and Arch Manning, Wickersham reveals how this one position has become emblematic of success in American life.
As an inside look into a uniquely American job and a uniquely American obsession with football, American Kings is a must-read for sports fans and anyone who wants to understand what the price of ambition tells us about the quest for achievement and status.
About the author
Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN and the author of two New York Times bestsellers, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and It's Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness. Focusing primarily on long-form enterprise and investigative work on the National Football League, Wickersham has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and his stories have been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, and Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists, among others. Released in 2021, It's Better to Be Feared was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by Sports Illustrated and Best Sports Book by the National Sports Media Association. He lives in Connecticut with his family.
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