American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback

by Seth Wickersham

Overview

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."An instant classic—not just a great sports book but a great cultural history."—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A LifeThe 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781368114837
Publisher:	Hyperion Avenue Digital
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Sold by:	DISNEY PUBLISHING WORLDWIDE -EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of It's Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness. Focusing primarily on longform 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.

Read an Excerpt

Part I. Origins.

John Elway sometimes watches his younger self—the Elway that I loved—on YouTube. More than reliving old memories, he likes to see how that guy stacks up to the current guys, the newest models. He’s pleased with the answer. We’re in a bar south of Denver on a May afternoon—as it happens, forty years to the day after Elway demanded and was granted a trade from the Baltimore Colts to the Denver Broncos in 1983. Quick to smile and slim at sixty-two, down thirty-five pounds from a few years ago when he was leading a manic life as the Broncos general manager, he’s just flown in from “a good run” at the craps tables in Las Vegas. He sits with his back to the bar. The lunch crowd points and whispers. It’s hard to imagine a professional athlete meaning as much to a city as Elway has meant to Denver over the years. We talk about beginnings. He tells me about earning his first letterman jacket: Granada Hills Highlanders, 1977. A year earlier his father, Jack, had gotten a job as head coach at Cal State Northridge in the valley north of Los Angeles. Elway can still see the black leather sleeves and the Kelly green wool. His name stitched in white. “Like a trophy,” he says. He remembers the pins he put on the letter, remembers proudly walking the school halls. “Making all-league, trying to make all-city . . .” The jacket now hangs behind glass in a restaurant bearing his name, and the football field at Granada Hills bears his name, too. But there was a moment when one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time didn’t think of himself as a quarterback at all.

Football was once the expression of a certain sort of omnivorous land grab, a bruising ground-level grind to take what we see as ours. But the spiral, a pass—the first known example of which probably came in 1885—and its particular and exhilarating and efficient carve through space, a pursuit and trajectory, metaphysical and mystical and metaphorical all at once, a demonstration of ambition and grace, untethered, bold, full of possibility, brought the game into the realm of discovery. Only in 2020 did scientists pin down the physics of a football in flight, why it turns over in the air rather than sinking to the ground. A spiral can be the offspring of a variety of arm angles, from over-the-top to three-quarters, sidearm, and even sometimes underhand, but no two are quite alike. Joe Namath’s is different from Johnny Unitas’s is different from Terry Bradshaw’s is different from Joe Montana’s is different from John Elway’s is different from Tom Brady’s is different from Patrick Mahomes’s. That wrist snap and twist-swirl, that whip of the finger, it’s a signature, like a strand of DNA, a statement of style and intent. If it didn’t fly in that tight, silent spin, there would be no such thing as a quarterback. Not a magical one. Not of the kind Elway was. Not of the kind I wanted to be.

But it does, and because it does, the quarterback’s power, pressures, and responsibility sometimes seem near limitless. The first time I saw Elway throw a football in person was November 24, 1991, Broncos at Seahawks. I was fifteen years old. The word I’d use to describe his ball’s aesthetic now, but didn’t think of then, is determined. He threw spirals that had muscular ideas and intentions, that knew what they wanted. The ball he threw, and the self-assured—if not outright arrogant—barely contained violence with which he threw it, conspired to make him execute things others wouldn’t try, setting up deep in the pocket and calmly hitting impossible margins on the sidelines and invisible gaps between defenders down the middle of the field. Television never did it justice. You had to be there to see it, and once you saw it you couldn’t shake it. Some of the best throws in Super Bowl history belong to Elway, even in the games he lost. In Super Bowl XXI, on a team devoid of stars and facing the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor and one of the most stacked defenses in NFL history, coached by Bill Belichick, Elway ran left as the pocket collapsed and pulled up to throw deep. It was third and long, second quarter. If you watch it now and pause the video at the point of release, his body is leaning to the left, like a heeling sailboat, as the ball leaves his hand on a diagonal across the field, to the right. The receiver he hits is running a post route away from him. It looked casual; he never truly turned his arm loose, for fear of injury. Nothing about this throw makes sense. Elway lets fly on the hashmark at the Broncos’ 14-yard line and Vance Johnson catches it on the run beyond the right hashmark at the Giants’ 32-yard line. No physics explain it, just raw fearlessness and a gift applied to the max.

I watch it on repeat. You should, too.

In his best moments, Elway bent the logic of the football field the way Michael Jordan refused the laws of gravity and Wayne Gretzky manipulated objects, speeds, and angles. He played free, his own authority on what mattered and what was possible.

“You just feel like you can do anything,” he says.

At fifteen, John Elway was a running back. Calvin Hill of the Cowboys was his favorite player. He wore number 35 because Hill did. He liked to run and to lower his shoulder on contact. Quarterback, as he knew it, was boring. All you did was hand off. And anyway, Elway’s best sport was baseball. But in 1975, on the first day of ninth grade, on Military Hill in Pullman, Washington, his father told him who he was about to be. They were driving in the family’s ’73 Impala—Sheila the Chevy, the Elways called it—on the way to school, and John was talking about going out for running back, and Jack shook his head and quickly pulled the car over and put it into park.

Jack knew what he’d set his son up for, a particular kind of life and prophecy and duty as much as a position to play. A year later, when the family moved to Los Angeles and found Granada Hills, he chose a high school before he bought a house. The program had a progressive passing offense. It threw as a mandate and an imperative and a higher calling, as a way to set up the run rather than the other way around. That’s where John was headed, where Jack was headed, where football, and maybe the country, was headed. Yes, John was the son of the new coach at Northridge. Yes, people saw him as a hotshot outsider coming to dominate. So yes, there was pressure. But the way to survive it, Jack was sure, was to throw. That’s why they’d come. To throw. Jack saw something special in John. Not just the powerful arm—Elway calls it “my security thing”—but the engine inside him, an intense expectation of self and an idea of worth and identity, something burning. When John was just ten, father and son would play Ping-Pong matches until two in the morning, the boy always insisting on another chance to slay the old man and full of rage when he came up short. There were marks on the basement walls from where John threw paddles in anger. Jack wanted to nurture that fire, channel it, see where it could take his son. Raised in a small Washington logging town, the son of a plumber, Jack had made it to Washington State as a quarterback himself, but injuries cut his dream short. He proposed to his wife, Jan, after only a few dates and with only one condition: “I have to have a son.”

Elway says he can’t recall the exact conversation in the Impala. You’re growing. It’s time. You’re not as fast as before, and you need to get stronger, but you’ve got this thing, a singular awareness and singular power. This is the moment. But he remembers the message like it was yesterday. Jack pulled over. Jack talked and John listened. “Fifteen minutes later, I got out of the car a quarterback,” he says.

Editorial Reviews

Advance Praise for American Kings:

“A must-buy for not only every serious football fan but also every actual quarterback, from high school to the Hall of Fame.”
—New York Times / The Athletic

“[The title] sounds grandiose until you realize just how much pressure rides on the shoulders of a quarterback, on and off the field…. To a certain degree, “American Kings” is not so different from any parable about the perils of ambition.”
—The New Yorker

"Catnip for sports fans"
—Garden & Gun

“[Wickersham's] ability to scan the field and make smart, crisp connections earns him standing with Plimpton and Halberstam among the finest sports chroniclers.”
— Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize winning author of King: A Life, and Ali: A Life

“Seth Wickersham’s new work is subtitled A Biography of the Quarterback, and, yessir, it’s not about a single quarterback, it’s about all of them. It’s about anybody who has ever played, aspired to play, or been obsessed with the quarterback position. [...] read it, folks. I urge you. It’s not just about football. It’s about a kingdom of its own.”
— Rick Telander, National Sports Media Association Hall of Famer

"A unicorn of a book.... a parable about American ambition, which feels like the exact window we need right now into our national psyche. This will go down as one of the greatest sports books ever, and one of the best books of the year period."
—Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn

"No writer has ever gotten the quarterbacks who've become part of of our culture and part of our lives to reveal the nature and cost of their preeminence the way Seth has in the pages of his book... a book written in words that spiral."
— Tom Junod, two-time National Magazine Award winner and author of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man

"What elevates American Kings above most books about the QB – and there have been many – is its ambition. Wickersham wants to explain not just how the position works, but why it matters: how it reflects American ideas about leadership, masculinity, power, and self-invention."
— Pigskin Books

"A must-read for all football fans, but of particular interest to Denver Broncos fans."
— Broncos Wire / USA Today

“Football fans and pigskin prognosticators both will love this book in a snap.”
— The Miami Times


Praise for Wickersham's It's Better to Be Feared, the National Sports Media Association's Book of the Year:

“The definitive document of the Belichick/Brady dynasty.”
―Bill Simmons, The Ringer

"On my Mount Rushmore of sports books. The writing is fantastic, the reporting better."
―Peter King, NBC Sports

"[A]n honest, sprawling, meticulously reported, and beautifully written portrayal of perhaps the greatest and probably the most unlikely dynasty in modern professional sports . . . ."
― Chad Finn, Boston Globe

From the Publisher