Consider quarterback | New Yorker

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is the Super Bowl champion, who has played the Super Bowl MVP in two of the last three Super Bowls. In his first (2023), he achieved one of his best performances in his career, and it doesn’t matter, his team ended up losing that year. The Hurts never missed the playoff quarterback. He can shoot deep balls or find small creases, tear the defense and run. He never seemed confused or overwhelmed. Sometimes literally, he carries the team on his back. All he did was progress. He calmly but powerfully grasped everything defense gave him in the air and on the ground Thursday night in the opening game against the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL season, leading his team to victory. He looked at the control. Again, he threw the stinky smell from time to time. He is not Lamar Jackson. He lacks the talent of Patrick Mahomes. He didn’t have the fire from Josh Allen. He is a Beautiful Tush With arms. Last season, pain wasn’t even the most important player. He’s a good quarterback, but not Great One, at least not yet. A great quarterback is like a lewd: you know when you see it.

Why is it so important? The quarterback is not only another spot on the football field. It is a unique American institution, a call related to the fundamental myths about leadership and manhood. “The idea of ​​quarterbacks has and remains with who we are and how we view the idea of ​​the country,” journalist Seth Wickersham wrote in his new book.The King of America”, which sounds grand until you realize how much pressure is put on the quarterback, on the field and on the shoulders. Actors and musicians are more famous for their decisions being the greater consequences. Young told Wickersham.

Wickersham knew how it felt to walk the hall at a quarterback at American High School. And, after being transferred to a wide range of receivers, he knew the feeling of walking the hall as a person who wasn’t. His book is an attempt to understand the differences. He spent years researching in archives and talking to the best people ever – John Elway, Tom Brady, Young, Warren Moon, the Manning family Joe Namath, and family with positions with certain people, including Johnny Unitas, Y. A. A. Tittle and Bob Waterfield. He talked to the quarterbacks and they weren’t great. He interviewed coaches, agents and development masters. He covered up a handful of prodigy and criticized their father. Wicksham wondered what would happen to him if he had fulfilled his dream, this Dream.

The answer is fascinating, but it is usually ugly. To some extent, the “King of America” ​​is no different from any allegory about the dangers of ambition. Genius in one area of ​​life may develop in other areas. Great has costs, and sometimes terrible. These stories are full of alcohol, not to mention depression, domestic violence, toxic parenting, pain-pain, psychological and physical. It seems that football can release the narcissistic personality that normal society may limit. Being a quarterback means being selfish and sometimes delusional. Someone at Elite 11, one of the senior quarterback camps, told Wickersham that the camp “collected very few assholes.” Brady said at one point: “I had to draw on part of my emotions, radical, angry, decisive, unreasonable. All of these things.” At the end of the book, Elway sat in a very lonely bar, reflecting on his life as a competitor. “Emotionally, you kind of…” he said, before the pause, “twisted.”

Wickersham wrote Andrew Luck’s profile, after his unexpected luck retirement and exit from public life, he started working on the book and spent a lot of time at his luck home in Indianapolis. Luck, who worked as an engineering major at Stanford, designed the house for a quarterback. There is a movie room and a body therapy room. But now the movie room is a home office, and luck is to make eggs for his daughter rather than tie ankles. He has left the game due to the severity of the injury and due to what he has done to his personality. Becoming a true quarterback requires him to be a control freak, put himself first and become someone he doesn’t like. Luck is not one of the core characters of the book, but his story haunts it. Wixham told me it reveals something essential. Quarterback is not what you have to do. This is not a job. This is your stuff.

The challenge and opportunity of post-football luck is to figure out that he doesn’t have the sport, even though he isn’t fully sworn in. He is now the general manager of Stanford University’s football program. Elway is a tragic character, but he ends the book and is happy for his life. Steve Young – not born as an artist like Elway or Joe Montana, but a good student who remembers notes – is sometimes a wise stand-in for the author. In the alumni competition with young men, the young man, there is no chance to resist the last test of the spiral. Wickersham also revisited his quarterback days and found himself reluctant to give up on his idealization of his role and sense of failure. At the end of the book, in the NFL, combined with Indianapolis for a week, he drank a beer with his old center and asked why he failed the quarterback. “You don’t have a chance,” replied his borderman. “We can’t stop it.” Wickersham listened to his friends describing his strengths and blessed them. He had a chance to see himself as his identity again: “his quarterback.”