Peyton Manning

Sample

Ray Lucas with David Seigerman

In Under Pressure, Ray Lucas provides fans with a timely, uncensored look at pro football's play-at-all-costs culture. Overcoming questions about his size and skills as a quarterback, Lucas persevered and went on to play seven seasons in the NFL. His professional football career, however, came to a sudden end at age 30, when a neck injury caused him to collapse on the sideline during training camp. Instructed by NFL doctors that surgery wasn't an option, Lucas turned to painkillers for relief, but as his tolerance for medication escalated and his NFL insurance coverage expired, he began to pla.

Sample

David Kopay and Perry Deane Young

"Coach Vince Lombardi always told us backs to 'run to daylight.' That's exactly what I was doing that day when I reached for the phone to call Lynn Rosellini (Washington Star reporter). By that time I knew that there was nothing else I could do. My hands were shaking. It was game time. The National Anthem was playing." The time was December, 1975. David Kopay, ten-year veteran running back for the San Francisco Forty-Niners (where teammate John Brodie dubbed him "Psyche" for his aggressive play), the Detroit Lions, the Washington Redskins, the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers, had decided it was time to begin to end his long personal nightmare and publicly reveal his sexual preference for men-the first professional athlete ever to do so. To explain why he chose to do so meant revealing the conflicting emotional touchstones of an entire life, including his early education at a Catholic seminary, his co-captaincy of the 1964 University of Washington Rose Bowl team, his sexual experience with a male college classmate and later an all-pro player, his psychotherapy that, while under hypnosis, helped induce him to marry a former airline stewardess, his heartbreaking confrontations with his parents and older brother, and the unpredictable support from certain former teammates as well as others-homosexual and heterosexual-whom he'd never met... Together they comprise a story that is far more than self-exposé. With the skilled collaboration of a gifted writer, Perry Deane Young, they make up an unsparing, moving account from adolescence to maturity of one man's search for sexual identity in America today.

Sample

Ron Knapp

Profiles the personal life and football career of the man who succeeded Joe Montana as quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.

Sample

Jim McMahon with Bob Verdi

In the midst of all the publicity for the 1985-86 Bears and media favorite "Refrigerator" Perry, the Midway Monster most in the spotlight was unconventional quarterback McMahon, with his punk-rock haircut, sunglasses and headbands. Here, with the assistance of Chicago Tribune sports columnist Verdi, he tells of his life and his attitudes. Not surprisingly, he views himself primarily as an entertainer rather than an athlete and on the printed page maintains the ruthless candor that has made him controversial. He makes no attempt to conceal his contempt for Bears team president Michael McCaskey, his distant and cool relationship with his parents and his feeling that a lot of sportswriting belongs in the category of fiction and not reportage. He also has very little good to say about his alma mater, Brigham Young. His autobiography is refreshing and real, not unlike the man himself.