Overview

A New York Times Bestseller By the author of Showtime--the source for HBO's Winning Time--the definitive biography of mythic multi-sport star Bo Jackson. ""A legendary tome on a legendary athlete."" --Chris Herring, author of Blood in the Garden From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character--and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat. He became the first person to simultaneously star in two major professional sports, and overtook Michael Jordan as America's most recognizable pitchman. He was on our televisions, in our magazines, plastered across billboards. He was half man, half myth. Then, almost overnight, he was gone. He was Bo Jackson. Drawing on an astonishing 720 original interviews, New York Times bestselling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman captures as never before the elusive truth about Jackson, Auburn University's transcendent Heisman Trophy winner, superstar of both the NFL and Major League Baseball and ubiquitous ""Bo Knows"" Nike pitchman. Did Bo really jump over a parked Volkswagen? (Yes.) Did he actually run a 4.13 40? (Yes.) During the 1991 flight that nearly killed every member of the Chicago White Sox, was he in the cockpit trying to help? (Oddly, yes. Or no. Or ... maybe.) Bo Jackson isn't Jim Thorpe. He's not Deion Sanders, either. No, Bo Jackson is Paul Bunyan. The Last Folk Hero is the true tale of Bo Jackson that only ""master storyteller"" (NPR.org) Jeff Pearlman could tell.

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9780063268166

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Reviews

A legendary tome on a legendary athlete that was almost too good to be true. Pearlman's research takes us into Bo's cramped childhood home, inside his elementary school classrooms and onto the first muddy fields he ever played on. And in doing so, he gets us closer than we've ever gotten to the truth of who Jackson really was, and how he got to be that way. The book is appointment reading; an undeniable masterclass. -- Chris Herring, New York Times best-selling author of Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks As Jeff Pearlman depicts Bo Jackson's life, from neighborhoods in Bessemer to charter jets in Memphis, you begin to wonder whether Pearlman contacted every human being who has ever interacted with Jackson. That's how detailed this book is on a life seemingly so hard to depict. Former classmates, agents, teammates, attorneys and so many others provide an array of vignettes that distinctly portray the human arc of one of sport's most mythical figures. -- Alec Lewis, Kansas City Royals beat writer, The Athletic Every word was devoured like cornbread and collard greens at a family reunion. Pearlman's beautiful and brilliant work here takes you deep inside the life of America's greatest athlete of all time, but there is so much more to this book. As a child of Birmingham, Alabama, who fell in love with sports in the 1980s thanks to Bo Jackson, I consider this one of the greatest sports biographies ever written. -- Joseph Goodman, author of We Want Bama

Author Information

Jeff Pearlman is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books. His subjects include NFL legends Walter Pay-ton (Sweetness), Brett Favre (Gunslinger), and Bo Jackson (The Last Folk Hero), as well as the '80s Los Angeles Lakers (Show-time), the 1986 New York Mets (The Bad Guys Won), and the '90s Dallas Cowboys (Boys Will Be Boys). HBO adapted Showtime into the dramatic series Winning Time, produced and directed by Adam McKay. A former Sports Illus-trated senior writer and ESPN.com colum-nist, Pearlman is the host of the Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast.

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