Consider the Quarterback | The New Yorker

Jalen Hurts, the Eagles quarter of Philadelphia, is a Super Bowl champion, the prevailing MVP of the Super Bowl that he played in two of the last three Super Bowls; In his first, in 2023, he had organized one of the best performances in his career, it doesn’t matter that his team ended up losing that year. Hurts never missed the playoffs as a starting quarter. He can throw deep bullets or find a small fold, tear the defense and run. He never seems confused or outdated. He sometimes literally carries the team on his back. All he does is to improve. Thursday evening, during the opening of the NFL season against the Dallas Cowboys, he calmly but powerfully taken what the defense gave him, in the air and on the ground, leading his team to victory. He looked in control. Again, he throws the stuents from time to time. It’s not Lamar Jackson. He does not have the talent of Patrick Mahomes. He doesn’t have the galvanizing fire of Josh Allen. He’s a beautiful arm of arms. Last season, Hurts was not even the most important player on his own offense. It’s a good quarter-tree but not a great One, at least not yet. A large quarter is like an obscenity: you know when you see it.

Why is that important? A quarter is not only another position on a football field. It is a unique American institution – a vocation, linked to fundamental myths on leadership and virility. “The very idea of ​​the quarterrier was and remains linked to who we have and how we see ourselves on a national scale,” wrote journalist Seth Wickersham, in his new book, “American Kings”, which seems to be grandiose until you realize how much the walks on the shoulders of a quarter-Arrière, on and out of the field. There are more famous actors and musicians, businessmen and politicians whose decisions are increasingly important. But no one else should manage such a distinctive mixture of violence and spectacle, and which is exposed to such a risk of public failure week after week. “The reason to do so is sacred hell,” said the quarter of the renowned temple, Steve Young, in Wickersham. “That’s all that a human being can be thrown away.”

Wickersham knows what it is to walk in the rooms of an American high school as a quarterrier; And, having been moved to the wide receiver, he knows what is to walk the corridors as a person who is not. His book is an attempt to understand the difference. He spent years looking for the archives and speaking with some of the best to do so – John Elway, Tom Brady, Young, Warren Moon, Joe Namath, the Manning family – and with the families of some of the men who have made the position of what he is, notably Johnny Unitas, Ya Tittle and Bob Waterfield. He spoke with good quarter-backs that had no size. He interviewed coaches and agents and gurus of development. He shaded a handful of wonders and, critically, their fathers. Wickersham wants to know what could have happened to him if he had experienced his dream, THE dream.

The answers are fascinating but often ugly. To a certain extent, the “American kings” are not so different from any parable on the dangers of ambition. Engineering in a field of life can restrict in other areas. Greatness has costs, sometimes horrible. The stories are saturated with alcohol, not to mention depression, domestic violence, toxic parenting, pain – a lot of pain, psychological and physical. Football, it seems, can release the kind of narcissistic personality that normal society could force. Being a quarter of a quarter means being selfish and sometimes delusional. Someone in Elite 11, one of the best quarter-arre camps, told Wickersham that the camp “Collection de Petits Assards”. “I had to rely on a part of me that was emotional, aggressive, angry, decisive, irrational. All these things, ”says Brady, at some point. Towards the end of the book, Elway sits in a bar, deeply alone, reflecting on his life as a competitor. “Emotionally, you get a little …” He says, before stopping, “distorted”.

Wickersham wrote a profile of Andrew Luck, after the retirement and unexpected withdrawal of Luck from public life, when he started working on the book, and spent a lot of time at Luck, in Indianapolis. Luck, which had been a major engineering in Stanford, had designed the house, the quarters adapted to a quarter. There had been a movie theater and a physical therapy room. But now, the cinema was a home office, and luck made eggs for her daughter instead of hiding the ankles. He had moved away from the game because of the severity of his injuries and because of what he was doing to his personality, he told Wickersham. Being a very large quarter forced him to be a control monster, to put himself first, to be someone he did not like. Luck is not one of the central characters in the book, but his story haunts him. It revealed something essential, Wickersham told me. The quarter is not something you do. It is not a job. This is something you are.

The challenge and the opportunity, for luck after football, was to understand who he was without him, although he does not swear sport. He is now the director general of the Stanford football program. Elway is a tragic figure, but he ends the happy book for his life. Steve Young – who was not born an artist like Elway or Joe Montana but, but rather a good student who took notes – sometimes serves as a kind of sage stand for the author. In a match of former students at Brigham Young University, Young, on the field with much younger men, cannot resist the chance to test your spiral one last time. Wickersham also revisits his own quarter days, finding himself little willing to abandon his idealization of the role and his feeling of failure. At the end of the book, during the NFL combination week in Indianapolis, he catches a beer with his old center and asks why he failed as a quarter. “You had no chance,” replied his line player. “We couldn’t block.” Wickersham listens to his friend describing his forces and hears him in a blessing. He gave the chance to think about once again, like what he was: “his quarter-arre”.