Bo Jackson

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, Bo Jackson was among the most talked-about figures in American sports and pop culture. Crowds could not be contained, stopwatches struggled to measure him, and his strength was spoken of in awe. Video game makers built him into a nearly unbeatable character, and the games were not exaggerating: he scaled walls, snapped baseball bats across his knee, and flattened tacklers. He became the first athlete to star in two major professional sports at once, and he overtook Michael Jordan as the country's most recognizable product pitchman. He appeared on television, in magazines and on billboards everywhere. Then, almost overnight, he was gone.

Drawing on 720 original interviews, sportswriter Jeff Pearlman sets out to uncover the real Jackson: the Auburn University standout who won the Heisman Trophy, the star who played in both the NFL and Major League Baseball, and the face of Nike's "Bo Knows" advertising. The book takes up the questions that have long surrounded his legend, including whether he really jumped over a parked Volkswagen, whether he really ran a 4.13 40-yard dash, and what part, if any, he played in the cockpit during the 1991 flight that nearly killed the entire Chicago White Sox team.

Pearlman also compares Jackson to Jim Thorpe and Deion Sanders and argues that his place in the public imagination resembles that of a folk hero such as Paul Bunyan. The book's subtitle is The Last Folk Hero. Pearlman is also the author of Showtime, the book that served as the basis for HBO's Winning Time.