You’re reading The Sporting Scene, Louisa Thomas’s weekly look at the world of sports.Jalen Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, is a Super Bowl champion, the reigning Super Bowl M.V.P. He has played in two of the past three Super Bowls; in his first one, in 2023, he had put on one of the best performances of his career, never mind that his team ended up losing that year. Hurts has never missed the playoffs as a starting quarterback. He can launch deep balls or find a small crease, rip open the defense, and run. He never seems confused or overwhelmed. He, sometimes literally, carries the team on his back. All he does is improve. On Thursday night, in the N.F.L. season opener against the Dallas Cowboys, he calmly but powerfully took what the defense gave him, in the air and on the ground, leading his team to the win. He looked in control. Then again, he throws in stinkers from time to time. He’s not Lamar Jackson. He lacks the talent of Patrick Mahomes. He doesn’t have Josh Allen’s galvanizing fire. He’s a beautiful tush with arms. Last season, Hurts wasn’t even the most important player on his own offense. He’s a good quarterback but not a great one, at least not yet. A great quarterback is like an obscenity: you know it when you see it.Why does it matter so much? A quarterback is not just another position on a football field. It’s a uniquely American institution—a calling, connected to foundational myths about leadership and manhood. “The very idea of the quarterback was and remains bound up with who we are and how we see ourselves on a national scale,” the journalist Seth Wickersham writes, in his new book, “American Kings,” which sounds grandiose until you realize just how much pressure rides on the shoulders of a quarterback, on and off the field. There are actors and musicians who are more famous, businessmen and politicians whose decisions are of far greater consequence. But there is no one else who has to manage such a distinctive mix of violence and spectacle, and who is exposed to such risk of public failure week after week. “The reason to do it is the holy hell,” the Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young tells Wickersham. “It is everything a human being can be thrown into.”Wickersham knows what it’s like to walk the halls of an American high school as quarterback; and, having been moved to wide receiver, he knows what it’s like to walk the halls as someone who’s not. His book is an attempt to understand the difference. He spent years researching in the archives and talking with some of the best to ever do it—John Elway, Tom Brady, Young, Warren Moon, Joe Namath, the Manning family—and with the families of some of the men who made the position what it is, including Johnny Unitas, Y. A. Tittle, and Bob Waterfield. He spoke with good quarterbacks who fell short of greatness. He interviewed coaches and agents and development gurus. He shadowed a handful of prodigies and, critically, their fathers. Wickersham wants to know what might have happened to him if he had lived out his dream, the dream.The answers are fascinating but often ugly. To a certain degree, “American Kings” is not so different from any parable about the perils of ambition. Genius in one area of life can be stunting in other domains. Greatness has costs, sometimes horrific ones. The stories are saturated with alcohol, not to mention depression, domestic violence, toxic parenting, pain—a lot of pain, psychological as well as physical. Football, it seems, can unleash the kind of narcissistic personality that normal society might constrain. To be a quarterback means being selfish and sometimes delusional. Someone at Elite 11, one of the top quarterback camps, tells Wickersham that the camp is “collecting little assholes.” “I had to draw on a part of me that was emotional, aggressive, angry, decisive, irrational. All those things,” Brady says, at one point. Near the end of the book, Elway is sitting at a bar, profoundly lonely, reflecting on his life as a competitor. “Emotionally, you get a little . . .” he says, before pausing, “warped.”Wickersham was writing a profile of Andrew Luck, after Luck’s unexpected retirement and withdrawal from public life, when he started working on the book, and spent a lot of time at Luck’s house, in Indianapolis. Luck, who had been an engineering major at Stanford, had designed the house, quarters fit for a quarterback. There had been a film room and a physical-therapy room. But now the film room was a home office, and Luck was making eggs for his daughter instead of getting his ankles taped. He had walked away from the game because of the severity of his injuries, and because of what it was doing to his personality, he told Wickersham. Being a truly great quarterback required him to be a control freak, to put himself first, to be someone he didn’t like. Luck isn’t one of the central characters of the book, but his story haunts it. It revealed something essential, Wickersham told me. Quarterbacking isn’t something you do. It’s not a job. It’s something you are.The challenge, and opportunity, for Luck after football was to figure out who he was without it, though he doesn’t swear off the sport altogether. He’s the general manager for Stanford’s football program now. Elway is a tragic figure, but he ends the book glad for his life. Steve Young—who wasn’t born an artist like Elway or Joe Montana but, rather, was a good student who took notes—serves as a kind of wise stand-in for the author at times. At an alumni game at Brigham Young University, Young, on the field with much younger men, can’t resist the chance to test his spiral one last time. Wickersham, too, revisits his own quarterbacking days, finding himself unwilling to let go of his idealization of the role and his sense of failure. At the end of the book, during the week of the N.F.L. Combine, in Indianapolis, he grabs a beer with his old center and asks why he failed as a quarterback. “You had no chance,” his lineman replies. “We couldn’t block.” Wickersham listens to his friend describe his strengths, and hears it in a benediction. He’s given the chance to think of himself, once more, as what he was: “his quarterback.”But I heard something else in the lineman’s response: Wickersham is asking the wrong question. He’s considering the quarterback as quarterbacks do: as an individual, accountable for his success and failure alone. But the quarterback is a member of a team. He needs an offensive line that can block. He needs decoys and receivers. He can’t catch his own throws. Quarterbacks understand how much they rely on their teammates, and the great ones manage to inspire total trust and sacrificial commitment from others, in part by showing it themselves. And yet they tend to be seen, and they see themselves, as men apart from the crowd.Do they have to be? Part of the beauty of football is its interdependent nature, the way all the gears shift and turn together as part of one fantastically complex machine. I asked Wickersham if, by isolating quarterbacks instead of focussing on the collective, we were all missing something. Was there a chance to reimagine the position, as part of a whole? Wickersham gently waved me off. “They inherently know that they need other people,” he said. But they didn’t have the luxury of thinking of themselves as just one of the guys. “They are going to be the ones who are the face of failure. They have to set themselves apart.” Even so, watching the Cowboys-Eagles game, I couldn’t shake the sense that the question of whether Hurts is a great quarterback is beside the point. He’s the quarterback of the team that won the Super Bowl. What more do we want? ♦