CHICAGO - It’s one of the best, most fitting titles I’ve ever seen for a sports book, or any book for that matter: American Kings.
Seth Wickersham’s new work is subtitled A Biography of the Quarterback, and, yessir, it’s not about a single quarterback, it’s about all of them. It’s about anybody who has ever played, aspired to play, or been obsessed with the quarterback position. It’s about anybody who ever wanted to be king. From Bob Waterfield to Johnny Unitas to Steve Young to Patrick Mahomes to young Seth Wickersham himself, former jayvee quarterback for Robert Service High School in Anchorage, Alaska, they’re in here with their stories.
It’s about the truly American phenomenon of envying and exalting the guys who line up in the middle of the football offense, the ones who call the plays, take the snap, hand the ball off, run it, or—majestically, heroically—pass it downfield in wondrous spirals to zig-zagging receivers, and thereby control everything.
It’s about how we worship those boys and men and, above all, what it takes to be a member of this unofficial royal family. And, man is it a tale.
Caleb Williams of the Chicago Bears looks on during the first quarter against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field on January 05, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Patrick McDermott/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Here in Chicago we know mainly of the selected excerpts from American Kings that deal with Bears second-year quarterback Caleb Williams. At USC he worried about where he’d go in the draft, concerned that it might be with the quarterback-cursed Bears. Williams said he might sit out the draft, stay another year in college, if Chicago was going to be his destination. He wanted to play for the Vikings, he thought, play under young, quarterback-friendly coach Kevin O’Connell, the man who would be voted 2024 AP NFL Coach of the Year.
Caleb’s dad, Carl Williams, warned him famously, if not originally: "Chicago is where quarterbacks go to die."
That may have caused a stink with Bears fans—but was it wrong?
Hmm. The Bears have not had a Hall of Fame quarterback since they drafted Sid Luckman in 1939. They’ve had only two Pro Bowl quarterbacks—Jim McMahon (1985) and Mitchell Trubisky (2018)—since 1963. (And Trubisky was a fill-in for the Rams Jared Goff who was playing in the Super Bowl.)
There’s more. The Bears are the only team in the NFL never to have had a 4,000-yard passer. The Bears season records for passing yardage (3,838) and touchdowns (29) are still held by Erik Kramer, set 30 years ago, in a 16-game season. Kramer himself can’t believe it. He’s told me several times.
Caleb Williams of the Chicago Bears scrambles with the ball during the second quarter against the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium on December 16, 2024 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
How about this list going back to 1971: Bobby Douglass, Gary Huff, Bob Avellini, Vince Evans, Mike Tomczak, Steve Walsh, Dave Krieg, Shane Matthews, Cade McNown, Jim Miller, Craig Krenzel, Kyle Orton, Rex Grossman. If those quarterbacks didn’t figuratively die in Chicago, they assuredly were wounded.
Jay Cutler? Damaged into retirement. Mitchell Trubisky? Justin Fields? Almost nothing.
Williams himself? How does 68 sacks in his first season sound? A ten-game losing streak?
But enough of that. Things should change with new coach Ben Johnson and upgrades on the offensive line, at tight end and wide receiver. American Kings—which I have read in manuscript form, since it won’t be out until September—is a beautifully and passionately written treatise on the athletes we worship so fervidly that the more you learn about the craft and its practitioners the farther away, the more incomprehensible it all can seem.
Being a quarterback is almost a mythic thing. On the field everybody listens to you, everybody looks at you. To be a great one you start very young, and it becomes a lifestyle, a way of looking at yourself and the world. You have to believe you’re the best. You have to believe you’re the king.
[L-R] Seth Wickersham and Wright Thompson speak onstage at the ESPN Features: The Intersection of Storytelling and Culture panel presented by ESPN during Advertising Week 2015 AWXII at the Liberty Theater on October 1, 2015 in New York City. (Grant Lamos IV/Getty Images for AWXII / Getty Images)
The sweetest part of this book—which is, I’m just going to flat-out say it, a must-read—is that the author himself is all in. Wickersham, whom I met a quarter-century ago when he and his best pal, Wright Thompson, were University of Missouri journalism students who somehow b.s-ed their way into getting press passes to Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta, has an emotional attachment to these stories that is palpable. So many years ago, he and buddy Thompson were there, stranded with all of us oldtimers in the main hotel due to an ice storm, hanging with the veteran scribes, sucking up any info they could, clearly in love with the printed word, wide-eyed with the possibilities that lay before them.
"It was Wright’s idea," Wickersham tells me. "Remember how we sang songs and drank whiskey until 2 a.m.?" I so do.
The two kids had the spark that moved me, the joy of the moment, the fervor that made me think they were special, that they would not be stopped. In fact, they were quite different in manner, speech, upbringing and personality, but so close in brotherhood. One from Alaska, the other from the Mississippi Delta.
Thompson (author of The Barn) has turned into a multimedia whiz and, without question, the premiere longform sportswriter in the country. Wickersham, whose It’s Better to Be Feared, about the Patriots and Tom Brady, was named 2021 Best Sports Book of the Year by Sports Illustrated, is now also in a class of his own, having learned to master the words and sentences and thoughts he earlier wrangled like unbranded cattle.
Wickersham lived for years with the praise and hopefulness given to him at a high school camp in Anchorage, when visiting NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe saw the 15-year-old throw a deep completion in a drill and simply said, "There’s a ball."
From that inspiration, like a spiral into the future, we have this wonderful book. When it comes out, read it, folks. I urge you. It’s not just about football. It’s about a kingdom of its own.
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The Source: Rick Telander, contributing sports columnist for FOX 32 Chicago, held this conversation with Seth Wickersham.
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