American Kings by Seth Wickersham, review

Quarterback is perhaps the most demanding role in sports. It calls for precision, poise, leadership – and the ability to read and react to 21 other players in real time. No wonder those who master it, from Tom Brady to a Friday night high school hero, become icons.

The stakes are so high, and the rewards so great, that an entire industry has emerged around scouting and developing the next great QB. But is it helping the young athletes it claims to serve or simply inflating their hopes – and egos?

In American Kings, longtime ESPN writer, and former high school quarterback, Seth Wickersham delivers what the subtitle calls “a biography of the quarterback.” It’s not a chronological history or a series of player profiles, but a mosaic of men and moments that together define the position.

He traces the quarterback’s cultural rise from early stars like Bob Waterfield, who married Jane Russell and became a national celebrity, to modern prodigies like Arch Manning, burdened with the expectations of his family name. He explores the pressure that shaped legends such as John Elway, the emotional toll faced by Andrew Luck and Steve Young, and the identity crisis many quarterbacks encounter when it’s time to walk away.

Title: American Kings
Author: Seth Wickersham
First published: Hyperion Avenue, 2025
Buy the Book: Amazon US | Amazon UK*

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Along the way, there’s original reporting – Sean Payton on Bo Nix, Carl Williams trying to steer Caleb away from the Chicago Bears – and dozens of sharp insights about fame, failure, masculinity and control.

It’s a book about quarterbacks, and about the America that makes them.

THE AUTHOR

Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN, where he has worked for more than two decades, winning multiple awards in the process. His first book was It’s Better to be Feared, about the New England Patriots dynasty. American Kings is his second book.

QUOTES

I’ve been looking for a grand universal theory on quarterbacks, proof of existentialism, or grit or cosmoses or goddamn magic, but the thing that once seemed so mysterious and unattainable — the perfect pass, delivered in the crucial moment — is maybe the simple part. “hey don’t have to think about that. The living with what it takes, what it brings, and what it costs, is the mystery.

Every aspiring quarterback must decide at some point: Are you about this world? Are you willing to do what it takes? Do you want to leave the old version of yourself behind? Do you possess all of the strange traits–talent, smarts, drive, luck, the combination of broken in the right places and healed in the right places–to do it? There’s a chrysalis, a metamorphosis that takes place. It happened to Peyton and Eli. Both faced choices about what they were willing to sacrifice. As boys, these men dedicated their lives to this job.

Nix’s data is the best in the draft — and is better than Mahomes’s was. Payton doesn’t think Nix is the best prospect since Mahomes, of course. But he believes in his potential right now, for what Payton needs and where he’s drafting. And he believes that together, they can be special. He has a plan for his quarterback. And he knows that sets him ahead of so many rookies. This is rare. A quarterback needs coaching and infrastructure. Nix will end up as one of the best quarterbacks of the 2024 class because he has a head coach who knows offense, knows quarterbacks, isn’t afraid of being fired, and is more invested in him than in covering his own ass. “I’ll get criticized for taking him at twelve,” Payton tells me of Nix. “I don’t give a fuck. Three years from now is what I’m worried about.”

REVIEWS

Seth Wickersham’s American Kings belongs in any football library. Drawing on years of reporting, dozens of interviews, and a deep understanding of the game, it offers more than a history of the quarterback – it captures the position’s place in American culture.

Wickersham writes with pace and precision, cutting between moments like a film director. Even familiar events, such as John Elway’s iconic 1986 AFC Championship Game drive, gain new energy through his telling. There’s very little fat: each chapter adds to the book’s layered portrait of what it means to play, coach, or parent a quarterback.

What elevates American Kings above most books about the QB – and there have been many – is its ambition. Wickersham wants to explain not just how the position works, but why it matters: how it reflects American ideas about leadership, masculinity, power, and self-invention. That’s a tall order, and at times the balance leans too heavily on figures like Elway and Young, who dominate the narrative somewhat. A little more on the broader cultural and historical backdrop might have sharpened the argument further.

Still, this is a gripping, thoughtful, and often exhilarating read. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of the game – and the impossible demands we place on the men who play its most mythic role.
Shane Richmond, Pigskin Books

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.
Louisa Thomas, New Yorker

Wickersham explores the reality and the culture of America’s favorite (and most hated) athletes in the book, which is on sale Sept. 9, a must-buy for football fans and quarterbacks themselves.
Jon Greenberg, The Athletic

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Amazon US | Amazon UK*

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