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Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile
Current price:
$18.89
Publication Date: September 2nd, 2014
Publisher:
Harper Perennial
ISBN:
9780062108036
Pages:
288
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days
Description
Nate Jackson’s Slow Getting Up is an unvarnished and uncensored memoir of everyday life in the most popular sports league in America—and the most damaging to its players—the National Football League.
After playing college ball at a tiny Division III school, Jackson, a receiver, signed as a free agent with the San Francisco 49ers, before moving to the Denver Broncos. For six seasons in the NFL as a Bronco, he alternated between the practice squad and the active roster, eventually winning a starting spot—a short, tenuous career emblematic of the average pro player.
Drawing from his own experience, Jackson tells the little known story of the hundreds of everyday, "expendable" players whose lives are far different from their superstar colleagues.
From scouting combines to training camps, off-season parties to game-day routines, debilitating physical injuries—including degenerative brain conditions—to poor pensions and financial distress, he offers a funny, and shocking look at life in the NFL, and the young men who risk their health and even their lives to play the game.
Praise for Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile
“That screaming you hear coming across the sky? It’s a wobbly spiral…Slow Getting Up is everything you want football memoirs to be but never are: hilarious, dirty, warm, human, honest, weird.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Excellent...busts through pro football’s prevailing mythology...Nate Jackson gives us the game warts and all, but never in a drag-ass, woe-is-me way. A really fine book. Man can write.” — Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
“A tremendously authentic, inside-the-locker-room view is unveiled with Jackson’s myriad stories, clever wit, skillful prose and perfect dose of sophomoric humor.” — San Jose Mercury News
“Simply the best book by a former player about life in the NFL that you will read. Maybe the best book period about life in the NFL that you will read.” — Stefan Fatsis, author of A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL
“Slow Getting Up tells the whole truth about the NFL. Painfully honest and remarkably funny, it’s far and away the best ‘insider’ book about pro sports since Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.” — Scott Raab, author of The Whore of Akron
“The book the world has been waiting for. “Ball Four” for the football world is here at last.” — Tom Junod, via Twitter
“Fantastic.” — Jonathan Mahler, Bloomberg
“The best football memoir ever.” — Rolling Stone
“Excellent.” — New Republic