Fantasy Man: A Former NFL Player's Descent into the Brutality of Fantasy Football

The New York Times bestselling author of Slow Getting Up chronicles his descent into the madness of early retirement and fantasy football.

In Slow Getting Up—hailed by Rolling Stone as "the best football memoir of all time"—Nate Jackson told his story face down on the field. Now, in Fantasy Man, he’s flat on his back.

Six years have passed since the former Denver Broncos tight end wore a helmet, and every day he drifts further from the NFL Guy, the sanctioned-violence guy, the psychopath who ran head first into other psychos for money. But Nate hasn’t quite left the game. Bed-ridden by a recent surgery to remove bone fragments in his ankle, he's trying to defend his title in one of the millions of leagues captivating America through modern fantasy football, the interactive human poker game started by rotisserie leagues, boosted by ESPN and Yahoo!, and now elevated to that rarefied world of vaguely-legal Internet gambling by FanDuel and DraftKings.com.

And this time it isn’t a 300-pound wall of flesh rushing to crunch his spine.

It’s worse.

Exploring the fantasy—and the reality—of professional football after you’ve left the field, Fantasy Man is as funny, self-deprecating, and shockingly honest as Slow Getting Up.

So what happens when a retired NFL player has nothing to do but draft a fake team and confront the real damage?

• An Insider Account of the NFL: Jackson pulls back the curtain on what life is really like for a pro player—the psychopaths, the pain, and the strange transition back to civilian life.
• The Physical Toll of the Game: Go beyond the stats into the reality of football injuries, from post-career surgeries to the murky world of painkillers, Toradol, and cannabis.
• Fantasy Football Obsession: Follow a former pro's hilarious and harrowing season defending his fantasy title while flat on his back, navigating draft nights, waiver wires, and the madness of DFS.
• Brutally Honest Humor: With a voice hailed as one of the best in sports writing, Jackson delivers a memoir that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is shockingly candid.

“When I played in the NFL, I was always in such a hurry to run my routes, so eager to please, and so scatterbrained. We all were. But the older you get, the more of the field you see.”—From Fantasy Man

At the start of 2015—16 NFL season, New York Times bestselling author and former Denver Broncos tight end Nate Jackson was rehabilitating his latest surgically repaired body part—an ankle clouded by bone fragments—while setting his lineups for three different fantasy football leagues. Six years after playing his last game, Jackson has found a welcome distraction in fantasy sports—just like millions of other Americans. The reigning champion in two of his leagues, Jackson drafts with his heart and foils the statistical analytics of the “little experts,” as well as his pals Ryno, Rocky, Razor, Bruise, and the rest, by drafting old teammates from his former life, including Jay Cutler, Brandon Marshall, and the entire Mile High defense.

He quickly learns that smashmouth football in the NFL is not nearly as brutal as the life of an obsessed fantasy owner. Part exorcism, part catharsis, Fantasy Man takes us behind the scenes as a recently retired athlete grapples with the uncertainties of a second career: from being an outspoken advocate at marijuana conventions with Ricky Williams to offering radical ideas about football tactics (three quarterbacks behind the center, anyone?) to tending to his battered post-football body. He even makes it into Roger Goodell’s skybox to bear witness to Peyton Manning’s final heroic playoff run. At once poignant and uproarious, Fantasy Man is the story of the 2015—16 NFL season as seen through the razor-sharp lens of the game’s best writer.

Praise for Slow Getting Up: “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

“Excellent.” - New Republic

“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