Writing a book is a nightmare.
I’ve included that sentence in the Acknowledgments section of all eight of my releases, and the words are no joke. While authorship is certainly one of the greatest gigs of all time, there’s a lot of isolation, a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of self mutilation, pain, suffering, anguish. Plus, when I was suffering through health anxiety, the loneliness of writing a book convinced me I had every possible disease.
All that being said, the euphoria of a book arrival is cocaine-level stuff.
And today, my book arrived. In Hawaii.
That’s right—in Hawaii. We’re celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary here in Maui, and Megan Wilson—Houghton Mifflin’s amazing publicist/all-around wonderful person—wanted me to have a first copy. So she UPSed it here, out of pure decency. And holding it … man. It’s something. It really is. All the long hours, the hundreds of interviews, the chasing of facts and nuggets. Feeling and seeing the actual book brings it all together. It really does.
“Football for a Buck” was the hardest project I ever worked on, in that I was given one year. Nobody (literally nobody) thought the USFL warranted a book. But I pushed it and pushed it and pushed it … and now it’s in my hands.
The best feeling.
The absolute best.
