Book Review: The Last Folk Hero by Jeff Pearlman
The Last Folk Hero is basically exactly what I expected, which is mostly a good thing. This is the latest biography from Jeff Pearlman, who has made a career out of sports books that fall into roughly two categories:
Chronicles of successful teams that were quite dysfunctional/wild off the field - The Bad Guys Won, Boys Will Be Boys, Showtime
Measured biographies of legendary athletes giving a full overview of both their amazing feats and positive traits and their flaws - Gunslinger, Sweetness, The Rocket that Fell to Earth.
This falls into the latter, providing the definitive account of Bo Jackson’s athletic career. For those unfamiliar, Jackson was a Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn who played in both the NFL and MLB simultaneously for several seasons. A devastating hip injury in 1991 ended his pro football career (he played several more baseball seasons) but he still racked up his fair share of brilliant moments, including a legendary 221-yard effort on Monday Night Football against the Seattle Seahawks. He is also perhaps best known as having the most overpowered sports video game likeness ever in 1991’s Tecmo Super Bowl (and it’s not even close).
The Last Folk Hero touches upon these highlights and more, presenting a comprehensive overview of Jackson’s life and playing career. It’s a by-the-numbers sports biography in terms of chronologically examining Jackson’s life and doesn’t really get very macro in terms of broader themes represented by Jackson (Pearlman has always seemed most interested in getting to know his subjects as well as possible and depicting their full character), but it’s mostly well-written and Pearlman’s level of research is superb.
Jackson gave The Last Folk Hero his blessing (in terms of Pearlman notifying him about it and Jackson not shutting it down) but didn’t sit down for any interviews with the author. However, Pearlman conducted over 700 interviews while writing the book and there were several passages where I thought to myself “I guess Pearlman had to have interviewed Bo for that nugget.” Pearlman doesn’t skimp on any chapters in Bo’s life and despite the high levels of detail I didn’t find any portions to lag. I have always enjoyed football more than baseball but I found the hardball-centric chapters generally just as enjoyable as those focused on the gridiron.
Bo’s life follows the arc of a folk hero almost to the letter: kid grows up poor and black in an Alabama town that isn’t always particularly non-racist with a single mother, has a stutter and a troublemaking streak, finds refuge in sports and realizes he’s absurdly talented, accomplishes some bonkers athletic feats despite largely coasting on his talent before being severely diminished by a horrible injury. Even if his star only shined brightly for a remarkably brief time, he still was an absolute phenomenon in the late eighties and is deserving of the full-on biography treatment. Bo did write an autobiography in 1990, but from what I recall from reading it as an 11 year-old, even at that young age I thought it was a little shallow.
Pearlman deftly guides us through each chapter of Bo’s life, pulling no punches but also never coming off as a hatchet artist. I feel like Pearlman tends to gravitate towards “complicated” figures and fairly represent their full character, and he certainly does so here. Bo could be charming and befriend a random batboy and take him under his wing, or he could be an absolute jerk to a longtime teammate and demand he gets paid to autograph a football for him. It seems impossible to draw any conclusions from his behavior beyond calling him “mercurial” (Bo was mean to a lot of batboys and nice to a lot of teammates too). He mostly let his absurd athletic gifts carry him (I’m still gobsmacked he apparently squatted 975 pounds as a 195-pound high schooler despite rarely ever touching weights) until he fully committed himself to recovering from his hip injury with a punishing rehabilitation regimen. In short: Bo Knows Emotional Complexity. Pearlman devotes ample time to every stop of Bo’s career from high school through the pros and I especially liked his behind-the-scenes insights of major events like his decision to spurn to Buccaneers after they selected him first overall in the 1986 draft, how the Raiders sorta sneakily selected him in the seventh round the following year, the weird political games Al Davis played with the Raiders’ backfield (any biography with Al playing at least a supporting role is probably going to be entertaining), and Bo’s grueling recovery from the hip injury. There isn’t a lot of post-career coverage, but that was fine to me because outside of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acting career he seemed to largely just spend time with his family (which is great, but not the most riveting reading material).
My only real quibbles with the book are that some of the baseball seasons get kinda same-y (the football ones are less of a problem because there are fewer games anyway and Bo would only join after the baseball season had completed) and some grating writing quirks Pearlman has (he’s a big fan of the single-sentence paragraph to lend a sense of gravitas, which is fine in moderation but gets overused here). That’s small potatoes though and I thoroughly enjoyed the vast majority of my reading experience.
This is a “sports biography” rather than a “biography about a sports player” if that makes sense (i.e. expect some sportswriting tropes and it’s going to be sports-centric rather than history-through-a-sports-lens) which is what I anticipated coming in and it’s done well. Like most books like this, if you saw the description and/or author and thought to yourself, “hey, that might be good,” rest assured that it is. Strongly recommended to any fan of the NFL or MLB, especially if they have any passing familiarity of/interest in Bo’s heyday.
8/10