Alphabet Jackson

by Jack Olsen

The Billygoats, champions of the National Conference of the NFL, are flying to New Orleans for the Super Bowl when their plane is hijacked by a familiar giant with a machine gun, a drug habit and a pair of sure hands….Alphabet Jackson is the Billygoats’ balding offensive center, and he tells the suspenseful, violent and funny story, which really began on the first day of training camp. For Alphabet, the ride to the Super Bowl is a long-held secret dream that threatens to end in a nightmare of flame, twisted metal and death.With Alphabet, a ten-year veteran coming off a knee operation, you venture into the inner world of pro football with as colorful a cast of characters as you’ve ever encountered. Alphabet knows his teammates well – the studs, bruisers, boozers and pill poppers. He knows the agonies of the grass drills, the brutal combat in the pit, the savage joy of the game. And he knows the wild hilarity, the “football Annies,” the “management moguls,” the frantic fans off the field.But it’s not until the plane is hijacked that Alphabet understands some of the things that have been going on all the suspicious shift in point spreads, the crazy incidents stirring up racial tensions, the kook telephone calls to wives.It all comes together on the way to the Super Bowl – in a novel that will hold the championship in its field for years to come.

309 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Curt Bobbitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

(read in 1976) Though I hate to admit it, I loved this book when I read it in 1976. It is raunchy and sexist but has numerous laugh-out-loud dirty jokes.