Alphabet Jackson

The Billygoats are champions of the NFL's National Conference, and they are on their way to the Super Bowl. Their plane has just been hijacked.

The man with the machine gun is enormous, drug-addled, and disturbingly familiar. He has a pair of sure hands. And he has a very specific agenda.

Alphabet Jackson, the Billygoats' balding ten-year veteran offensive center, is the man telling this story. He has spent his career in the trenches of professional football, surviving knee operations, grass drills, brutal training camps, and the savage combat of the pit. He knows his teammates intimately: the studs, the bruisers, the boozers, and the pill poppers. He knows the wild hilarity of life off the field, the football groupies, the ego-driven management, the frantic fans. He thought he had seen everything pro football had to offer.

He had not seen this.

As the hijacking unfolds, Alphabet begins to understand what has been happening all season: the suspicious shifts in point spreads, the incidents deliberately stirring up racial tensions, the anonymous phone calls to players' wives. It has all been leading somewhere. And it is all coming together now, at 30,000 feet, somewhere over the American South, on the way to the biggest game of his life.

Suspenseful, violent, and frequently hilarious, Alphabet Jackson is Jack Olsen's fiction debut, a wildly entertaining trip inside the world of professional football that only a writer with his instincts for character and storytelling could pull off.