Hero of the Underground

As captain of the college football national champion Nebraska Cornhuskers, Jason Peter was the master of all he surveyed, whipped to a frenzy by his own power and ambition. But just a few years later, his NFL career in ruins after devastating injuries, he found himself consumed by addictions: first painkillers, then crack, and finally heroin, ingested in quantities that would have killed most people.

In Hero of the Underground, Jason Peter tells his story with utter candour, an athlete's attitude and a junkie's single-minded obsessive clarity. Prowling the pre-dawn streets of Manhattan, strung out and fearing he has murdered his girlfriend... flying cross country in a chartered jet with two high-priced call girls and His and Theirs piles of coke and heroin... crawling inch by inch through shag carpet toward the door of a last-ditch Los Angeles hotel with the utter conviction that he is being surveyed through the peephole... these and other vivid scenes punctuate a life that is part Bukowski (without the exhausted world-weariness), part Burroughs (both William and Augusten), and part A Million Little Pieces (except it all really happened).

About the Author

Jason Peter grew up in Middletown, New Jersey. He was an All American and a member of three National Championship football teams at the University of Nebraska, co-captaining the championship team. He was also a National Football League first-round draft pick by the Carolina Panthers, where he played for four years before injuries forced him to retire. He is now married and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he co-hosts a sports radio program, The Spread, for ESPN.