Of course I got the book. It’s all about Bo Jackson. Greatest athlete I’ve ever seen, heard, talked to, defended against an uninformed national backlash and hitched a ride in a limo alongside from LaGuardia Airport in Queens to the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan.

Greatest athlete anyone has ever seen. I will die a thousand deaths on that hill no matter how many times I felt his death-ray stare during his tortured and triumphant Heisman Trophy season at Auburn.

Talk about right place, right time. The fall of 1985 was his last football season on the Plains and my first season as the Auburn beat writer for The Birmingham News. I turned 24 as fall camp began. He turned 23 three months later on the day of his final and most painful Iron Bowl.

About that. I shared a few stories from that season with the accomplished author Jeff Pearlman during his exhaustive research for “The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson.” Me and 719 others. The book jacket says Pearlman did 720 original interviews for the hefty biography, which checks in at 484 pages if you count the index, so he couldn’t include every anecdote.

Allow me to share a memory that will help you know Bo a little better.

There’s no official statistic for it, but I believe no other Heisman Trophy winner has been the target of more contempt and disdain during his signature season. It was almost a national campaign. Rick Reilly’s hatchet job in Sports Illustrated, painting Bo as a coward, was merely the most infamous and casually vicious of the genre.