As a football player, Ahmad Rashad was never the

type to take the ball home and sleep with it just

because the coaches told him to. Approaching the

game with his own blend of dedication and fun-

loving high spirits, Rashad was an All-Pro wide

receiver during his NFL career, including seven

sparkling seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, and

his star has risen since he left the field in 1982 for

a career in broadcasting, partly because he never

saw football performance as a lifetime achieve-

ment, but mostly because his energy, wide-angle

intelligence, humor, and independent spirit shine

as brightly off the field as on.

These qualities shine as well in the pages of

this very entertaining book--a memoir that is also

an inspiring success story, a football book that

goes beyond the gridiron and cuts to the quick

of real life in the locker room, in the TV studio,

and at home with another star, Phylicia Rashad.

His 1987-1988 broadcasting season for NBC s

popular "NFL Live" show provides opportunities

for Rashad not only to observe the game, its

players, and its controversies today, but to recall

the way things were and the dramatic route of his

own life and two careers.

From his childhood in Tacoma, marred by a

mysterious skin disease, to his college days as

Bobby Moore during the late sixties, when the face

of America, and particularly blacl~America, was

changing; from his initiation into pro football with