Something Before the End: The Fall of a Southern Football Hero

Set in contemporary Savannah, at and around a fictional university in the Southeastern Conference, Something Before the End: The Fall of a Southern Football Hero is the explosive, unflinchingly frank story of an aging Heisman Trophy winner, Billy Gene Wells, who abuses his athletic fame in his desperation to get his wife back and regain a measure of his former glory. His efforts result in or contribute to front-page scandal, not just for Wells himself but also for, at the university, a black activist administrator and an eminent gay faculty member. The narrator is Wells's best friend and former teammate on the National Championship Team of 1963, Guy Givens, a nostalgic, politically incorrect English professor who has long been in love with Wells's wife.