YOU OUGHT TO DO A STORY ABOUT ME

The emotional tale of a “Super Bowl hero” who ended up homeless in his hometown of New Orleans.

The story of how Jackie Wallace was lost and found—and lost and found again—is about many things, none of them simple: racism, professional sports, New Orleans, addiction, and the gaping holes in the societal safety net that even someone who was once deemed so successful can fall through. It’s also about the transformational power of journalism; Jackson, a freelance photojournalist who worked for three decades for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was profoundly changed by his work with Wallace. As Jackson’s newspaper article went viral, it moved and inspired countless readers to examine their own lives—and to remain connected and get clean or stay clean. Though Wallace was by no means a household name in the NFL, he was on the roster of three teams that made the Super Bowl, and he played in two of them. His light was brighter in his native New Orleans, where he was the star quarterback on the first team from a black high school to compete against white players. At the University of Arizona, where he enrolled in 1970, his coach “didn’t need another quarterback, especially a black one,” so Wallace switched to cornerback and eventually became a first-team All-American—and then a second-round draft pick in the NFL. The author found him while shooting a series on homelessness; Wallace suggested, “You ought to do a story about me.” The rest of the story is consistently complex and absorbing, as Jackson chronicles how Wallace cycled through rehab and relapse and a series of failed jobs and relationships. The author continued to stay in touch, more or less, before writing the follow-up story about losing Wallace, finding him again, and then losing him again. There are few easy answers here, but there are glimmers of hope.

A rich and rewarding narrative about the possibilities—and the challenges—of redemption.