Peter King

Peter King will be joined in conversation by bestselling author Jeff Benedict, offering audiences an engaging discussion on the NFL’s evolution, the stories behind THE GAME, and the figures who helped shape football into America’s most influential sport.

“Peter King has stories no one else can tell,”
notes legendary quarterback Troy Aikman.

For four decades, Peter King was the NFL’s most trusted insider, with unparalleled access to players, coaches, owners, and moments that shaped the modern game. In THE GAME (WW Norton & company; on sale October 13, 2026), he draws on a lifetime of reporting to chronicle the NFL’s rise from America’s favorite sport to its dominant cultural force.

In THE GAME, King takes us on the Madden Cruiser, on a cross-country journey with John Madden. He goes behind the scenes in the Reggie White free-agency saga, when the small-town Green Bay Packers made the canniest offer you’ll ever hear. He gives us Deion Sanders’s philosophy on how to be great on the field and how to work the system off it. He shows us Steve Young, lying in a bed with IVs in each arm after the greatest game of his life on the biggest stage. He shares the bizarre story of how a tanning bed and some well-timed push-ups helped catapult Peyton Manning to the top of the 1998 draft. He reveals Nick Foles’s mastery of a moment no one thought he could be equal to. He brings us inside the worlds of referees, of owners, of NFL drafts. Looking at the future, he fires a warning shot about the greed overtaking the game.

Time and again, King was in limousines, on planes, in locker rooms, and on sidelines where players and coaches told him why they did what they did, whom they hated, whom they thought highly of, what they dreamed of achieving.

The result is THE GAME—a vivid, revelatory portrait of the league in all its triumph, controversy, and complexity from one of football’s most influential storytellers.