TN: When does the book officially release?
BT: September 21. It will be officially released Sept. 21. That’s 20 days after my freaking birthday, if it released on Sept. 1, I would think somebody was playing a joke on me. But it’s humbling man, you being a writer, and that’s another thing too.
B.J. Bennett is a writer. B.J.’s the editor at SouthernPigskin.com. So he writes every day. And that’s a great part of it. A lot of things I bypassed, I didn’t have to worry about like finding a ghostwriter. B.J. knows me so he kind of knows how I talk, how I sound, my mannerisms, my behaviorisms. So he had to speak for me, and what I liked about that was I saved a lot of time, money and frustration because my best friend got to write the book for me, and what people don’t know is they say do you want to do three things in his life.
He said, “Man, I want to get married.” He’s married. He said “I want to have children.” He has children. And he said “I want to write a book,” now I thought he had already written a book and he said “Nope, this is the first book I’ve written.” So I don’t know, man. It’s like a journey for both of us, we are attached forever now.
Make no mistake about it, we almost killed each other with this book. Because it’s a lot I mean, B.J. would send me a chapter, B.J. doesn’t go to sleep man… We cover the SoCon, the SEC, the ACC and the Sun Belt. So he had to write stories all the time. So he’ll say “Hey, man, I’m about to send you the draft of chapter 9. And it’d be two o’clock in the morning and I was like “What the heck, man, I’m sleeping.” B.J. helped me really appreciate this process because of how serious he took it, he didn’t play with it because I realized this is both of our baby, man. We put it out for the world, but I’m super-duper proud of it.
There are going to be teammates, coaches that have no clue they’re part of my story. That’s why I’m looking forward for people to read it because they think “Oh, it’s all about you, Ben.” Yeah, but it’s all about the people, the places, the things, the circumstances. It’s like a Quentin Tarantino film, man, you really don’t know, man. It’s like the very first line in the book will let you know that this ain’t what I thought it was going to be. It ain’t about just football, it is but it isn’t.
Hey, man, my life is crazy. I wouldn’t change it. But to know that I had five grandparents, I had a great grandmother, two grandmothers and grandfathers and I knew them all. I’m writing this for them. Like my grandparents in their wildest dreams couldn’t do the stuff I did, go to college, go pro, meet Steve Spurrier, Ron Zook, man, please.
So this is me just riding this wave, saying, “Look, I’m doing this half for me and the other half for the people that I’m attached to whether we former teammates, or friends, family,” and I said the only thing that’s different about my story is that I’m willing to tell it, that’s it. Nothing special about it outside of the fact that I’m willing to be vulnerable, put myself out there and hopefully, one day it may inspire you to get out there and write your book, whatever it is.
My friend wrote a book about making freakin’ brownies and it almost became a best seller, I’m like “Baking freakin’ brownies?” and he was like “I love brownies.” And he wrote a book about it and people were like, dude. Never ever think that your story isn’t captivating to the audience.
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