"In 1968 Harper & Row published A Fan's Notes, a fictional memoir by Frederick Exley. The book's originality immediately stood out from the manufactured best sellers headed for Hollywood. Its author was a complete unknown: a "loser," a "drunk," a "dreamer," as he described himself in recounting his doomed struggle to adjust to an "unhuman society." "For my heart," Exley wrote in his memoir, "will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the criminal...with those whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life." From, he meant, the travails of ordinary, workaday America. The son of a telephone lineman for a local power company, Exley grew up in Watertown, New York, a dying industrial town close to the Canadian border. His father was a star local athlete and barroom fighter. Young Fred adored and feared him. Disappointments came early--and easily--to Exley. In high school, he blew a key football game for illegal holding. After graduation, Fred matriculated at an "undistinguished" local college. Then, following a busted romance, he transferred to the University of Southern California, an "undistinguished" university, set in the splendor of the Southern California sun. On campus, Fred regarded himself as "a leper." (Self-pity was an Exley hallmark.) Ignored by the golden haired sorority girls, he spent his time in local saloons in the company of a vaguely literary crowd.

At USC, the future author first became aware of Frank Gifford. The star of the school's football team, Gifford was everything Exley was not: popular, a gifted athlete. Fred was never sure if he loved or hated him, but over time Gifford was to became an imaginary alter ego, a rival he never could catch. Fleet footed, sure handed, Gifford soon joined Tulane's Eddie Price in forming a dazzling backfield for the New York Giants.

In the fall of 1953, Fred Exley headed for Manhattan, his B.A. degree in hand. Unable to land a glamorous job in advertising, he joined the public relations department of the railroad. He lived at the Y, and each night headed for Greenwich Village where perched on a bar stool, he "dreamed my dreams of fame."

A transfer to Chicago, a cutback at the railroad, a few too many nights in bars, and Fred was back in Watertown. There, he spent his days on his widowed mother's davenport, staring at the blank ceiling, alongside his best friend, the family dog.

It was Sundays Fred lived for. That was the day Gifford and the Giants played. Cheering Frank on kept Exley going, and, in some weird way, Gifford's accomplishments became to Fred almost his own. In a sad and touching scene in A Fan's Notes, Exley recounts how he trained the family dog to sit with his back against the couch, so they could watch the Giants' game on television, like two.."