It is 1995 and the millionaire American decathlete Marty Luther Jones aims to be the first man to break the magic 9000-points barrier. After narrowly failing, he discovers that he has been ingesting a cocktail of drugs. None of these is illegal, but this causes him to seriously question his true ability. Marty now begins to hear voices and to see an old man who is invisible to anyone but him. He constantly asks Marty if he is ""ready"". Marty discovers that the old man is the ghost of Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete / football player of the early 20th century, one of the greatest American athletes of all time. Jim wants him to come back, to compete against him. The Aetherians, a spiritualist society, transport him back to 1911, where he finds that black existence is much harder. He befriends Jim Thorpe and becomes his coach. The two friends finally compete against each other in a titanic competition, but Marty then faces the problem of returning to the present with Mary Lou, the love of his life. Alas, no one from the past has ever made it forward into the future.
About the Author: Tom McNab's career spans both sport and the arts. Seven times Scottish triple jump champion, he played football for Scottish Youths and rugby for Bermuda, and has coached at world-level in athletics, rugby union and bobsleigh. In 1963, he became a National Athletics Coach, created the Five Star Award Scheme, the world's most successful children's athletics programme, and the National Decathlon initiative which produced Daley Thompson. In 1973, he was coach to Chelsea FC when they won the FA Cup, and he helped take the English rugby union team to a silver medal in the 1991 World Cup. It was in 1978 that he started work with Colin Welland as script advisor on the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, later becoming its technical director. It was in the same period that, having written definitive technical works such as Modern Schools Athletics, he wrote his first novel, Flanagan's Run. This went to the top of the best-seller lists in its first week, into 25 languages, and is now in film development. His next major novel, the sports-western The Fast Men, was declared the best book ever written on track and field athletics. A member of our London Olympic bid team, Tom presented a play on the Berlin Olympics, 1936, which showed successfully at Sadler's Wells in 2012. His play on the German film director Riefenstahl, Leni. Leni., featured as a short film at Cannes in 2016, and Whisper in the Heart, featuring Riefenstahl and Orson Welles, will show at the Camden Arts Festival in August, 2018. He has recently written Orwell on Jura, and now has in preparation My Name is Joseph Knight, based on the famous Scottish slavery trial of 1778. Still coaching back in 2003, he transformed a 16-year-old football player into a world-class long jumper. His name was Greg Rutherford.