If you're not a nut about professional American football, you might not know who sportswriter and Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio is. That's okay. I mention him only because, according to sports website AwfulAnnouncing.com, he has written a new novel, Big Shield, with a premise that might sound somewhat familiar to those of us who know Booster Gold's origin story:
Given that the dam has now burst, professional sports leagues and media companies are in business with the gamblers, and there is no such thing as amateur football anymore, I'm starting to think that the most far-fetched aspect of Booster Gold's origin story as a disgraced point-shaving quarterback is that future American society would feel he's done anything disgraceful.
If you make people enough money, you're already a hero to them.
Shawn posted on Sep. 26, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Both Florio and Dan Jurgens are big Minnesota Vikings fans
SLW (Steff) posted on Sep. 26, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Most college athletes are exploited terribly. There are whole papers and studies done on it. And how we view agency and culpability in this society is disgusting, especially when it does come to those being exploited, as if the spotlight and mere shot at something like fame is payment for the punishment they put their bodies and brains through.
Booster was a desperately kid with no resources in a dire situation with no way out. The only disgrace in all of that belong to the people using him.
Jeff posted on Sep. 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Given the recent times of college sports and nil money where some student athletes are making millions in college, it makes you think. Given the fact Michael only starts betting on his own games to pay for his mothers surgery, would they need to tweak boosters origin as he was the best college football player and was probably making millions in college why would they be a need to bet on his own games? Or am I overthinking this lol.
Boosterrific [Official Comment] posted on Sep. 26, 2025 at 9:48 PM
It's worth noting that American football is just starting to make a comeback in Booster's 25th century as society continues it's recovery following the Great Disaster. So maybe they have stronger rules against what we used to call "cheating."
Jeff posted on Sep. 26, 2025 at 11:28 PM
On another note, If the great disaster you're talking is the same one that relates to the character komandi. I thought that timeline was a else worlds story?
Boosterrific [Official Comment] posted on Sep. 27, 2025 at 1:21 AM
Yes, the original Great Disaster was on Earth-AD. In the Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era, with the Multiverse reduced to a single timeline, the Great Disaster was re-imagined as a nuclear war in the 21st century that was explored in the series HEX and referenced directly in BOOSTER GOLD volume 1.
SLW (Steff) posted on Sep. 27, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Also referenced in Time Masters.
Jeff, the thing you're getting into there is where the Watsonian (in-universe) read collides with the Doylist reality. It wasn't until 2021 that college athletes were allowed to make any money on themselves and even then, they were allowed to control their images, names and likenesses (NIL), not to get paid to play. (Though there are some really ugly things going on in college football that circumvent that kind of thing, involving private donors and 'gifts' and shit, which is not dissimilar from what happened with Michael.)
It's only now -- this year! -- where House v. NCAA was signed off on, allowing colleges and universities to pay players from the athletic budget, and I believe the cap is 20 million. Which is admittedly an astronomical sum of money, but that's a social problem. I'm not blaming the teenagers and early-twenty-somethings for it.
But this wouldn't have been the case when Dan wrote Vol. 1, ergo you can't assume that it would be the case for Booster regardless of whether it is now. Booster would have been playing under the rules as Dan understood them to be. Further, unlike Pete Rose or the Black Sox, his motivations for getting into it were -- as I've said when writing about this myself -- the most forgivable and understandable. Whereas the people exploiting this kid were a whole different kind of ballgame.
Personally -- and this is a very unpopular opinion -- I think football really oughta die off and not be resurrected, because the damage it does to the bodies and brains of the players is horrific. I worked in a stadium -- and not as a low-level grunt -- and watched them carry kids off the field, so I bet I've got more experience with this than most. But we're a frankly selfish nation that likes our entertainment more than we actually care about the people giving it to us, so that's not gonna happen; at least if college athletes are being paid, it's something in return for the fact they're risking CTE and various other horrors.
And yes, don't get me started on high school football, either. Even as a former band kid.
Anyway, the upshot is that Michael's backstory doesn't really need revised. It's an incredibly good backstory and frankly one of Dan's most brilliant pieces of writing; the way he doled that out over time and built it in each iteration, starting with what looked like selfishness and foolishness, but then adding little-by-little to it, until you realize just how screwed up and awful it was and just how little agency Michael actually had, possibly was some of the best character work I've seen in a comic. Maybe some of the best I've seen in any fiction.
It's tangled and twisted and painful and human and very, very understandable. Changing that would be taking away from its genius.
Eskana posted on Sep. 28, 2025 at 2:49 PM
In a football-related note, Glen Powell, a popular pick to play Booster Gold, is going to be starring in a show on Hulu in which he plays a washed-up college football player who just wants one more shot. He goes a decidedly different route than Booster.... but not TOO far off, really.
Audition tape? YOU decide.
SLW (Steff) posted on Sep. 28, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Glenn Powell's not pretty enough, in my opinion. LOL!
