I want you to imagine a guy with a resume so impossibly perfect. It honestly sounds like, well, like a mid -century fiction writer just made it up. It's almost cartoonish how perfect it is. I mean, we are talking about an Oxford Rhodes scholar, an elite collegiate athlete who was actually featured in Sports Illustrated because he was dominating in three different sports.

And because sweeping floors doesn't pay enough to support a family, he leans on his military training and gets a job as a commercial helicopter pilot. He works for Petroleum Helicopters International, flying workers out to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Which was a brutal, punishing existence. He was flying these exhausting shifts out of Louisiana during the week.

• What the source material reveals is that the true story of his life is one of the most radical t ...