In August of 2001, Mark Kriegel was suddenly fired by the Daily News from his job as a three-times-a-week sports columnist. He never saw the ax coming.

At age 38, with a 2-year-old daughter, Mr. Kriegel was unemployed, without prospects for steady work, and filled with fear.

But he was able to convert this fear into fire. He worked every day for more than two years in a focused frenzy. He was like an athlete in a career-defining crisis, or a deciding seventh game.

What Mr. Kriegel did was write a biography of New York football legend Joe Namath. It is exquisitely written, and deeply researched. It will arrive in bookstores next week and the publisher (Viking) is printing 100,000 copies.

It delivers a hundred scoops – some tabloid, some Freudian.

The Daily News will publish excerpts starting on August 22, which is just a week short of the third anniversary of the day it fired him. This is redemption squared. It is also the makings of autumn’s big book.

There have been four first-rate sports biographies the last five years: David Maraniss on Vince Lombardi, Richard Ben Cramer on Joe DiMaggio, Leigh Montville on Ted Williams, and Laura Hillenbrand on Seabiscuit. “Namath” belongs in this company of the compelling.

I asked Mr. Kriegel, now 41, how he got up off the floor and arrived at the idea of doing this unauthorized biography of Mr. Namath.

“I was a jobless sports writer,” he began. “I was frightened and trying to think of an idea, just for a magazine piece.”

“Then I started to remember a conversation I had with Sal Marciano (the veteran TV sports reporter) a few months earlier. Sal has painted a picture for me of Namath as a divorced dad who didn’t expect his life to turn out like this, and who missed his two daughters.”

Mr. Marciano had described Mr. Namath sitting in shadows, drinking, and recently divorced. The image had been marinating in Mr. Kriegel’s imagination for months. It kept coming back to him, and he decided Joe Namath was a good magazine profile.

Then his friend, Dan Klores, the publicist-turned-filmmaker, told Mr. Kriegel Namath was a book, not a magazine article. Mr. Kriegel’s stockbroker wife, Emily, told him the same thing.

Mr. Kriegel has always been a furnace of anti-Zen intensity. Now, with something to prove, with his career on the line, he took off like a rocket of research.

As a columnist, Mr. Kriegel was expected to deliver clever one-liners, attitude, and declarative final judgments on deadline.

Now he started to do real reporting, with no deadline, in archives and libraries. And when you knock on the doors of strangers, and ask interesting questions, you find out new things.

Mr. Kriegel began to discover threads of narrative and scoops of consciousness that columnists don’t have the time to excavate. He went to Mr. Namath’s blue-collar hometown of Beaver Falls, Pa,, checked into a Holiday Inn, made endless phone calls, and suddenly new insights began to fill a notebook.

In Beaver Falls, Mr. Kriegel was told that the saddest day of Joe Namath’s life occurred when his parents divorced when he was in the seventh grade.

“This turns out to be the central event of Joe Namath’s life, not the 1969 Jets’ Super Bowl victory,” Mr. Kriegel says. “Joe was left home alone with his mom, while his older brothers were out in the world. After this, Joe was always afraid of marriage.”

What “Namath” does is make more complex and nuanced all the deadline myths sportswriters popularized. The sportswriters made Joe Namath into this hippie, stud, counterculture gambler. They made him the Zeitgeist of the 1960s and this is how he was marketed.

But Mr. Kriegel’s “Namath” is more of a stoic in pain from a lifetime of football injuries to his limbs and joints. He starts to drink in 1965 – his rookie season – to ease pain. After a while, he can’t distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain. It just hurts.

Mr. Kriegel’s Namath is “John Wayne because of his courage and ability to endure pain. His drinking is self-medicating.”

There was also an element of method-acting empathy driving Mr. Kriegel. His marriage was a in turbulent phase and he was living alone in a studio apartment for a while. He was missing his daughter, the way Mr. Namath was missing his two daughters.

“I had contemplated life as a divorced dad,” Mr. Kriegel says, “and I think this helped me understand some of Joe’s pain. Writing this book saved my marriage.”

Some of the best passages of Mr. Kriegel’s biography deal with Mr. Namath’s Hungarian immigrant parents and his integrated, working-class origins in Beaver Falls that helped make Mr. Namath color-blind and yet sensitive about race.

Mr. Kriegel takes two pages to describe Mr. Namath’s (platonic) college friendship with Vivian Malone, the first black woman to integrate the University of Alabama, in 1963.

“It was a thrill to see Vivian walk through the door,” Mr. Namath once recalled. “You couldn’t understand how much pressure she was under.” But it would be eight more years before Bear Bryant’s Alabama football team would have its first black player.

Mr. Kriegel obtained his mother lode of original material with relentless legwork, fueled by his ever-present fear of failure. He became a reporter again, like when he started at the Daily News in 1988.

He spent days reading immigrant ship manifests in the National Archives. He read through warehoused court files of old lawsuits and found Mr. Namath’s old contracts. He got Mr. Namath’s FBI file. He got an archivist to fax him material involving Richard Nixon putting Joe Namath on his “enemies list,” the only athlete to receive the honor. Not even Muhammad Ali made it.

The repressed and paranoid Mr. Nixon projected something onto Joe Namath that wasn’t there. Mr. Namath was not political, perhaps even a little conservative. Nixon may have resented the football star’s lifestyle excesses.

When Mr. Kriegel found Mr. Namath’s parents’ divorce papers in the Beaver Falls courthouse, he recalls feeling, “both elated and uneasy because I was invading Joe’s privacy and secrecy.”

The book displays taste in probing Mr. Namath’s interior life; it is never cheap, but always true.

When Mr. Kriegel was 10 or 11, Joe Namath was his hero, “because he was cool. I had his uniform in my room.”

Mr. Kriegel interviewed about 80 people, but not Mr. Namath, who wanted to be paid to cooperate.

This book is the story of the wounded but not tragic sports hero in repose, of a famous life as it was lived – with torment, mistakes, hangovers, sex, and occasional fourth-down touchdown passes or bootleg trots into the end zone.