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.