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What: “A Man and His Mother: An Adopted Son’s Search,” by Tim Green

Publisher: Regan Books ($23)

A book on the life of Tim Green could be titled “As Good as I Wanna Be.” He was an All-American defensive end at Syracuse, a first-round draft choice by the Atlanta Falcons, valedictorian of his undergraduate class, and an honors law school graduate. He is now a best-selling author, respected pro football commentator for Fox television, and a regular contributor to ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Handsome, polite, personable, a devoted husband and father, Tim Green is the complete package, a true Renaissance Man.

His first three books, “Ruffians,” “Titans” and “Outlaws,” were novels. Then came “The Dark Side of the Game,” a best-seller that was basically nonfiction. This book is autobiographical. With heartbreaking honesty, Green examines how his lifelong drive to excel led him to undertake a fateful search for his biological mother. Sealed adoption papers forced him to hire private investigators whose efforts came up short, and one respondent to one of his ads led to a nightmarish meeting with a disturbed woman claiming to be his mother.

Green is featured in a segment on ABC’s “Prime Time” tonight, and his adoptive parents, Dick and Judy Green, also are interviewed by reporter Sylvia Chase. They talk about their difficulty in dealing with Green’s search and his going public about it in a book.

In the book, Green writes about how the search almost came to an unsatisfying conclusion until, in an almost unbelievable twist of fate, Green’s kindness to a young fan connected him to a woman who had access to records that eventually reunited Green with his biological mother.

Of his first phone conversation with his mother, Green writes: “I listed everything I’d done to that date, rolling accomplishments off the end of my tongue as if I was a salesman selling the fastest-moving model on the lot. . . . I struggled my whole life to be so impressive, so irresistible, that there was no way my mother could do anything but listen in amazement and wonder and admiration. Finally, she would adore me. She would want to stake claim to me, to call part of me her own.”

With unflinching honesty, Green lays bare the deeply held, and sometimes conflicting emotions, an adopted child lives with.

In this era of Dennis Rodman and the immoral, egotistical, and rude professional athlete, Green’s story of his search for his biological mother is truly an uplifting one.