You know the story by now. Four friends, two of whom were NFL players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, set out on a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico. Two days later, three of them were dead. The only survivor was 24-year-old Nick Schuyler.

We have seen a lot of Schuyler over the past two weeks — The TODAY Show, Oprah and Larry King Live, among others — plugging his new book titled “Not Without Hope.” The interviews have been emotional and dramatic. Many of the most daunting questions, however, not only remain unanswered, but unasked.

Maybe it’s the entertainment world’s innate desire to create sensational stories to captivate and inspire their audience — grand, heart-wrenching tales of ordinary people-turned-heroes who battled impossible odds and, only by the grace of God, triumphed in the end. Or maybe it’s just that we all desperately want to believe in such things. After all, if we acknowledged the whole truth — the real story, stripped of all its ratings-boosting hyperbole — we might be forced to confront a darker side of the human spirit — a latent state of mind that, in all probability, lies deep within us all. It is triggered by survival instinct and becomes the raw, primal process of protecting one’s own life at all costs. But we don’t want to think about it so that we don’t have to judge, because none of us can truly say what we would have done had we been in the same situation. It’s easier to just believe in miracles.

On March 2, the one-year anniversary of his rescue, Schuyler’s book was released, offering a definitive play-by-play account of the entire ordeal, along with a number of revelations.

Contrary to the larger-than-life tale spun by wishful media, it turns out that Schuyler isn’t Superman, and it wasn’t as if the angels of mercy reached down from the heavens and blessedly delivered him from certain death. There is no reason to believe that Schuyler is meant for some higher purpose while his friends died in vain, nor was his survival merely haphazard. It is really rather simple: He lived because his survival instinct kicked in faster and more fiercely than that of his friends. He lived because he did what he had to do to save himself.

This is not to say that he did nothing to help the others, but to say that he did everything he could to help them would be false.

This may all sound a bit callous, but you don’t exactly have to read between the lines of his book to draw these conclusions. It’s all right there in black and white.

Video   NFL boat tragedy survivor speaks out March 4, 2010: Nick Schuyler, the sole survivor of a fishing trip that turned deadly, speaks with TODAY’s Matt Lauer about his book, “ Not Without Hope,” and details the final moments he shared with his friends, Marquis Cooper, Corey Smith and Will Bleakley.

No doubt to frame the story more poignantly, the four men have been widely — yet inaccurately — described as “best friends.” That applies only to the relationship between Schuyler and Will Bleakley. The two had met in college and remained very close since. Schuyler said he had met Cooper and Smith not three months prior to the accident. Bleakley was invited along at the last minute after another friend canceled.

“He had never met (Cooper or Smith) until that morning,” Schuyler said in an interview after the release of the book.

In Schuyler’s written account, the gist of what set off the tragedy is this: The four men took the boat 70 miles out into the Gulf, despite an approaching storm. After several hours of fishing at the site, the seas became rough and they decided to head back. The boat’s anchor, however, was caught on something 150 feet down and couldn’t be pulled in. Cooper had the same issue the week before and freed the boat by cutting the anchor line. The new anchor had cost him $200, but not wanting to lose another they tied the anchor line to the back of the boat and gunned the boat’s engine at full throttle, hoping to loosen the anchor. Instead, the anchor stayed put, the line drew taut and the force flipped the boat, hurling all four men into the 64°F water.

After capsizing, they had no life jackets, so to retrieve them Bleakley and Cooper volunteered to dive down under the boat. To lessen their buoyancy, they both removed — and promptly lost — most of their clothing in the process.

After several failed attempts to get under the vessel, Bleakley asked Schuyler to help. “No, I can’t,” Schuyler responded, commenting in the book that he felt embarrassed to say that, but he was scared for his life and had never opened his eyes in salt water. To this day, Schuyler is still bothered by his actions.

“I was kind of waiting for someone to ask me about that; you’re the first to ask about it,” Schuyler said. “I’ll never forget it because I’ve never ever turned down a challenge or at least given something a shot.”

Eventually, Bleakley was able to get under and snag three life preservers and one seat cushion that could double as a floatation device. Bleakley nobly took the cushion for himself.

There was little room for the men to get out of the water and on top of the capsized boat. Though it was slippery, Cooper lay across the hull and held on as best he could, sliding back and forth across it as the storm set in. Schuyler and Bleakley balanced on the swim platform by the engine, largely keeping their bodies above water. Smith, however, remained submerged in the water, clutching the boat with one hand and floating behind.

Having removed their clothes to swim under the boat, Bleakley wore only a T-shirt and swimsuit, while Cooper was even less fortunate.

“All he had on was his swim trunks,” Schuyler recalled.

Prior to the boat flipping, Schuyler, feeling seasick, had bundled up in a sweatshirt, parka, pants, a skull cap, gloves and shoes. When the boat overturned, he was able to retain all of his clothes.

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The four men essentially remained in the same position through the night, rarely rotating to give Cooper a respite from the slick hull and bitter wind or allow Smith to escape the chill of the water.

Asked if they ever thought about rotating, or if there was any reason to their positioning, Schuyler said, “No, it’s just kind of the way it came out,” and also clarified, “We were thrown off the boat like 100 times, but for the most part, we always came back to that position.”

Overnight, the air temperature dropped to 40 degrees and the storm brought swells of up to 14 feet. According to the book, Cooper deteriorated quickly. Not only was he barely clothed, but he had used a significant amount of energy swimming under the boat earlier and then from being tossed from side to side of the hull “like wind shield wipers.” Swimming or treading water of this temperature can reduce survival time by more than 50 percent, and once hypothermia sets in any physical activity rapidly increases the rate of heat loss and can lead to death unless the body is warmed in time. As is the case of many who suffer from extreme hypothermia, Cooper also became rowdy and confrontational, exerting his body further. He began to slur his words, started to hallucinate and became sluggish and disoriented.

Schuyler lay him across his lap and held on to him, but he eventually fell unconscious. By 6 a.m., Cooper was dead. Distraught, Schuyler removed Cooper’s life jacket and guided his lifeless body into the water.

Within 15 minutes, Smith would also be dead. An hour prior, he had also begun showing signs of severe hypothermia — impaired speech, delirium and combativeness. Experts say that water zaps body heat 25 times faster than air, so not surprisingly, Smith’s condition declined rapidly as he remained in the water.

In one of the more disturbing scenes described in the book, Smith frantically struggles to pull himself out of the icy water while Schuyler and Bleakley forbid him to climb up on the swim platform with them. In an excerpt:

He’d try for fifteen seconds, go lifeless, and then try again to get out of the water. “Stop, stop!” It seemed like it went on for about a half hour. “You can’t, there’s no room, stop,” we told Corey.

Other than arbitrary misfortune, why Smith was the one condemned to the water has not been made clear. So did they simply not realize that Smith was in critical danger, having to stay in the water?