Guys Read: Sports

Have you ever bought something that is said to be great and it has been disappointing? I went through this experience when I chose to read Guys Read: The Sports Pages.  

Guys Read: The Sports Pages was a very disappointing book as I was excited to read it but once I started, all I wanted was it to be over.  The Sports Pages is a series of short stories by different authors, some professional athletes, that are about experiences in sports, or at least are said to be.  Many of the short stories have little to do with sports and are written poorly.  For example, Against All Odds by Dustin Brown, an NHL hockey player for the Los Angeles Kings, was extremely long and dry.  He wrote about his life growing up to know as a hockey player, but it seems like I know everything about his life as if I was with him the whole time once I was done reading it.  I believe that anyone who has read this story will agree with me that Dustin Brown should stick to hockey.  There was another story called How I Won the World Series, by Dan Gutman, known as very good author.  The story was about him holding a grapefruit during the World Series and how it was a good luck charm.  This is one of the most boring stories I have ever read, as the majority of the dialogue was either “pass the grapefruit”, or “let me hold the grapefruit”.  Since reading about people practically play hot potato with a grapefruit while watching a baseball game isn’t exactly my cup of tea, it wasn’t my favorite story.  I thought Tim Greens’ Find Your Fire was actually a decent story, as Jake, a great football player coming from a very wealthy family, plans to give up a high school scholarship to his less fortunate best friend, Bobby.  But this isn’t just any scholarship, it’s a scholarship to Immaculate Heart, IH, the best division one football program in the state.  Why is this? Jake already knows he is going to IH next year and Bobby can’t even come close to affording it.  But the tables turn when Jake’s family becomes financially broke and tell him they can’t afford IH anymore and he won’t be going there unless it is on scholarship.  Jake battles Bobby for the scholarship and it is a tight race.  They never say who won it but the ending had me scratching my head in confusion.  All it said was Jake rode his bike to a high school and the banner said “Go Huskies”, and it never said anything about any team called the huskies.  I searched and searched for an explanation or a deeper meaning to this but there was absolutely nothing.  I thought it was a good story with a horrible ending.  The next story I am going to tell you about is by far the worst.  The Meat Grinder, by Chris Crutcher, takes place at a football practice in the middle of a drill called the meat grinder.  The meat grinder is a drill where there are two lines and one player from each line go and smash into each other.  Although the story takes place in a drill, it is about the thoughts going through the mind of Devin Mack, mnthe main character, on his turn.  He does not care how hard he gets hit because he doesn’t feel that pain.  He feels the pain of child abuse.  The whole story is about child abuse and how horrid his parents are to him.  This story was very depressing and not what I expected at all.  It was like I ordered food from a restaurant and they messed up my order.  I wanted a sports book, and received one about child abuse.  I could not bring it upon me to finish the story, until the very next day (I never stop in the middle of a story/chapter, good or bad).  If for some reason you want to read this book, skip this chapter.  Guys Read: The Sports Pages was an awful book and I wouldn’t have ever wasted my time reading it if I had a review like this to help me.  If you are thinking about reading it, think twice, after you have read my review.