At last, a book for men. There are quite a few out there in the audience.
“You believe people can change?”
Play the game right and you can be a hero. You could also be the next hall of famer. Step out of line and you have no future. For a black athlete the game was your ticket.
There are three fundamental story lines in existence. The first is man against nature. The second is man against self. And the third is man against man. In this story we have a good example of man against man. And it is not just one man but several.
The pressure intensifies. How much pressure can a person take before he breaks? Flying high one day and shot down the next. For Dewayne Jobe, high school football hero and now college pick for best player of the year, it was a big drop. He starts out with friends; Sylvester ”Sly” Adams, Jesse Webb, Jake Hopper , his football couch, and a mother who believes in him, Cherie Jobe. Add to that a wife who believes in you. His football rival is Colby Stewart who wishes nothing more than to see Dewayne defeated on the football field.
Dewayne ends up with very little. He loses his friends and his wife through a trumped up murder charge. His chance to be someone on the football field is gone. The tension is maintained throughout the book.
The story really gets going when Dewayne marries his sweetheart, Rosella. He has it good. He could turn out being a real star. Soon Rosella discovers she has a long lost sister, Bonita. The sister turns out to be a drug addict with two children, Bruce and Sabrina.
This confronts Dewayne with poverty and the drug culture. Out of the goodness of his heart Dewayne gets involved with them. The daughter, Sabrina, is dating a lowlife, Tyler, who aims to bring Dewayne down. The nephew,
Bruce, wants to protect his mother from drugs. “He had to rid his family of this evil” So he makes plans. “He had hidden his mother’s secret stash of drugs — leaving her with an ample amount to keep her incapacitated long enough to carry out his mission — so she would call her dealer and get him to come to the apartment to replenish her supply.” Bruce attempts to stop Tyler with a baseball bat. “It worked up to the point that Sabrina grabbed him from behind. He never anticipated his sister trying to stop him, working against him, aiding and abetting the enemy.”
Bruce gets hurt instead and sent to the hospital. Tyler ends up in jail only to be paroled. That is just the first half of the book. The second half has Dewayne destroyed. To do this Tyler worms his way into good graces of everyone then proceeds to take away from Dewayne all his possessions. Tyler’s computer skills remove all the money from the back account of Dewayne Industries into an overseas account. Next Tyler is successful in having Dewayne arrested for the murder of Bonita, Bruce, Sabrina and his own son. Dewayne can’t defend himself as he doesn’t remember anything. He was found in his car in a locked garage with exhaust fumes seeping in. How he is cleared and restored is handled in a way that is satisfying and complete. The theme is endurance under stress. There is a book in the Bible called Job. This story reminds the reader of that classic tale.
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