"Kickoff (Or Never Trust a Girl Who Steals Your Ice-Cream Sandwich)"

     In the beginning of this story, Sarah Landwehr, a sensible person, and also Ken Bauer's girlfriend, the tight end/punter and class clown of the school, are arguing about Ken's ice-cream sandwich. Ken needs the sugar since he was going through a Hell Week at practice. Sarah intially pokes fun at Ken, calling him fat and round. After they completed arguing about the ice-cream sandwich, Sarah asked how his week of practice was. Big Chicago, the new stud of the defense, came up in discussion. He was an animal looking for flesh; he was insane on the football field. Rumors have it that he strikes he's prey with brass knuckles, he hits that hard. Half of the offensive team is afraid to block him. In one of the practices, when Ken was punting the ball, Chicago came at him shoved him to the ground and said, "I don't play scrimmages. I play football. You come to play against me and you'd better be ready to go to war." This guy was the real deal.
    This story is quite amusing to me. The title itself is such an attention grabber, it's such and orginal topic that gets the reader thinking. The story itself is easy to understand, but Carter uses great description to describe each character, especially with Big Chicago. He uses a lot of imagery in his writing, allowing the reader to picture that character of place in their heads. The only suggestion I would have for Carter is to maybe change the title. The title only relates to the beginning of the story, which consists of a page. But, the title is very interest so maybe that's why it is what it is.

"A Girl's Guide to Football Players"

In the story "A Girl's Guide to Football Players" Alden mentions all of the positions in football, allowing the reader to become acquainted with the sport. He explains what all of the positions do, but also talks about characteristics he believes that specific player has. For example, when talking about the role of a quarterback, he mentions that his job is to hand-off the ball or pass it to a teammate, and also says prior to the ball being snapped, he yells lots of gibberish.

Throughout all of the position descriptions, Alden makes jokes, just like the one I mentioned, which are very funny and agreeable. All those jokes are true, especially from my experience as a football player. The funniest joke that he makes is about offensive linemen. When he describes the holding penalty, he says, "... a penalty that invariably results in fervent denials by linemen, great wailing and weeping among fans, and much profanity from coaches." This story is the introduction to the collection and really gets the reader wanting more.
I honestly couldn't put the book down once reading this story!

Purpose Towards My Blog

For my creative writing class, we were assigned a project where we needed to read a collection of short stories and make a blog about that collection. I have read the collection Love, Football, And Other Contact Sports by Alden R. Carter. There's a lot of funny stories in here, and if you're into sports as much as I am, then I guarantee you would love them. On this blog, I will be discussing only five of Carter's stories. They are......

"A Girl's Guide to Football Players"
"Kickoff (Or Never Trust a Girl Who Steals Your Ice-Cream Sandwich"
"Trashback"
"Buck's Head"
"A Good Game"

Hope you enjoy reading my posts!