Love On My Mind (eBook)

Ben Korgen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
First Edition Design Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5069-0493-1 (ISBN)

Infos

This is a 244,006 word complete sorghum series novel created by joining its already published parts titled Love's Lone Ranger, Love in the Hornet's Nest, Love and the Wheels of Redemption, Love in the Crisis Mode and Love in the Lydia Devereaux College. English teacher Cynthia has a crush on Sorghum High football coach Rudy who finds her repulsive. Cynthia backs off from her crush but never gives up trying to gain favor with Rudy even when he falls for cute, charming cheerleader Kara, daughter of Sorghum Principal Horace Dowd. Rudy proposes to Kara in her English class while it's in session. At a party before the wedding, Rudy's quarterback Don tussles amorously with Kara who immediately believes she is pregnant. In conflict with Principal Dowd, Rudy whisks Kara off to a Justice of the Peace where they are married. On the wedding night, Kara fakes falling asleep at the crucial moment to justify annulment later so she can marry Don. Eventually, Don marries Kara and Rudy marries cheerleader Connie. Cynthia undergoes a makeover led by a personal trainer who builds her into a professional wrestler who consistently defeats male professional wrestlers. After building great wealth and fame as a wrestler, Cynthia feels empowered enough to relaunch her romantic interests in Rudy by offering Rudy's wife Connie a great deal of money to divorce her husband. Connie rejects this offer and goes to war against Cynthia, eventually exposing her as a rigged-match wrestler wearing a theatrical muscle suit to make her look intimidating. Rudy consoles the defeated Cynthia by assuming Rudy's long neglected role of Love's Lone Ranger to skillfully nurse her into seeing great merit in her long-term driver. Violent death shatters the whimsical, laugh-littered plot at a totally unexpected point.

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This is a 244,006 word complete sorghum series novel created by joining its already published parts titled "e;Love's Lone Ranger,"e; "e;Love in the Hornet's Nest,"e; "e;Love and the Wheels of Redemption,"e; "e;Love in the Crisis Mode"e; and "e;Love in the Lydia Devereaux College."e; English teacher Cynthia has a crush on Sorghum High football coach Rudy who finds her repulsive. Cynthia backs off from her crush but never gives up trying to gain favor with Rudy even when he falls for cute, charming cheerleader Kara, daughter of Sorghum Principal Horace Dowd. Rudy proposes to Kara in her English class while it's in session. At a party before the wedding, Rudy's quarterback Don tussles amorously with Kara who immediately believes she is pregnant. In conflict with Principal Dowd, Rudy whisks Kara off to a Justice of the Peace where they are married. On the wedding night, Kara fakes falling asleep at the crucial moment to justify annulment later so she can marry Don. Eventually, Don marries Kara and Rudy marries cheerleader Connie. Cynthia undergoes a makeover led by a personal trainer who builds her into a professional wrestler who consistently defeats male professional wrestlers. After building great wealth and fame as a wrestler, Cynthia feels empowered enough to relaunch her romantic interests in Rudy by offering Rudy's wife Connie a great deal of money to divorce her husband. Connie rejects this offer and goes to war against Cynthia, eventually exposing her as a rigged-match wrestler wearing a theatrical muscle suit to make her look intimidating. Rudy consoles the defeated Cynthia by assuming Rudy's long neglected role of Love's Lone Ranger to skillfully nurse her into seeing great merit in her long-term driver. Violent death shatters the whimsical, laugh-littered plot at a totally unexpected point.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1.

 

On a cool, 1939 autumn evening in Westlake, Wisconsin, eleven year old Rudy Tripp was riveted to his battered seat in the Old Harbor Theater being emotionally swept away by movie newsreel accounts of American-style college football games. The impact of these accounts was so strong, it swamped Rudy’s mind with an unswerving conviction that he would become the greatest football coach in history. In his final season of small college football, Rudy was a second team halfback spending most of his time on the Westlake College bench. For three and a half seasons, Rudy had been annoying his coaches by constantly offering them ideas for improving the team’s performance. In the Westlake locker room after the fourth loss of his senior season, Rudy threw a frantic, shouting tantrum that alarmed all the coaches and other players present.

Westlake head football coach John Holstrom ushered Rudy into an unoccupied locker room office and agreed to start listening to his ideas. While struggling to formulate what he should say, Holstrom suddenly accepts that he is so close to retirement, he has lost all interest in coaching football. Among his closest friends, he is starting to make statements about recruiting such as “If you want a circus, you have to get the animals” and about playing such as “You have to be crazy to play this game.”

Impulsively, Holstrom tells Rudy he has always been impressed by his ideas but could not bear to use them because they would change everything in their playbook and he was just too old and tired to face being demoted to a beginner trying to learn everything from scratch. He added that he planned to stop coaching football immediately, did not think his assistant coaches were competent enough to take over his position and vowed to convince the Westlake College administration that they must provide a special-case dispensation allowing Rudy to take over the team as player-coach for the upcoming big rivalry game with Splitcrag College.

Going into the Splitcrag game, football experts give Westlake no chance of winning. Splitcrag head coach Dorcon Kelbram would be fielding an undefeated team that won its first four games by big scores. In private, Kelbram expresses love and admiration for his own players and for opposing players who play hard to beat his teams. During all Splitcrag practice sessions and games, Kelbram is a strict disciplinarian who provides specific rules for his players to follow when they face every conceivable offensive formation, individual play, defensive alignment, non-typical stunt, kicking game possibility, overall strategy and tactic. Kelbram calls these rules his “keys” and believes they are largely responsible for his many coaching successes.

Media coverage feasts on any unusual, strange, freaky or unbelievable incidents that occur during American-style football games at the big university and professional levels. This is ironic because football player and coach numbers form a pyramid, with a tiny fraction of people located at the highest levels. If players and coaches at all levels were equally likely to cause unusual events, most accounts of these events would be found at the lowest levels of the pyramid. This effect should be magnified by increases in coach and player mistakes moving downward into the lower levels of the pyramid.

One does not need to go far downward from the top of this pyramid to find more abnormal events than could be found among the closer to perfection players and coaches at the top. The next level down is found at the small colleges. One of the best examples that avoided national and international media coverage occurred during the 1950 Splitcrag verses Westlake small college rivalry game.

Splitcrag, Minnesota and Westlake, Wisconsin are cities geographically joined to form a single port on the western tip of Lake Superior. In 1950, each city had a rapidly growing small college being pushed by educational zealots, political leaders, business entrepreneurs and wealthy alumni toward university status and bigtime football programs. Splitcrag College was ahead in this effort, partly because it had access to the resources of a bigger city. Football scholarships at Splitcrag were twenty times as valuable as those at Westlake. Most Splitcrag players were bigger, faster and more athletic than those at Westlake. Of the thirty three football alumni from the two schools who were playing or had played professional football, thirty two were from Splitcrag and one was from Westlake.

American small college football rivalries can get unbelievably intense. When teams leave stadiums after small college rivalry games, they often are escorted by dozens of police officers in squad cars, on motorcycles and riding big, intimidating horses sporting leatherwork studded with sharp-pointed, gleaming metal spikes. Football rivalries between small colleges geographically close to each other are the most intense. This is especially true for the Splitcrag-Westlake rivalry since both small colleges reside in cities touching each other within the same metropolitan area.

Small college rivalries are particularly frantic in America’s near-wilderness northernmost east-west strip. Several reasons for this have been proposed, argued and fought over. One theory suggests that because this strip is geographically far from America’s biggest entertainment and educational centers, its inhabitants irresistibly drift toward overemphasizing the importance of hunting, fishing, arguing, fighting and sports fanaticism. A different theory suggests that people living in the same far-north strip have wisely used geography to escape from the arrogance, snobbery and conceit that taints America’s major entertainment and educational centers, leaving them more appreciative of sports team players and coaches.

The 1950 annual Splitcrag-Westlake football game was preceded by an unusually strong buildup of fan interest generated by local media outlets and focused on the aggressive, empire-building Splitcrag head coach Dorcon Kelbram, record-breaking Splitcrag senior fullback Burl Harner and aging, easy-going and likeable Westlake head coach John Holstrom.

If player talent, size and strength were the only factors deciding the outcome of a football game, Splitcrag would easily crush Westlake. If coaching records were equally important, the result would be the same. Coach Kelbram’s teams were undefeated for five straight years going into this rivalry game. His 1950 team started the season with a 4 and 0 won-lost record. In contrast, Coach Holstrom’s players usually broke even or close to it and celebrated if they won more games than they lost. His team started the 1950 season with a 0 and 4 won-lost record. Splitcrag also would have the home-stadium advantage.

The game would be played under the lights. On game day, the parking lots surrounding the big Splitcrag football stadium began filling up in the early evening. Most of the first arrivers were tailgaters without official connections with either of the colleges involved. When the players from both teams trotted onto the field for their warmup drills, the stadium was rapidly filling with spectators.

Bill Damar of Harbor Radio Station WESW was scheduled to give the play-by-play radio presentation. When he arrived, the Splitcrag stadium was packed with students and faculty members from both colleges plus an army of football lovers fitting every possible description. When the players from both teams had time to establish impressions of their sizes, speeds and athleticism during their warmup drills, Damar concentrated intensely for a few moments on player impressions and how he would begin his radio commentary, then began to speak into his live Station WESW microphone.

 

Damar

This play-by-play broadcast of the 1950 Splitcrag-Westlake football game is brought to you by Cutilay Creams of Splitcrag, Minnesota. Gals, when you go to that big mixer dance looking for that perfect guy, what do you think the guys look at first when they get a close look at you? They look at your cuticles, the bands of tissue that smooth out the junctions between your fingernails and the skin of your fingers. If your cuticles are shabby, that perfect guy will know you’ll never manage his home they way he would want you to! Start using Cutilay Cuticle Cream right after this big game!

The players of both teams are trotting onto the field from opposite sides of the big Splitcrag stadium, the Splitcrag Eagles in white with blue and gold trim; the Westlake Warriors in red with white and black trim. They’re warming up and the lights make them look fast, crisp and almost heroic. Wow! Look at the differences in the sizes of these players! The Splitcrag players must average at least 20 pounds heavier than their Westlake opponents! Look at those muscular, athletic Splitcrag physiques! Look at their confident maneuvers and the spring in their every step! Westlake will have their work cut out for them today!

Splitcrag won the coin toss and elected to receive. Immediately after the coin toss was decided, the coaches and players on the Westlake bench began singing! I’ve never seen this before! It sounds like an alma mater, but I’ve heard the Westlake alma mater before and this is not it. Westlake kicked off and Splitcrag’s great fullback Burl Harner took the ball on his own twenty yard line. He started up the center of the field, drew a bunched-up crowd of Westlake players to meet him, then veered to the right, streaked down the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.10.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-5069-0493-9 / 1506904939
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5069-0493-1 / 9781506904931