Love’s Winning Plays

This rollicking, tongue-in-cheek sports novel from Majors (The Millionaires) makes for a breezy read worth a few chuckles while it gives a behind-the-scenes peek at the often greedy, arrogant titans who run college football. Raymond Love, former star QB at a small college in Kentucky, is presently a noncoaching graduate assistant, or “full-time errand boy,” at an unnamed SEC university. He aspires to fill a vacant coaching GA position, competing for it with his brown-nosing peer and rival, Sparkman. Before the team’s annual fund-raiser involving affluent “Pigskin Cavalcade” boosters, Love is assigned to babysit veteran coach Bill Woody, a loose cannon who loves opera and blunt speaking. All of them work for head coach Von Driver and athletic director Sampson; Love, meanwhile, is dating Sampson’s nubile daughter, Brooke. She ropes him into her largely women’s book club, and he laughs about his discomfort there with Julie, a fellow graduate student in his sports classes who, though she’s engaged to be married, obviously better suits him as a romantic interest. As Love listens to Coach Woody’s war stories, he also encounters the seamy, corrupt financial aspects underpinning university football. Love’s major conflict pits his personal integrity against his career ambitions to become a “great” college football coach in Majors’s funny, irreverent, and savvy sports novel. (Sept.)