内容简介：
In this novel, Bobby Christian, the hero, is sexually assaulted and terrorized repeatedly by a friend of his family, beginning at the age of seven. Turning his anger at the experience inward, and with an alcoholic father as a role model, he finds himself forced into the game of football in a sports-crazed community starting in the fourth grade.Pushed unmercifully into a game he never really wanted to play, he learns to harness the anger within himself and becomes a star. While still a teenager, he begins drinking as his father and brothers did before him. Soon, he too suffers from an alcoholism of the most treacherous kind. Because of his stature in the world of college and professional football, people willingly accept his addiction as aonly a wild streak, a or as just having a good time with the boys. But, simmering beneath the surface, his addictions slowly eat him up, and his seemingly perfect world comes apart.Devastated, he eventually starts to work on his problems, and tries to become a responsible husband and father to his long-ignored wife and two children. This book exposes the raw underbelly of big-time sports, where the pursuit of victory, violence, corruption, and societal pressures too often ruin lives.