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    The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock: God, I’ll Do Anything – Just Make Me Awesome
    The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock: God, I’ll Do Anything – Just Make Me Awesome
    The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock: God, I’ll Do Anything – Just Make Me Awesome
    Ebook162 pages49 minutes

    The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock: God, I’ll Do Anything – Just Make Me Awesome

    By Ted Kluck and Daniel Hawkins

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    About this ebook

    Join Flex on His Quest to Be Cool

    Like most middle schoolers, Flex's mind is on a million different things—school, sports, friends, girls (of course), and yeah, he's thinking about God too. More than any of these thoughts, Flex is obsessed with one thing—being cool.

    But how can Flex attain awesomeness when he's so amazingly average at, well...EVERYTHING?!?

    Football could be his ticket out of seventh-grade obscurity, but then Coach sticks him with a boring jersey number and reassigns him to the most unglamorous position on the entire team.

    His parents aren't helping, either. They won't even let him bring his iPod to school like the other kids do. At least, his parents love him and love the Lord. That's HUGE.

    And just when Flex thinks life couldn't any more complicated, he finds himself suddenly drawn to KK, the mysterious drama girl. She's homeschooled and in ninth grade. KK is totally different...and a little exciting.

    Will Flex ever be considered cool? In God's eyes, maybe he already is.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvest House Publishers
    Release dateMay 1, 2018
    ISBN9780736971362
    The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock: God, I’ll Do Anything – Just Make Me Awesome
    Author

    Ted Kluck

    Ted Kluck is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, USA Today, and ESPN.com. He’s the author of several books, including Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be, coauthored with Kevin DeYoung. Ted lives in Tennessee with his wife Kristin and their two sons, Tristan and Maxim. www.tedkluck.com

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      Book preview

      The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock - Ted Kluck

      Publisher

      1

      I HAVE TO POOP (OR, WHAT ANXIETY FEELS LIKE)

      For me it is a rapid flushing of the face.

      Meaning that my face gets, like, really, really hot and I feel like I have to poop. I get this anxious feeling several times each day, including (but not limited to) the following three occasions:

      1. Right before band practice.

      My band teacher is roughly 150 years old, has a face like a basset hound, and hates me. I play saxophone, meaning that for 55 minutes I sit and hold a saxophone and try to look like I know what I’m doing.

      The people who sit on either side of me are girls who have really hot names like Krissy and Elaine. Names that aren’t hot themselves but are made hotter because the girls are in eighth grade.

      They smell like hair spray and lip gloss, and I find that really intoxicating. To date, I have said zero words to Krissy because another thing happens when I get super nervous—my mouth gets dry and I have trouble making words. So, yeah, some challenges there.

      My mom put me in the band because in Empty Factory, Indiana (that’s my town), the good kids take band and get into classes with other good kids and good teachers. Everybody else is a bad kid. I’m not sure this is true, but it’s the prevailing wisdom in Empty Factory.

      Aside: I’m Flex. I’m in seventh grade. I don’t really know where the nickname Flex came from.

      Actually, I do. I’m sorry I lied just then.

      It came a year ago when I discovered push-ups and started doing hundreds of them (along with sit-ups) in my room each morning and night.

      Full disclosure: I struggle with chin-ups because I’m a bigger guy. I can only do three.

      Anyway. I started with push-ups, and apparently, according to my friend Doug Smith (nickname: Dougie Fresh), every time I walked by a mirror, a window, a shiny piece of metal, or anything else that could reflect an image, I would flex (like, my biceps or triceps) a little.

      Middle school kids can be ruthless when it comes to nicknames. Do I love the nickname? I should probably say no—because saying no would be the humble, self-effacing, and right thing to do—except that I kind of like it.

      Empty Factory is in the middle of nowhere, in Indiana. It’s about 90 minutes by car north of Indianapolis (where the rich kids shop) and about 30 minutes north of Muncie (where the regular kids shop). We shop at Murphy’s, which is a department store in downtown Empty Factory. Sometimes we make it to the Muncie Mall, where I’m mortified if anyone I know sees me with my mom (see: anxiety).

      As you can imagine, Empty Factory got its name because of all the empty factories we have in town.

      If we had more hipsters in our town, these buildings would be repurposed as coffee shops or gastropubs, which is just a gross-sounding name for a restaurant. We have three stoplights, a public pool, and lots of tanning parlors. Our chief export is super-tan girls who go to college at Ball State in Muncie.

      Everybody wants to get out of Empty Factory. My way out is going to be football. I’m probably going to play in the NFL.

      Playing in the NBA is my fallback, with baseball a distant third.

      2

      AM I COOL?

      Well, I’m 12 years old and writing a memoir, so that right there probably disqualifies me from being cool.

      I’ve always liked reading and writing. What can I say?

      In the pantheon of Nerdy Kids Who Write Books, everybody is doing apocalyptic fiction or trying to write their own versions

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