Cody's Varsity Rush

by Todd Hafer

  CODY'S VARSITY RUSH

  BOOK 5

  Other Books in the Spirit of the Game Series

  Goal-Line Stand (Book 1)

  Full-Court Press (Book 2)

  Second Wind (Book 3)

  Stealing Home (Book 4)

  Three-Point Play (Book 6)

  Split Decision (Book 7)

  Ultimate Challenge (Book 8)

  ZONDERKIDZ

  www.zonderkidz.com

  CODY’S VARSITY RUSH

  Copyright © 2005 by Todd Hafer

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

  ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 0-310-86141-1

  Requests for information should be addressed to

  Zonderkidz, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hafer, Todd.

  Cody's varsity rush / Todd Hafer.

  p. cm.- (Spirit of the game series ; bk. 5)

  Summary: Now a high school freshman, Cody makes the varsity football team and struggles with whether to identify himself as a Christian at school and on the playing field.

  ISBN-13: 978–0–310–70794–3

  [1. Christian life—Fiction. 2. Football—Fiction. 3. Conduct of life—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H11975Cod 2005

  [Fic]–dc22

  2005004292

  * * *

  All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Zonderkidz is a trademark of Zondervan.

  Cover design by Alan Close

  Photos by Synergy Photographic

  * * *

  05 06 07 08/DCI/5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. Back in the Danger Zone

  2. Brendan Clark in the Dark

  3. The Intruder

  4. The Speed Challenge

  5. Road Kill

  6. Nowhere to Hide

  7. The Pain Pool

  8. Epilogue

  About the Publisher

  Share Your Thoughts

  This book is dedicated to the life and memory of

  Tim Hanson, a true athlete, a true friend.

  Foreword

  I love sports. I have always loved sports. I have competed in various sports at various levels right through college. And today, even though my official competitive days are behind me, you can still find me on the golf course working on my game, or on a basketball court playing a game of pick-up.

  Sports have also helped me learn some of life’s important lessons—lessons about humility, risk, dedication, teamwork, friendship. Cody Martin, the central character in “The Spirit of the Game” series, learns these lessons too. Some of them the hard way. I think you’ll enjoy following Cody in his athletic endeavors.

  Like most of us, he doesn’t win every game or every race. He’s not the best athlete in his school, not by a long shot. But he does taste victory, because, as you’ll see, he comes to understand that life’s greatest victories aren’t reflected on a scoreboard. They are the times when you rely on a strength beyond your own—a spiritual strength—to carry you through. They are the times when you put the needs of someone else before your own. They are the times when sports become a way to celebrate the life God has given you.

  So read on, and may you always possess the true Spirit of the Game.

  Toby McKeehan

  Chapter 1 Back in the Danger Zone

  Cody strained against the weight on his chest. He hungered for one more bench press, but now the bar seemed rooted to his torso.

  “A little help,” he gasped. He wondered if his plea was loud enough for anyone in the Grant High School weight room to hear. A few seconds passed. He wondered if anyone had died this way—pinned to a weight bench and slowly crushed by 135 pounds of iron.

  He felt relief wash over him when the Evans twins, Bart and Brett, appeared on either side of the bench. They each grabbed one end of the long iron bar and lifted it from Cody’s chest, helping him extend his arms and replace it atop the posts that rose like crossbars at the head of the bench.

  “Thanks for the spot, guys,” Cody said. “I shoulda stopped at three reps.”

  “No problem, Martin,” Bart said. “Doing reps with 135? That’s pretty good. That’s five pounds better than my max.” He looked down at Cody. “It looks like you’re starting to get some guns on you. Robyn Hart’s gonna be impressed.”

  “Squirt guns, maybe,” Cody said, ignoring the dig. “Some of the juniors and seniors are lifting twice what I’m doing.” He sat up and looked around the room. At this early hour, 8:00 a.m., it was mostly frosh and sophomore football hopefuls trying to prepare for the upcoming season. The older players would arrive a bit later. Cody wanted to finish his workout before that happened. It was embarrassing to watch guys warm up with the kind of weight that he could lift only a few times—and then only with much grunting and ungainly effort.

  “Hey,” Bart said, dislodging Cody from his thoughts. “Chop’s here!”

  Cody turned to the entrance expecting to see Pork Chop Porter smiling, flexing his thick arms, and telling everyone, “Okay, time to load up all bars and machines with the man-weights. Chop’s in the house!”

  But Chop stood in the doorway somber and quiet, his eyes scanning the room. When he locked on Cody, he raised his right arm and made a curling motion with his forefinger.

  Cody frowned and followed Chop out of the weight room.

  “What’s up, Chop?” he asked once they were outside, squinting against the bright late-August sun. You look like your breakfast didn’t agree with you or something.”

  Chop didn’t appear to have heard him. “Dude, Gabe Weitz is back in town,” he said grimly.

  “Gabe Weitz?” Cody was surprised by the shrillness of his own voice. “That psycho loser? I thought he got thrown in jail up in Denver earlier in the summer. Assault charges.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard too,” said a voice behind Cody.

  Cody turned 180 degrees to face Bart, who had followed him out the door.

  Pork Chop wagged his head slowly. “I don’t know where he was, dawgs; I just know he’s back. I was in Dairy Delight last night—I just stopped in for a chocolate shake to go—and he walks in. He comes over to me, and I think he’s gonna take a swing at me. But he just says, ‘Hello, Porter. You doin’ okay? And how about your little friend?’”

  “Whoa!” Bart said. “What did you say to him?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him. Tried to stare right through him. And I made sure I held my ground. He was right up in my face, but there was no way I was takin’ a step back. Finally, he walks away and goes up to the counter, probably to see if the Double D has a Loser Meal or something. So, I figur
e I can go now, right? I get to the door and I hear him say, ‘See you guys around.’ I don’t like the way he said it. It was a threat, no doubt.”

  Cody groaned. “Man, I thought we were done with that guy.”

  Bart scrunched up his forehead. “What does he have against you guys anyway? I mean, this isn’t still about your brother laying the smackdown on him last winter, is it, Chop?”

  Pork Chop sighed heavily. “I think it is, at least partially. He wanted revenge big-time after that. He tried to hit us with beer bottles one time. Then he went after Co and Drew Phelps during track season. Chased ’em all over town.”

  “Crazy,” Bart said. “When’s he gonna give up?”

  “Probably not till one of us is in the hospital,” Pork Chop answered. “Or the morgue.”

  The words made Cody shudder. He recalled how easily Weitz had thrown him against the Grant Middle School gym door and then had tossed him, like a rag doll, in a snowbank. All for the heinous crime of letting the door close and lock behind him.

  Cody pictured how Pork Chop had come to his rescue before Weitz could pull him out of the snow and pummel him some more. Chop had held his own against the larger, older enemy.

  Then Doug Porter had appeared. One vicious uppercut to the stomach and it was over. Weitz’s ab muscles—if he had any muscles under his substantial beer gut—were probably still aching now, almost a year later.

  “Look guys,” Bart said, apparently uncomfortable with the uneasy silence, “so what if he’s back. I mean, if he messes with either one of you, you just call Doug, right, Chop? And he comes down from Boulder and stomps a mud hole in Weitz, once and for all.”

  Pork Chop chewed thoughtfully on his bottom lip. “That’s not gonna happen, dawg. Doug’s a college football player now. And you know what’s been happenin’ in college ball lately. The scandals and stuff. That ‘boys will be boys’ junk—it’s so over now. Doug’s gotta keep his nose clean or he gets booted off the team. It’s as simple as that. Besides, Boulder’s a long way from Grant, and I don’t even think he’s comin’ home till Thanksgiving. Maybe during a bye week in mid-October. That’s almost two months away. Co and I could be dead meat by then.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Bart asked, his voice becoming nasal and whiney.

  Pork Chop looked at Cody. “Try to stay alive. Watch each other’s backs, right, dawg?”

  Cody nodded. “Just like always.”

  Pork Chop forced a smile. “Well that’s enough of that subject. Time to go throw some iron around. Yet one more reason to get all swole now.”

  “You already look pretty swole to me,” Bart said, his voice full of admiration. “I mean, you get bigger every time I see you. What’s your secret?”

  Pork Chop eyed his teammate suspiciously, then snorted. “No secret. Just hard work.”

  “Yeah,” Cody said. “Nobody puts in the work like Chop. He’ll work all day helping his dad on the farm and then go hit the weight room.”

  Bart whistled through his teeth. “Well, Chop, it’s workin’—big time!”

  Chop smiled broadly. “What can I say? I’m a man of steel and sex appeal. But don’t worry, Co, I won’t try to steal Ms. Hart from you.”

  Cody shook his head. “Great. First Bart and now you bustin’ my chops about that. I can see some things aren’t gonna change from eighth grade. Can you both repeat after me: ‘Cody Martin and Robyn Hart are NOT boyfriend/girlfriend. Period.’”

  Pork Chop frowned. “Could you run through that one more time, dawg? I think I missed part of it.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Bart chimed in.

  Cody tried to load his voice with as much disgust as he could muster. “Whatever. Come on. Let’s go throw some weights around. The first official practice is only three days away.”

  Cody swallowed hard and whispered, “Know how those sportscasters are always talking about somebody being ‘a man among boys?’ I feel like one of those boys right now. You know how hard we worked this summer, but my arms look like garter snakes—in a room full of pythons!”

  “Yeah,” said Pork Chop, without turning around. “Some of these dudes make me look small. I’m not used to that.”

  Cody surveyed the scene. It was the first day of football practice, and the locker room buzzed with activity. The older players, seniors and juniors, already had their equipment and were dressing out in front of their freshly painted deep-blue lockers.

  Cody drew in a deep breath and let it escape as a low whistle. Several of the hulking linemen had tattoos. His dad would be freaking out if he were here. He put tattoos and body piercing in the same category: senseless self-mutilation.

  Cody wondered what Brendan Clark would say about that characterization. The all-state middle linebacker sported a double-strand barbed wire design around the bulge of his right bicep. On his left shoulder was the full-color trademark S of Superman.

  A coiled cobra, fangs bared and dripping droplets of venom, stared menacingly from the midback of senior Jeff “Truck” Tucker, a six two, 230-pound defensive end who had amassed eighty-five tackles, nineteen sacks, and ten knocked-down passes the previous season. Pork Chop knew all of the key Grant High defensive stats. He could recite them to Cody as easily as he could recite the multiplication table up to twelve.

  “ATV!” Cody heard Clark bellow. He turned his attention to the linebacker again. Clark was exchanging fist pounds with Gordon Daniels, nicknamed ATV, for all-terrain vehicle. Daniels had the powerful, compact build of a pit bull. He would start at fullback now that Doug Porter, Pork Chop’s all-world brother, had graduated. If not for Doug, ATV would have probably been a starter since his freshman year. Every football player at Grant Middle School had known about ATV. Only five ten, but 210 solid pounds. He could bench-press 340 pounds, squat 525, and run the forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds.

  “Dude,” Cody said, “ATV’s beard stubble is almost as thick as my dad’s.”

  Pork Chop, still not turning around, offered, “Yeah, it’s almost as thick as my Aunt Wanda’s.”

  Cody chuckled softly, not wanting to risk some senior asking, “Hey, freshman, what’s so funny, stick-figure boy?” Cody looked down at his arms and shoulders. He knew he should have hit the weights harder over the summer, but baseball had gobbled up too much time. Then there were the morning runs with Drew Phelps, helping his friend prepare for cross-country season. I’m in decent shape, he thought, but looking at these guys, I have a feeling that “decent” isn’t going to cut it in high school football. I wish I could have made it to preseason football camp, but I couldn’t leave the guys on the baseball team hangin’.

  At least, he reassured himself, I don’t have to play against these bigger, older guys. I’m not like Chop. I’m not gonna make varsity. And that’s a good thing. These monsters would kill me. All I want to do is play freshman ball—maybe get called up to JV by the end of the season.

  Cody trained his eyes on the bronze back of his best friend. His shoulders were thicker and broader than ever. Chop was getting taller all the time too. “Growing faster than the national debt,” as Mr. Porter said.

  Everyone would know just how tall Chop was in a few moments, when the two of them got to the front of the line where Mr. Curtis, an assistant coach, and Larry Vance, the team manager were busy weighing and measuring.

  Bart Evans, who had quarterbacked the Grant Middle School teams, was on the scale now. Curtis adjusted a thin metal arm that was attached to the scale, sliding it up, then unfolding a foot-long piece that jutted out from the arm at a ninety-degree angle, and resting it atop Bart’s closely shorn brown hair. Cody had seen the same kind of scale in the doctor’s office.

  “Evans, Bart,” Curtis called out in a nasal monotone voice. “Height: Five feet eleven inches. Weight: A buck sixty.”

  Vance, who reminded Cody of the singer Steven Curtis Chapman, sat in a metal folding chair next to the scale, a computer not much bigger than Cody’s Bible perched on his lap. The manager’s fingers danced across
the keyboard logging Bart’s information.

  It was Chop’s turn now. He waited for Curtis to nod, then hopped on the scale with both feet.

  “Easy there, young Mr. Porter,” Curtis warned, but his voice was still as flat as the voice that announced the time and temperature on the phone. “This is sensitive equipment here.”

  Cody noted that many of the upperclass players had stopped joking and swapping stories to study Chop. Even Clark was watching carefully. Guess this is what it’s like when you’re the little brother of a legend, Cody reasoned.

  “Porter, Deke,” Curtis was saying, raising his voice for the benefit of the intrigued onlookers. “Six feet even, 215 pounds.”

  That brought a few hoots and whistles. Two-hundred- plus-pound freshmen didn’t come along every day, especially when the weight was mostly muscle.

  “Chop’s almost as thick as his bro,” ATV called out.

  “Yeah, but can he play like DP?” someone asked.

  Cody half expected Chop to turn and flex his thick arms for his teammates, but his friend stepped off the scale softly, nodded at Cody, and went to get fitted for pads and a helmet.

  Cody stared at the digital readout at the bottom of the scale, which flashed only a series of dashes after Curtis reset it. He hoped he’d put on at least some muscle since last football season, when he’d weighed in at 120. He remembered Chop’s words as they’d bench-pressed in the high school weight room a few days previously—“Dawg, you gotta get more junk in your trunk if you wanna play ball with the big boys. A buck twenty ain’t gonna cut it. I bet some of the high school cheerleaders weigh more than that!”

  “Martin, Cody.” The words snapped Cody back to the present. “Let’s see what we got here,” Curtis said. “Five feet ten, 140 pounds.”

  Cody sighed hopefully. Well, he thought, at least my trunk’s a little junkier. And maybe I can put on a few more pounds during the season. It would be nice to get up to a buck fifty.