Thursday, September 6, 2012

Out of the Blue

by Victor Cruz, with Peter Schrager
New York : Celebra, c2012.

If you follow football at all, you probably heard about Victor Cruz. He was an undrafted rookie free agent who signed with the New York Giants' football team, only to sit out most of the 2010 season with a hamstring injury. But in 2011, he made headlines, apparently coming out of nowhere to become Eli Manning's go-to receiver on third down. Cruz's autobiography details exactly where he came from, starting in a rough neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey to go to the University of Massachusetts, through all the hardship and determination to make it in the NFL.

As a huge Giants fan from a family of Giants fans and a UMass alum, I may be biased, but I think even non-football fans would enjoy this read. He has a sense of where he's come from and knows he's a role model. Cruz shows how many times he could have ended in failure by bad decisions or just pure bad luck, and how hard his mother and his coaches worked to make him the young man he is today. The style of writing is chatty and personable (in my head, I could often hear Cruz's voice from my dad's highlight DVDs). An entertaining and inspiring read I'll be recommending to my family.

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