Making the Call: The Big Time by Tim Green

"I'm Drew Edinger: I'm staying with a client who lives a few streets away. I'm the boy's father."

"You're not his father," Troy's mom said.

Drew looked at Troy, gave him a sly wink, and said, "You're saying he belongs to someone else?"

Troy White is sitting on top of the world when he answers that doorbell. His phenomenal game analysis skills have just taken his own team to the Georgia Junior Football Championship. With his help the Atlanta Falcons are one game away from a shot at the SuperBowl, and Troy will be there on the sidelines to help call the plays. And Troy and his mom are already beset by agents offering to make him a fabulous deal with some NFL team willing to pay to get his football genius skills on their coaching staff.

But with the appearance of his unknown father, Troy's world shifts like the glass in a kaleidoscope. His mother, dubious of Edinger's motives, is reluctant to allow him to see his father alone, but Troy, eager for the father he's never known, sneaks out at night and goes to the palatial house of rapper C Money, where his father is staying, and when his dad brings him home, persuades his still hostile mother into letting him see him again.

Edinger reveals that he's a lawyer for big-time celebrities, including Atlanta's local superstar, C Money, and eventually wins Troy's mom's grudging consent to fly Troy to New York on his private plane to try to set up a contract deal with the Jets. Troy's dad works an eight-figure ten-year deal, with a five million dollar advance, and his mother, retaining the power final approval on the deal, agrees to let the talks proceed until she sees the final contract.

Troy should be riding high, with an expectation of riches for himself and his mother far beyond their dreams and with the annual Georgia-Florida Junior Football All-Stars game coming up, a chance for him to show off his own playing skills before the top coaches in the SEC. But his mother's doubts about his father's motives remain, and Troy himself, while thrilled to spend time with his glamorous and talented dad, begins to notice things about his style that are troubling.

Then several FBI agents appear at his door. They are investigating his father's various questionable financial dealings which appear to involve money laundering for a crime syndicate and Troy begins to realize that his father plans to expropriate his advance from the Jets to pay off his obligations to the gangsters who are pressing for their money. Troy is asked to plant a listening device hidden in an ordinary-looking quarter inside C Money's house to gather evidence, evidence which can send his father to prison, and he realizes he has a big call to make, a call which will affect the rest of his life.

In his latest, The Big Time: A Football Genius Novel (Harper, 2010), Tim Green brings his own varied skills together to provide another middle reader sports thriller in his Football Genius series. A former Atlanta Falcons player, a lawyer, and best-selling author, Green uses his background to provide exciting game play and high-powered legal wheeling and dealing as the setting for a suspenseful action tale for upper elementary and middle school sports fans. Although Troy's "football genius" abilities and his sudden immersion into the murky waters of big-time sports money and crime are a bit beyond the usual bounds of the sports novel genre, Green's storytelling skills will keep readers engaged to the end, even tossing in, as he does, a last-page literary screen pass signalling yet another book in this best-selling series.

Earlier books in this series include Football Genius and Football Champ: A Football Genius Novel.

Gym Candy: Baseball Great by Tim Green

Tucker reached into his rain jacket pocket and removed an amber vial with a white plastic cap. A pill bottle, just like you'd get from a doctor. He twisted off the lid and shook a pill into Josh's hand. The smooth white lozenge bore an imprint that read A17.

"Gym candy," Tucker said. "You take one in the morning and one at night, before you eat."

"But what is it?" Josh asked.

"Good for you is what it is, " Tucker said. "What? You don't trust me?"

"Yeah, I do," Josh said, giving back the pill.

"You won't believe how strong you're gonna get," Tucker said. "It's a team thing, Junior."

Josh LeBlanc is a twelve-year-old phenomenon at shortstop. His dad, a first-round draft pick for the Toronto organization right out of high school, has just been cut from his AAA team after thirteen years of never quite making the big leagues, and he places all his hopes on Josh. When his dad finds a sales job selling nutritional supplements with Rocky Valentine's youth league organization, he wangles a tryout for Josh with the fourteen year old travel team. But when he makes the team, Josh is faced with overt hostility from the older players who resent the loss of the player he replaces.

Feeling that he must succeed to help his dad keep his job, Josh gives the team everything he's got. For the first time he's expected to work out in the weight room, endure brutal practices, and down a muscle-building drink called Super Stax twice a day. And when he manages to get a hit which drives home the winning run in the ninth inning of a crucial game, Josh finds himself finally accepted as one of the team.

But then he discovers that there is one more thing he must do to meet the demands of Coach Valentine and the team. Teammate Tucker secretly slips him a bottle of "gym candy," and Josh is pretty sure that what he is being told to take are steroids. To verify what the drugs are, Josh tells his new friend Jaden about the meeting. She slips her physician dad's Physician's Desk Reference out of his office and identifies the drug.

Jaden urges Josh to go straight to the police, but he knows that the revelation of illegal drug use by Valentine's teams will cause his father to lose the job he needs so badly. Instead he suggests that they try to photograph Rocky taking delivery of the drugs behind the local hospital where Josh has seen Rocky's car parked often, planning to blackmail the coach into stopping the distribution of the drug. Reluctantly, would-be journalist Jaden agrees to help stake out the loading dock that night with her cell phone camera, and the two manage to get one quick flash photo of Rocky taking a bag from a shadowy figure in a lab coat.

Splitting up, Josh and Jaden manage to elude Rocky's pursuit without being identified, but when Jaden gets home and looks at the photograph she has taken, she sees that the doctor providing the steroids is her own father, and the two seventh-graders realize that they are in the middle of a wrenching personal as well as legal problem.

Like his previous hits, Football Genius and Football Hero, Tim Green's Baseball Great offers sports-loving middle readers a baseball story with plenty of taut gameplay, believable middle school social dynamics, and a realistic moral choice faced too often by young athletes. Green writes compelling stories of talented youngsters driven to compete in team sports which hold their own with the novels of Gordon Korman, Mike Lupica, and, of course, the old master Matt Christopher. But Green's books adds elements of the suspense thriller in the up-to-the-minute moral dilemmas in which he places his young heroes, calling into question the morality of the win-at-any-cost ethos which today permeates even youth sports and deepening his theme of what achieving a personal best in life really means.