Liz Crowe on the beautiful men in the beautiful game
Liz Crowe joins us today to drool … I mean, appreciate the men of soccer, just in time to celebrate the U.S. win in the Women's World Cup and the release of her very appropriately titled Hat Trick.
Liz: Who doesn't love a top-notch athlete?
We admire them for their tenacity, their extreme dedication to their sport, their talents on the field, the ice, the pitch, the floor.
If you ask me, watching someone like Rafael Nadal or Mike Green or Tom Brady or Kevin Durant or Matt Kemp or that-adorable-kid-who-keeps-winning-golf tournaments-he's-Irish-or-something-but-the-jury-is-out-on-whether-golf-is-a-sport-to-this-gal is akin to watching Fred Astaire or Mikhail Baryshnikov make their moves.
But the footie — the beautiful game, soccer — now there is a sport worth a second (or third) look by any gal who values fitness and hotness in her book or sport boyfriend.
There are the biggies of course (I call them Captain Obvi-Hotnesses): Chistiano (yes, I've seen him play live), Becks (even though he sounds like his "boys" haven't dropped yet), and Gerard (married to and procreating with Shakira). But trust me when I tell you there are entire enterprises devoted to categorizing the soccer hotties, and locating the fresh crops.
On a fitness level, soccer players are constantly running up and down a field with no real breaks for two 45-minute halves. They play a ton of games, and their season is long. In short, they have amazing legs and, um "glutes," but are typically not over-torso-bulked.
On a numbers level, soccer ("football" to anyone not in America) is the world's most popular sport. Full Stop. On any given day you can find some action, especially if you are like me and pay extra to have access to every soccer TV channel known to humankind. My years spent living in Europe really gave me a taste for the concept of soccer player as not-so-minor celebrity. I also discovered a formerly well-kept secret: "Soccer" seems to attract an overabundance of Super. Hot. Guys.
OK, OK, calm down, all you baseball/basketball/American football/hockey fans. I know you have your standard bearers. But for this rabid sports fan and author, The Beautiful Game = Beautiful Men.
I concocted a set of my own, a whole team of 'em, and plunked them down in Detroit, Michigan. The Black Jack Gentlemen is a fictional MLS (Major League Soccer) expansion team that Detroit snagged out from under the original expansion city — Las Vegas.
They get a state-of-the art stadium, a couple of hot manager dudes and are populated with the dregs and riff-raff from the Euro leagues and the college newbs who don't get a shot at a "real team." What happens? Drama, naturally. The men can be just as competitive in their WAG conquests as they are on the pitch. It's a veritable hotbed of plots and characters.
I toss in my well-documented "Liz twists and turns and holy-crap-you-did-not-go-there's" and voila! A series is born.
To honor the Women's World Cup, I am rebooting this series, which many of my fans call my "best," although it's another one of those "well-kept secrets." I got them new, custom-designed covers, marked the original three down and a new one just came out, Hat Trick — pretty fitting title considering that the kick-butt win by the U.S. Women's National Soccer team came thanks to a hat trick by Carli Lloyd!
Beckham? Nah, give me Declan, as in Declan MacGuire, the hot new forward for the Detroit Black Jack Gentlemen soccer team!
About Hat Trick:
Detroit's expansion pro team has a hot star forward, fresh from the English Premiere League. Thanks to a series of fatal misunderstandings coupled with his famous temper, Declan MacGuire only has one thing left to him—soccer—and he's determined not to make the same mistakes in his new life stateside.
Emily Keller, an accidental low-level PR flunkie for the team watches as Declan gets sucked into a whirlwind romance with Cassandra Dean, the team's Queen Bee groupie, trying not to be jealous while the woman maneuvers him into a sickeningly familiar situation.
When things escalate, the team is forced to take sides, and Declan faces the toughest choice of his life.
Find out more about Liz and her books at lizcrowe.com.