Most Valuable Player: a sports romance

 

I just have the feeling that with Heated Rivalry popping its pussy so hard in recent times that that’ll mean other sports romances will pop off too. That’s just a vague thought I’ve had since I’m talking about Most Valuable Player by Amanda Woody. I know that I read They Hate Each Other before, and then I got this as a Christmas gift from a friend.

Blurbiana Grande says that Cameron Morelli is hot. Worse, he knows it. With a godlike physique and a position as his varsity football team’s star quarterback there’s nobody he can’t charm. So one might imagine his mortification when he’s rejected by Mason Gray – the team’s snarky water boy. To make matters worse, this disgrace is followed by Cam’s coach benching him until he can get his grades up. Luckily, a reliable tutor steps forward to help Cam reclaim his dignity: the boy who just humiliated him. For Mason, tutoring an airhead jock is nothing but a distraction from a past he can’t escape. What he doesn’t expect is to find something worthwhile in their conversations – something softening the ice between them. Nor does Cam expect that Mason’s calm smile hides a harrowing story. As they slowly nudge through each other’s steel gates, the dangerous realities beyond high school threaten their deepening bond. But really, it’s about football.

The first few pages read very British. I don’t know if it was just Cam’s voice that was supposed to be just so up his own arse, but he called himself a “strapping young lad”, and that he flashes a “cheeky” smile. Both of which feel very British to me. Anyway, you see a little of the issues that both the boys have at home. Cam’s is mainly down to his family’s money situation, and Mason’s is his mother who, even from one chapter at his home, seemed not only overbearing, but controlling and likely abusive. And then what he has going on with this guy whose texts he’s ignoring, when the guy shows up in the book, the concept of what’s going on, or has gone on in the past – Mason fully getting groomed and the impact it had on Mason felt absolutely wild to me. The guy was acting like the two were promised to each other in some full gaggery of a nasty romance book. And the way his parents talk about the guy that groomed him, it was very much like they were trying to sell Mason off because the other guy was so rich – almost like they were trying to get a drip down of the riches.

I definitely found the book a little slow in the beginning. I understand that Mason and Cam had to open up to each other, but at the start it did feel a little sluggish, like I was desperate for the two to open up faster, or for there to be something else going on in the background. I recently watched this YouTube video talking about the annual meltdown that people have over BookTok where there are people who post how many books they read throughout the year, and people consequently getting mad at strangers for their numbers. For context, if anyone cares, my number of books read in 2025 was 35 – my goal is always 24, and anything over that is a bonus. But it’s always getting mad at the people who seem to read over 100 books a year. First of all, wild, to me. I’m a slow reader, and I think the only way I’d personally be able to read that many books is that if I was reading to young children, like, kids’ books, or just spent every moment of my free time reading. But my ultimate take on that is: who cares? Why does the number of books a person you don’t even know has read in a year matter to you? Anyway, the relevance to what I was saying before taking a fun little tangent was that in that video, the girl said that she gives every book 100 pages if it doesn’t seem good to her. She gives it the chance to change, and if it doesn’t, she drops it. I do think that’s a good way to go, especially since, like I said, this book started off slowly, but for me, it did find its stride as time went on. Shockingly, the more time I spent with the characters, the more I liked them – I do think I liked Cameron more than I did Mason, but that’s just personal preference.

I suppose I should actually talk about Mason and Cameron at some point, shouldn’t I? The both of them had similar journeys when I really think about it (Heather Sommer tease). Mason’s journey was opening himself and standing up to his groomer and abuser, since he had been ruined to the point where he felt bad for wanting anything, because he had been conditioned to believe that was a bad thing. Cameron ended up helping him opening up and believing he was allowed to want again. There was a line that Cameron managed to draw out of him, “I just want someone to be gentle with me”. And my god, that was probably my favourite line in the book. It was just so powerful to read, seeing him finally speaking for himself. Then for Cameron, he was conceptually the same. I mean this in that his journey was also to open himself up again. You learn as you go through the book that he was previously bullied for being too “girly” and “feminine” as a child, like, he’d paint rocks, buy flowers for his mum, things like that, so he consequently closed himself off and built the douche-y jock persona that he’d made for himself to be “Cam” rather than “Cameron”. And for him, it was allowing himself to open those walls, or lower them even, so that he could, sadly, be happy again, and allow himself to have actual relationships, rather than the acquaintances that he had at the beginning of the book.

It definitely felt like, even though the book followed both the boys’ POVs, Mason was more the main character than Cameron was. I think that was more down to what was going on in both of their plot lines. Mason’s was far darker and more serious than Cameron’s, not that Cameron’s wasn’t serious, so it felt like Mason’s took more prevalence. And really, I think that even though I’ve read the book and I’ve enjoyed it, since it is such a heavy topic, I can’t say I can see myself rushing back to re-read it any time soon. I do think whenever A M Woody has a new book come out, I’ll read it, because I seem to remember enjoying They Hate Each Other. But anyway, here’s my really abrupt end to this post.

Okay, bye.