Excuse me if I get majorly bitchy and offensive, but this rant is something I'm insanely passionate about.

Let's talk about: The Golden Boy

Y'know the guy I'm talking about. The "star" player of the football/basketball/baseball team that every girl swoons over and takes all their clothes off for and blah, friggin' blah.

Can I just tell you how much this pisses me off? Like seriously. I hate how ignorant people can be.

You know nothing about sports if you think that captain of the team just has natural talent and all this time for screwing people and being a stuck up asshole. Because everything is just handed to them, right?

How many times do I have to tell you this? Natural talent means nothing on a good team.

My best friend was the captain of the football and basketball teams his senior (and junior for basketball) year. He was hands down, without a doubt, the best player we had. He had the most talent, the most drive, the most courage, and the most skill. He had scouts from major schools asking for his tapes and sending him letters.

And yeah, I'm bragging about him. Why? Because nothing, absolutely nothing (you hear me? N-O-T-H-I-N-G) was handed to him. He worked for every position he got. Talent didn't save his ass on that. If anything, having talent made him have to work harder.

I've watched him work to the point of literally destroying his body just because people relied on him that much.

I'm sick of everyone assuming the star player is just lucky. I would call that life anything but luck.

When you're the best player on a team (and everyone knows it) there is insane pressure on you. Especially if it's a small town, like where I came from (and where a lot of these stories are set).

Scouts aren't going to find you if you come from a tiny school in the middle of the nowhere unless your coaches get in contact because you have seriously worked at a superior level.

No, instead of always having it your way, your ass is constantly being yelled at, people are always talking about your personal life like it's their business, and every mistake you make is scrutinized to an almost blasphemous level. You're expected to lead an entire group of your peers, fix all their mistakes, and make their jobs easy.

And that's not just having shit handed to you.

In case you couldn't tell, I get extremely pissed when sports stars get this bad rep as being stuck up and snobby and worthless outside of their "talent". I watched this label tear my best friend apart.

Everyone expected him to be the best and to always pull out a win. If we lost, it was his fault. If we lost, he lost another scholarship opportunity. If we lost, he took the blame for what other people did wrong. If we lost, he lost chances at going to good schools. If we lost, he lost respect.

And it didn't come from the coaches. It came from the town and the school.

People would be downright rude to him if we lost a game and it was awful, because he was the absolute nicest guy. Seriously, if you can't get along with my best friend then you're the jerk. He loves everyone.

Yet, everyone sees that he was the "captain" and the "golden boy" and they assume he put no work into his craft and went through life on his looks and talent and that couldn't be farther from the truth.

And because I'm so sick of everyone on Wattpad acting like all these "star" players are jerks that do nothing and still win, I'll just share with you HALF of what my best friend did and went through.

In the spring and fall he ate, slept, and breathed football, which sucked, because he had hospital bills to pay too.

He was at practice in the mornings and evenings and worked afterwards as often as he could to pay the bills. It meant sacrificing so many hours of sleep and it really took a toll on him and his schoolwork.

Any days he had off from work he spent watching game tapes, reviewing plays, or lifting. If I wanted to hang out with him, we had to work the same shifts, or I had to help him practice or workout.

The guy never slept.

And then basketball season would come and he really didn't sleep then. Instead of having days off from work to practice some more, he had days off to go to games. And on practice days he went to work.

On weeks we had three games, he would get about four hours of sleep a night. However, he did find time to sleep in class. A lot. So much so that he was constantly being sent to the office. Naturally his grades suffered horribly, but he had to keep them up. You don't pass, you don't play.

More than once he fell asleep at his house taking a shower. And on nine different occasions I can remember, he slept in the gym, because it was too late and he was too tired to go home.

But now let's talk about the actual physical toll it takes on a person's body to actually be the golden boy.

Despite being injured in multiple instances, he never pulled out of a game. Ever. Why? Because if he did, we would lose. And if we lost, the insults would come flying. So if he could control the game, he did.

Here's the injuries I can think of off the top of my head.

During one football game he partially dislocated his shoulder before the half. And instead of getting out of the game, the trainer pulled it back into socket and he finished off the game (and that is as painful as it sounds).

During a basketball game, he caught an elbow on the forehead and instead of going then to get stitches, he taped it back together and went to the hospital after the game.

I'm not exactly sure what happened during one basketball game, but I know he came off the court and couldn't close his jaw. As far as I knew it was dislocated. He went in an office with the trainer, and I'm guessing they put it back in place, because he came back out and finished the game.

He broke his wrist during a football game and didn't tell the coach it was broken (it was a big game, and I don't think he felt it). He finished the season with a cast. (Yeah. Played in a cast. It was allowed for his position).

At one football game he took a bad hit and got a major concussion. Then, a year later at a basketball game, his head got slammed into the backboard and he got another concussion. And it left the biggest bruise on his cheek and everyone made fun of him for it, because it looked awful.

After his accident, the spinal injury he suffered caused him to have these absolutely horrible migraines and he'd have them during every single basketball game. During the half he would lay on the benches in the locker room while coach talked, because he couldn't sit up without getting sick. A few times he even had to be subbed for a minute so he could run to the bathroom and throw up.

Eventually, he had three surgeries to somewhat correct the problem, but he still has major headaches from not letting things heal right.

During the very last basketball game of his career he took a really bad hit (so much for a no contact sport (I'm laughing if you think basketball is a no contact sport)) and went to an emergency room that night where he had to have surgery to reset some ribs that were about to puncture his lung. Fun, fun, fun.

On a few occasions I even thought he was going to die.

Once he was in so much pain when we were coming back from an away game that the coaches actually got really worried. Now, if you've ever played a sport, you know that coaches don't come to your level after games. You come to theirs. And they hardly ever worry unless something big is going down.

So everyone freaked out when the athletic trainer laid down on the floor to talk to him.

That's probably one of the scariest things you can see: the fifty-seven year old trainer laying on the floor of a bus talking to a kid who can't even get off the ground.

It got to the point where he was eating pain killers like candy because there was nothing else for him to do. He would take what the trainer gave him, then go take some he had stashed, because it was never enough.

And had the coaches known, he would have been pulled from the game. He always begged me not to tell and I didn't, because if golden boy didn't play, the town would have been pissed at the coaches and his family and they would start spreading all sorts of rumors about his personal life. That's just how it works. Everyone thinks they know golden boy, but they don't.

One night, I was closing out the locker rooms for the night and he was curled up in the floor (the game had ended nearly an hour before) because he was in so much pain he couldn't bring himself to get up and leave. So I sat with his head on my lap for half the night because it was dangerous to leave him alone.

And the whole time I was terrified he was going to stop breathing, because it had happened before. I literally counted every second he took between breaths for two hours straight after he finally fell asleep and every time I was convinced it was taking too long and that he wasn't going to wake up.

So excuse me for getting pissed when people say the golden boy does nothing. Do you see all the work my best friend put in? And those aren't even half the injuries he sustained. It got so bad that even if he took a scholarship offer, his career would be two years at best. Three if he got redshirted.

Back off on the "he doesn't have to work hard, because he's so good" charade. You know nothing if you think that's true.

Make the characters work for it.

And stop acting like they're stuck up douches. You think someone would go through that much pain because he was stuck up? No, he went through that for his team, for his coaches, and for his town. If it were just up to him, he would have quit after the accident.

But he did it to prove to himself, and everyone else, that it's not all about having talent. It's about working your ass off for something you want, even if you lose it in the end.