Journal Six - Jack

Jack A. Hardin

English 1109, Tue at 4:18 PM

October 20, 2020

 

Journal Six

     I loved college football. It was the only kind of sport that peeked my interest. I loved the Ohio State football team. I watched their games with my family and cheered them on. But after reading Clarett’s autobiography, One and Done, it changed how I viewed football, sports, and the different industries of entertainment. 

     One thing that took me away was how the football industry works. I knew that the players of football and other college sports weren’t being compensated, but I did not know how much the coaches and athletic directors were being paid. Two years before Clarett won the national championship, “OSU’s athletic Director got an $18,000 bonus on a badass wrestler won an individual weight class at the NCAA Championship… Logan Steiber probably trained his entire life for that and he gets a plaque or a medal around his neck and goes back to his apartment to eat ramen noodles and the athletic director who is already making a million dollars gets another $18,000?” (Clarett 155). I was not aware that these students went through hell and high water for a plaque/medal and recognition while the people in charge make money for something that the athletes deserved.

    Another thing that I got out of the book was the use of metaphors. Clarett and Eckhart do not use as many metaphors and symbolism as Cisneros. But when they used metaphors, they would blow me away every time I would come across one. I have two favorites: The first one tackled how messed up football was and how unfair it was to the players, stating, “The entire system is a fraud based on the lie that college football players are students when in fact they’re gladiators finally beating each other all fall long and coliseums all over the country.” (Clarett 134). Another metaphor/symbolism that topped it all was when Clarett talked about the way Andy Geiger was treating him due to the CD investigation, writing, “I still don’t know what the hell Geiger was thinking, this day, other than he was going to show his kid from the streets of Youngstown he was the master of this plantation.” (Clarett 158). Even though there were not a lot of metaphors in the book, they are nonetheless impactful that would stay with a reader for a very long time.

     One takeaway that I received from the Zoom meeting we had with Maurice Clarett and Bob Eckhart was how they developed the book. I did not know how a writer or editor develops a book about another person. Eckhart composed interviews with Clarett and took notes. During the writing process, Eckhart stated that there were less than 500 F-bombs in his notes. They had to get rid of a lot of the curse words, but when there were scenes that had a lot of heat written in the story, they included the F-bomb to generate more drama. I always wanted to know how writers and/or editors composed books about other people and thought it was very interesting how they did it. 

(Clarett with his autobiography)