More Than a Game
Ja’Brian Blackwell
English 1A M,W,F: 9am
For the 30th year and
running, the NFL has been the most popular sport of America. One of the biggest
issues in the National Football League is the amount of injuries that are
happening. Of course there is a wide variety of injuries but one in particular,
concussions. These traumatic brain
injuries are caused by a jolt or blow to the head that can change how your
brain works. To go along with my theme of football concussions, I decided to create
an object that depicts how every traumatic incident you get contributes to the
development of cognitive impairments and other negative outcomes.
To show this, I chose to build a
brain inside of a football helmet that showed how each impact to the head could
break away at a part of your brain. The main object, which is the helmet, is
actually a piñata that I found
in target. My main idea was to get an old helmet from the equipment manager
down at the football facility and then find a way to cut a wide hole in it
somehow. Then as I was walking through target looking for materials I glanced
over and saw this piñata in the shape
of a football helmet, and thought to myself “this is perfect!”
The size of this helmet is actually the normal size of a real life
football helmet and is colored with grey and green confetti, which I found to
be awesome because it is similar to CSUS colors. I formed the brain out of a
dark shade of white air-dry clay with my hands. I placed a thick cardboard tube inside
of the helmet and glued it to the bottom of the brain to hold it up. Next I
stuck a long wood-piece vertically on top of the brain. Then I used about 8 smaller
wood-pieces to glue horizontally to the vertical one. After that I tied strands
of tooth floss to the 8 smaller wood-pieces, which will be hanging on to the
deteriorated brain fragments from the blow to the head. The toothpicks were
placed around the top of the helmet with red strips of paper on the tips of
them to indicate that there was an impact that caused the brain to break apart.
The audience my object is intended
for is anyone or parents who have children who are interested in the sport of
football. For football players, there is a 75% chance for concussion in every
season. That is a very high percentage and I feel that people should be aware
of this when they are deciding to play this sport. The message that the object
I created conveys how serious a concussion is in the sport of football, but at
the same time I hope to convey how much passion a lot of athletes have for
their sport. I feel that my object is very effective because it is very
specific in explaining the side effects of concussions. For instance, it may
cause concentration problems, or memory complaints, sensitivity to light, hard
to sleep, disorders of taste and smell etc. I love the sport of football with a
passion and honestly don’t think I could live without it. To me and I’m sure
most other football athletes, the sport of football isn’t just a sport, it is
more than a game. So I don’t feel like my object is scaring my audience away
from football, it merely just lets them know exactly what they are risking what
they are getting into by participating in the sport.
My 3-D genre relates to the other 3
texts that I chose for my previous genre analysis assignment in many ways. They
all tie in to the main point of concussion through blows to the head through
helmet to helmet hits. There have been many reports to stop the use of helmets
or completely ban the sport of football due to so many concussion injuries and
the effects they were having on the athletes’ lives. Boot states in his article
“Let's not overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or
litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans.”
In NFL super star Jamichael Finely’s personal
interview about the concussion he received from taking a helmet to helmet hit
from a safety. He then talks about when he finally came back to his senses, the
conversation he had with his five year old son. “Daddy can you fly out and come
home, I don’t want you to play football anymore.”(Finely Jamichael. Personal
Interview. 28 Oct. 2013) This explains the effects concussions have on not only
the athletes themselves but on their families. Because Finely loves the sport so
much, despite the fact that he had this life changing experience he continues
to live his dream in the NFL.
The photographic text that I chose,
ties into all the other texts because it depicts another NFL star getting his
head smashed between two other professional athletes on game day. This image is
really effective because it looks really painful and doesn’t look like he got
up by himself after taking that. I have actually been concussed the same exact
way depicted in the image here at CSUS. It was my first concussion I have ever
received and I hope to never experience it again.
At first, after drawing up my
object I didn’t think the outcome was going to turn out too good. That is
because I was going to use a real football helmet and try to figure out a way
to cut it open, which I don’t think I would have. But fortunately I was walking
through target looking for materials and looked over and saw a piñata in the shape
of a football helmet. From then on, I knew this object was going to turn out
great. I did have a few challenges in creating this object. The first challenge
I had was cutting a perfect square at the top of the piñata helmet.
Because I didn’t have a box cutter, which would have made it a thousand times
easier, I had to use the normal house-hold knife. I did not feel too safe
cutting this difficult object with a house-hold knife but fortunately I pulled
through. The second and last challenge I had was forming the air-dry clay into
a brain as best as I could. Trying to hold the clay in one hand and forming it
with the other was difficult because as you were holding it with one hand, the
clay was so soft that one side of the brain would kind of get squeezed together
and end up smaller and deformed.
The grade that I feel I deserve on this assignment is a B+. I feel I deserved
this grade because I honestly found a way to complete this assignment in the
short time that we had, and my time being even shorter trying to balance the
most busy week of this semester that included spring ball with the team, and
all the team meetings; and also all of my other classwork including my coms 4
speech that I had to prepare for, for Wednesday. I believe that the quality of
my project is really good, and I am very happy with the outcome of it. I had a
lot of fun with this assignment and I am happy we were assigned it.
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