Dear reader,
Hello, my name is Adonis Watt and right now I’m a at the Cronkite school of journalism. I’d say my journey up to this point has been rather unique. I believe the best way to start this story is from the beginning. I grew up with both parents and a brother and a sister. I was just like any other young child; I wanted to run around the neighborhood all day and stay up and eat Oreos all night. One Sunday summer that all changed. I was five years old, and we had come back from buying all my football gear that I was about to use that very next day, and we decided to go swimming in our neighbor’s pool. We were getting ready to leave the pool when I decided to go underwater one last time. When I resurfaced everything had changed. Everything was cloudy. To be honest I couldn’t see any more than a couple inches in front of me. As any other parent would think the original plan is to wash my eyes out and move on. Later that night I ended up running my eye into a doorknob, and 12 bilateral eye surgeries later I’m completely blind.
Remember that whole football thing, even after all that I was ready to step on that field. I believe my passion for sports starts and ends with me stepping back on that football field. There were so many questions. Questions like, who would ever let their child play in this condition? How will he play? At that point I never heard the doubt I was just a kid trying to have fun. As I continued to play football, run track, and at a point and time wrestle one question rang in my mind. Honestly Adonis, how far can you take this football thing? I know what you’re thinking, this is where he put the pads away and started his journalism journey. Of course not, that would be boring. To be honest I believe with every cell and molecule in my body I will be an NFL player or an Olympian track athlete. Eventually we’ll be able to look back at this and we’ll either laugh because I was trippin or everyone but me will be laughing in surprise saying wow, he really did it. To create a plan B, I landed on Sports Journalism. Seeing the amount of podcast, TV and radio shows dedicated to talking about the games from last night, or making predictions on the future interested me. It interested me so much because when you think about it, we all do that. Whether it’s with our family and friends, in the barbershop, or with that random person wearing the jersey of your favorite team or player. Now we all don’t get the fancy cameras and lights to go with it, but when you break it down to its purest form, we all participate in sports conversation.
Coming out of high school I had two options Arizona State or USC. As good as USC looked from a far, there was no chance I was going there. Being blind eight hours away by myself was something my parents for sure weren’t going for. Not to mention ASU gave me way more scholarship money. As I look back on the last 3.5 years here at ASU I keep having this reoccurring thought. I don’t necessarily want to be a journalist. I’d like to believe I’m a decent writer, but I believe I’m naturally a better speaker, and when it comes to sports I prefer to give my opinion. Which finally brings me to this commentary class. I may be overstating but this class may help me toward where I want to be more than some of the other classes I’ve taken so far. This is because I’m working on my writing skills, but I believe it more importantly shows me how to formally write and give evidence for my opinions. As I look at the journalism industry you can’t avoid the problem of attention spans becoming smaller and smaller. This problem effects all media but especially journalism because I believe people would rather listen or watch someone talk about sports from their perspective compared to reading facts. Why is this the case? Well, it’s because as important as facts are they aren’t as entertaining as a potential lie or half-truth is.
With all for whoever is still reading, thank you for indulging me. You should know that while I’m tasked with giving my opinion, I will do what I can to have sufficient evidence to back what I believe. The last thing I’d like to leave you with is whether you agree or disagree with what I write just know I fully believe it myself, and hopefully I can get your respect based on that.
