Youngstown Boys explores class and power dynamics in college sports through the parallel, interconnected journeys of one-time dynamic running back Maurice Clarett and former elite head coach Jim Tressel. Both emerged from the working-class city of Youngstown, Ohio—Tressel as the head coach who turned around the football program at Youngstown State—before they joined for a magical season at Ohio State University in 2002 that produced the first national football championship for the school in over 30 years.
And of course, how scandal destroyed both of them.
Youngstown Boys will premiere Saturday, December 14, at 8 p.m. CST on ESPN after the Heisman Trophy Presentation. I jumped on the media conference call yesterday with the directors, Tressel and Clarett to preview Youngstown Boys. And I’ve watched the advance screener copy of Youngstown Boys.
Directors Jeff and Michael Zimbalist (The Two Escobars) tell a very compelling tale and I’ll have quite a few upcoming features in the next few days on Tressel and Clarett with reaction from both these Youngstown Boys. Both were extremely talkative on the conference call and very philosophical. They didn’t say anything Earth-shattering in regards to news value; or anything that you can pack into a pungent sound bite. However, they said a lot of interesting stuff from a flying at 30,000 feet stand point. They were quite loquacious about the Gestalt of it all.
Maurice Clarett is good friends with Lebron James, from just up the road in Akron, and when you see that the law allowed LBJ to get paid, but Clarett could not, you sympathize with him. Youngstown Boys paints both The Senator and The Beast as sympathetic figures, so if you expect anything else from this ESPN film you better check those inhibitions at the door before you view it. Also, the soundtrack for this film is terrible. I mean the music is awful. Like guy who picks the tracks at the United Center bad. I actually enjoyed this very through-provoking product of the Zimbalists, but their taste in music here is just so God awful.
It really distracts from the joy of viewing it.
As you know, the NFL requires you to be three years removed from high school before you can enter it’s good graces. For the NBA it’s one. This is complete and utter horseshit. It should be be zero required years for both leagues. It should be a free market. Truly deregulated pure competition in a free enterprise system means you can start working for a living whenever anyone wants to hire you. Youngstown Boys makes you think about this, but it’s a discussion for another time.
The NCAA should pay the athletes in the revenue producing sports, but alas, that’s also a discussion for another time. Even though Youngstown Boys makes you think about that.
Clarett had a very rough upbringing, and absent father. And we see a loving mother for her athlete son as his talents help him escape the thugs and drug dealers. Clarett eludes the inner city gangsters to become the first freshman ever to start at tailback at Ohio State. He goes off for 175 yards and 3 TDs in his first college football game. But you know the story. You can take a child who’s house gets shot up by a drive-by out of the mean streets. But you can’t take the mean streets out of the Youngstown Boys.
Yes, these stories happen so much that they’re cliche. However, that doesn’t take away from the seriousness of all the socioeconomic issues involved here. Just because you’ve already heard this song a million times doesn’t make the song any less sad. It’s still a powerful ballad. Youngstown Boys is like a college football version of a Michael Moore documentary. It opens by profiling the Rust Belt de-industrialization. Globalization of the steel industry led to the economic depression within the Upper Midwest.
And you see how the outsourcing of blue collar jobs in the Great Lakes region spawned all the impoverished neighborhoods in the heartland of America.
That’s the macro level.
Maurice Clarett is the micro level.
During his days as a college tailback, he was intrigued about the NFL lifespan, he knew about durability and numerical data about hits, injuries and how it limits your shelf life.
Then Ohio legend Jim Brown gets involved, who called then Ohio State Athletic Director Andy Geiger a slave-master. Brown is spot on.
Clarett was a free thinker, an independent mind who took on the mighty OSU SID. He battled the Evil Empire of the OSU athletic department. Youngstown Boys then becomes Giger versus Clarett. Jesse Jackson makes a cameo and it’s a film about civil rights, right to work, and the right to earn a living. Basic American values.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “All of which are American dreams” as Rage Against the Machine would say. All of which Clarett was denied.
And you know what happens to dissidents that dare rage against the machine? Ohio State did more than distance themselves from Clarett. They erased him from the record books. Then Youngstown Boys shows us the injustice of NCAA labor laws, how the ruling overturned by the second circuit court destroyed Clarett’s life.
It reversed the favorable initial ruling.
Depression after the ruling sent Clarett into a downward spiral as Youngstown Boys depicts. He turned to booze and pain killers. The alcoholism ruined his NFL opportunity with the Denver Broncos. As Youngstown Boys conveys, Clarett’s drinking problem destroyed him. He never played one snap in the NFL; not even preseason.
He should have taken the signing bonus. Then Denver wouldn’t have cut him. Clarett never earned a single dollar from the NFL; and at times like thess he could have used a father figure, but he didn’t have his dad in his life then; or ever.
Then he was found with four loaded guns, a bullet proof vest doing 125 m.p.h. The debauched, degenerate, hedonistic. sex, drugs and gangsta rap life. Well, I think I’ve sold you enough on watching Youngstown Boys. You know how it all ends. But you’ll want to see Youngstown Boys anyway. Clarett is enrolled again at THE Ohio State University. And he’s done very well in his courses thus far.
Paul M. Banks is the owner of The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports. He’s also an analyst for multiple news talk radio stations across the country; with regular weekly segments on NBC and Fox Sports Radio. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks) and RSS Catch him Tuesdays talking Illini and Northwestern for KOZN 1620 The Zone, Fridays talking Chicago Bears for WAOR 95.7 The Fan
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