Supplied
- Title: Football
- Author: Chuck Klosterman
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Penguin Press
- Pages: 294 pages
Covering the Kentucky Derby for the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970, Hunter S. Thompson described the sleaziest part of the annual race of thoroughbreds: the infield at Churchill Downs.
“Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money,” Thompson wrote. “By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races.”
That a counterculture magazine would run a horse racing feature is an indication of the sport’s mainstream popularity at the time. Thompson’s piece, though, was a portrait of a pastime in free fall. Today, horse racing is mostly irrelevant.
Author Chuck Klosterman, in his brainy new book on professional football, uses horse racing as a cautionary tale. He views the pigskin sport as being in decline − in defiance of conventional wisdom and blockbuster television viewership. A contrarian? No, he’s just playing the long game.
“This is a book about football, written for people who don’t exist,” he writes, one sentence in. He’s referring to the unborn. Football is a look back at a pastime’s decline that has not happened yet.
The game is still thriving as a social force, almost unaccountably so in a society where the rest of the monoculture is in an accelerated state of decay. And while pro football won’t ever disappear completely, it is “destined to recede from the epicentre of American life,” Klosterman writes. And then? The collapse will be “sudden and catastrophic.”
Football, like the proverbial frog on the stove, is slowly boiling to death.
Last year, sports writer Jane Leavy released the prescriptive Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It. Klosterman’s Football is not as optimistic. Neither is it a love letter to the game, or a book about fandom and tribalism, or toughness and masculinity.
Chuck Klosterman.Joanna Ceciliani/Supplied
Klosterman is not a sentimentalist interested in saving football. Rather, he smartly and entertainingly explains its demise.
The author fleetingly compares the inevitable downfall of pro football with the decline of baseball and boxing, but settles on horse racing as a more appropriate comparison.
There was a time when people routinely owned horses, and during that time it made sense that horse racing was popular. Now, not so much − we haven’t been an agrarian society for a very long time. Horse racing has lost its cultural mooring.
Football has as well, and Klosterman lays out the disassociation. Parents don’t want their children to play football for fear of head injuries, and college football is devolving into a semi-pro situation.
Klosterman is a writer of a unique strain. The author of 2003’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a well-respected music essayist and pop-culture analyst who also knows his sports. When he writes about music, he’ll stuff in semi-obscure sports references. Conversely, when he tells us how dispassionate he is about football, he’s way too eager with a music reference: “I am not Eric Clapton, football is not George Harrison’s wife, and this [book] is not Layla.”
So, Klosterman is a bit of an egghead. Some of us dig his smarty-pants style. Football is right up my alley, even if the author occasionally annoys with cutesy asides. There’s a paragraph about an old roommate, “whom I shall call Michael, since that is his name.”
A Klosterman fan groans and bears it.
Despite its stature in the American sports world, football doesn’t have a lot of great books dedicated to the game. One of the best is Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger, a journalistic account of a star-crossed Texas high-school team. It’s as much or more about sociology as it is about the sport.
Football is a thinking man’s opus on the game. Still, there’s a chapter on the greatest players of all time. They are, to his mind: William (Pudge) Heffelfinger, Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Sammy Baugh, Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Tom Brady. The chapter is a joy − elite barstool profundity.
Though football is now at its pinnacle, its inevitable decline cannot be prevented. That racehorse, one might say, has already left the barn.