On Chuck Klosterman’s “Football”

Chuck Klosterman’s Football is based on the premise that American professional football is doomed to go the way of horse racing, a once massively popular but now marginal pastime. Klosterman’s aim is to leave a record for posterity explaining to future readers how it was that football captivated the imagination of the United States from approximately 1958 (when the supposedly greatest game ever was played) to the Superbowl extravaganzas of today.

The first part of the book, consisting of the first two chapters, is compelling and thoughtful. First and foremost, Klosterman understands that football is inseparable from its mediation via television. That is, the wildly popular mass spectacle (93 of 100 of the most watched TV shows of 2023 were NFL broadcasts) is at heart fundamentally disconnected from the anticlimactic reality one sees while attending a game: i.e., 22 men smashing each other to bits on a 100 by 53-yard field. The mundane reality of in-person viewing, where it’s sometimes hard to even see what’s happening, allows for none of the arresting cinematic detail captured by the “forced perspective” produced by dozens of cameras, instant replay, and slow motion. In fact, Klosterman persuasively argues, televised detail ironically comes at the expense of actually seeing and understanding the game, as the viewer’s gaze is (mind-) controlled by cameras focusing on the movement of the ball, not the rest of the action on the field. Because camera close-ups distort space and perspective, we are receiving an incorrect version of reality even as it is these very images that capture our imagination.

Relatedly, Klosterman continues, football is so remarkably complex that it is impossible to recreationally reproduce it: “It would be easier to stage an amateur production of Death of a Salesman than an amateur version of a Raiders-Broncos game.” Seemingly channeling Jean Baudrillard, Klosterman writes that football, a game we cannot truly see, understand, or replicate, can in fact only be “understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life.” 

Notwithstanding this auspicious beginning, the book soon falls apart. It’s not merely that many of the ensuing chapters struggle to stand on their own, but that they ultimately contradict the arguments of the first two. With a hat tip to writer (and friend) E.J. Hamacher, who likened the book to a football game in which the team scores a few early touchdowns before collapsing in the second half, I am reminded of Superbowl LI, which the Falcons managed to lose to the Patriots notwithstanding a 28-3 lead. 

Like the Falcons in that historic meltdown, Klosterman does pull off some good plays in the second half, evaluating the relationship between money and football and the idiosyncratic world of six- and eight-man high school football in rural Texas. Klosterman also alludes to the relationship between football, a game we project our fantasies onto precisely because of its “unreality,” and alienation. One of the most memorable passages is when Klosterman describes his obsessively conservative — i.e., historically realistic — approach to playing John Madden football with a friend, prudently punting or kicking field goals on fourth down in an effort to mimic the old school conservatism of 80s-era Bill Parcells or Dan Reeves. But the joke, Klosterman realizes, is ultimately on him, as the actual game, following big data analytics and the wild creativity of a new generation of superhuman quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes, has evolved so that it now in fact mimics all those “unrealistic” 12-year old gamers who throw wild passes into triple coverage and never punt or kick field goals. Even our so-called realism is the stuff of illusions.

Notwithstanding these insights, Klosterman ultimately pulls a Matt Ryan, fumbling the game away by strangely and incongruously defending the ostensibly objective reality of football on its merits. Regarding the dangerousness of football and the prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Klosterman writes: “Football is crazy. But it is an insanity we must accept and permit ourselves to enjoy, unless we believe people are obligated to remove every unessential hazard from day-to-day existence.” But given the disconnect between football’s reality and the mediated thing we’re enjoying, what exactly is it that Klosterman’s defending? If it’s all mediated anyway, why can’t we just watch digital images giving themselves brain damage?

In an even larger non sequitur, Klosterman announces that “advertising doesn’t work” and that one day in the not too distant future advertisers will suddenly realize that they are wasting their money, pull their ads, and football (and apparently all of capitalism) will precipitously decline. For Klosterman, advertising doesn’t work because you cannot draw a line connecting advertisements to profit, weirdly ignoring what advertisers have known for at least half a century: advertising works cumulatively and while they can’t tell you what to think, they certainly can tell you what to think about. And it’s in part companies’ zero-sum quest for competitive advantage over rivals that encourages them to pony up billions on market research, psychologists, and unending ads; one’s own company’s ads might not work, but one cannot afford to take the chance that another’s will.

Returning, following no small number of detours, to his premise, Klosterman proclaims that like horse racing after the rise of the automobile, “Football will recede from prominence as average people lose their relationship to the sport’s interior culture…. Future people will still like football, but their psychological investment will be zilch, and when some economic disaster makes football disappear, they won’t mind if it never comes back.” Why Klosterman takes this needless leap of faith (Hail Mary?), I don’t know, but there is little to support it. 

First, if football is not football but mere mediation, what does it matter if people’s connection to its “interior culture” dissolves? Second, fewer people playing high school football due to CTE is hardly akin to society abandoning horses for cars (i.e., the Industrial Revolution). And, third, even if it were, the popularity of horse racing declined during the rise of TV and new opportunities for gambling — that is, horse racing’s decline is less connected to U.S. industrialization than the very phenomena (the spread of TV and gambling) that Klosterman wrote about for hundreds of pages but apparently did not read. Finally, what of the individual agency and decision-making of not only NFL commissioners and owners but other sports’ heads, contingencies that apparently do not exist in Klosterman’s imagined future?

Could it be that a bigger threat to the NFL is that the modern audience has had its attention span broken into a million bits and that sitting through a three-hour anything, no matter how shiny the helmets, is increasingly akin to going to the opera? Perhaps most bizarrely, Klosterman claims that football “is a contradiction of what enlightened people are supposed to want” and that “American culture is in direct opposition to the culture of American football.” Is our observer of popular culture really unfamiliar with the booming popularity of MMA or the two elections of its number one fan? 

Klosterman does have a telling conclusion, though. He describes a midnight routine in which he eats Cookie Crisp cereal while compulsively going over technically sophisticated football dialogues in his head. For some reason, football, or its mediation, clearly comforts many of us amid our inherently troubled world. But, given that football is quintessentially part and parcel of that world, shouldn’t we more fully interrogate just what it is that we’re forfeiting for that comfort? Sugar highs might be great for thinking, but they don’t do an awful lot for thought.

The post On Chuck Klosterman’s “Football” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.