A gridiron great

This is a book about football.

It is so much a book about football that its title is simply Football. It has no subtitle.

The cover of the book is almost painfully austere. It looks and feels like a lonely, antiquated library book. The textured line drawing of two football players on the cover is uninvolved and old-timey. The font is defiant and stalwart. And the book itself is the colour of a football.

This is a book about football written by someone who adores football.

That someone is Chuck Klosterman. Originally from North Dakota, Klosterman wrote for various magazines for decades before recently settling in Oregon, now a full-time writer of books. Just nicely in his 50s, with no fewer than a dozen books published, most quite successfully, Klosterman tends to write about American popular culture, especially rock music, television and sports. He has also dabbled in fiction, although less successfully so. His style is entirely erudite, his analogies thoughtful and provocative and his asides more than a little bit amusing.

You might say that when he wears his sportswriter cap, Klosterman has great wingspan, specializing in basketball and football, favouring the college game. Klosterman regularly muses that, when we watch that anonymous, undersized kicker from that near-anonymous, undersized school kick in that big game nestled near New Year’s Day, we are collectively watching the most important moment of that human being’s life. This he finds both enthralling and terrifying, something to be marvelled at and pondered.

Klosterman played a bit of high school football, and an unholy amount of video game football. He asserts several times that he has always breathed and loved football, effectively privately studying the sport for decades.

Contrary to his reputation as a faithless “sports atheist,” Klosterman here loudly confesses that he did have a favourite growing up: the Dallas Cowboys and their paragon quarterback, the stoic, dependable Roger Staubach. Klosterman therefore has the hardened chops to speak of triumphs and of failures, of GOATs and of goats. He adores football inside and out, warts and all.

This is a book about football written by someone who adores football, and yet the book also predicts football’s demise.

This too is typical Klosterman, marvellously. His inveterate intellectual habit is to survey a popular culture field avidly, to notice its glories and its bruises, to assemble and review theories about those features, to realize that his own thinking on the matter is different and then to throw himself into trying to understand why he himself thinks peculiarly. He is a relentless, unforgiving, entirely earnest self-interrogator.

The prevailing wisdom about football today would be that it’s not just the dominant North American sport, but the domineering one — a sport whose undisputed reign ought never end. In character, Klosterman takes that observation (football is seemingly omnipotent), but tweaks it in his own mind (football surely cannot be eternal). The result is Klosterman thinking out loud over 11 substantial, discrete essay-style chapters, mulling if and how this might be so.

There is no particular rhyme nor reason to the structure of Football, but meaty essays appear on all of: the NFL (baroque, controlling) vs. the NBA (jazz, freestyle); the greatest players (not robotic, dry Tom Brady but preternaturally gifted, artful Jim Thorpe); the instructional style of the football coach (alarming but revered); gambling and fantasy football (now calling the plays); the role of race (understood and misunderstood); military metaphors (arming and disarming); and even the CFL (three downs fascinating, four downs better).

Without relent, Klosterman effortlessly trots out example after example, never guilty of recentism, ever a master teller of the athletic story.

Each of the 11 chapters prepares and defends elaborate nuances to his thesis that football is doomed to fade, and not a single one is frivolous. The argument, put too simply: football will fade because, just as it accidentally ascended to primacy on the back of the television, so it accidentally has persisted too much, sanding away individuality, opting too greedily for more control, digging in rather than continuing to morph, turning a wilful blind eye to its undeniable, defining horrors. These include: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and its devastating after-effects on players; routine, extreme, intentional violence; and football’s heartless exploitation of its own workers’ careers and lives.

This prophesied expiration of Klosterman’s beloved football might take a few generations — it’s impossible to imagine it’s capable of petering out any time soon — but he says it is already well underway.

Whether or not this book is for you comes down to a bit of your essence: Do you love this entity, football? Enough to read a paean to it that also foretells its end?

Klosterman doesn’t just love football, he contemplates it, differently, and is able to articulate his thinking with methodical rigour, enthralling elegance and steering force.

This is his manner, and it compels. It has compelled for books and books, and it compels for this book — this pigskin book about football.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg.