JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's the day after Thanksgiving in 1984. College football is on TV. The defending national champions, the University of Miami Hurricanes, lead the Boston College Eagles by four points late in an absolute shootout of a game.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN: There's only six seconds left, but I hear Brent Musburger's voice in the other room.
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BRENT MUSBURGER: Three wide receivers out to the right.
KLOSTERMAN: So I walk in, and, you know, I say to - I ask my dad what's happening, and he's like, oh, Boston College, yeah, they played hard, but this is over.
SUMMERS: Boston College has the ball but only has time for one last desperation play. Quarterback Doug Flutie tells all his receivers to just run and heaves a Hail Mary pass into the end zone.
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MUSBURGER: Caught by Boston College. I don't believe it.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Oh.
MUSBURGER: It's a touchdown.
KLOSTERMAN: And then my dad, in a very kind of strange way, you know, with this odd demeanor, was like, well, there you go. It's like, I gave up, and he didn't. That's why he's who he is and I'm who I am.
SUMMERS: Yes, this was a weirdly dark moment for a young Chuck Klosterman. And yet, it was one of the moments that he recounted to me as formative for his ongoing obsession with the sport of American football.
KLOSTERMAN: I do believe, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that on balance, football is good for the United States, but not necessarily because it was good for me.
SUMMERS: After making a career as a music and overall pop culture critic, Chuck Klosterman can't stop watching and thinking critically about the sport - why it became so dominant in American culture and why, decades from now, it will lose its popularity in favor of whatever we have by that point in history. So he wrote a book that's called "Football."
KLOSTERMAN: I had always wanted to do a sports book at some point. Over time, it became very clear to me that the sport had to be football. In this country, people care about football not just more than the other sports, more than all the other sports combined. If somebody were to ask me, I'm trying to understand, you know, life in the U.S. from 1950 to 2000, and I want to do it through some sort of vehicle or vessel, this is the one.
SUMMERS: One of the points that you have made in the book that other writers have made as well is that football and TV have grown up together and are responsible for each other's growth. In fact, you write in the book that football is the best television product ever produced. Say more about that.
KLOSTERMAN: So football is invented in the years after the Civil War, in the 19th century, as this college sport, the idea being because we're no longer going to be involved in wars, we need something to make men tough. And then it intersects in the 1950s with the rise of television. The way football comes across on TV, its intense moments of, you know, kinetic action with these gaps of time in between - which in theory should be detrimental - actually create the perfect passive watching experience. Even if someone disagrees with this, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that, well, something's going on because there wouldn't be such an overwhelming dominance of television's and football's popularity when married together like this.
SUMMERS: Another key point in your book that I want to get into is this idea that football is a sport of executive control that's governed by all these rules and sets plays. There's a guy on the sidelines or in the box calling the shots. And do you think this is key to the sport's appeal?
KLOSTERMAN: The controlled world of football is the key to, in many ways, the degree to which people can relate to it because society, in many ways, operates the same way. American society is very much like this. We believe that we have a lot of freedom and that we are in a position to make our own choices and sort of have control over who we are. And yet, that's probably not true. It's kind of an illusion.
And, you know - and football works the same way. The fact that, like, plays come from the press box and are sent down to the sideline and then are sent into the quarterback, you know, through a radio, you know? And then he uses the information he gets in the radio to look at his wristband and unlock the Byzantine code of the play and then the quarterback delivers this to the other 10 guys. It's like, it is the most managerial scenario you can imagine in a sport. There's not really any sport like this, where...
SUMMERS: But at the same time...
KLOSTERMAN: ...What you're seeing...
SUMMERS: ...Couldn't one make the argument that some of the most exciting and celebrated moments of the game are when players take matters into their own hands? - where the best laid plans of both sides of the game, they kind of fall apart, and you see, like, a quarterback under pressure who escapes the pocket, scrambles, somehow finds a receiver, takes it into his own hands. That's what gets people on their feet, right?
KLOSTERMAN: Absolutely. Those little glimmers of extemporaneous action do have, like, this immense payoff. Patrick Mahomes often operates in a very confined world where he is technically instructed to do a very specific thing with very specific timing the same way every time.
SUMMERS: As a Chiefs fan, I am quite familiar with this.
KLOSTERMAN: Yes. And then sometimes he breaks free from this, correct?
SUMMERS: Correct.
KLOSTERMAN: And there's this - and it seems incredible. It doesn't seem possible. But it is possible, and it's heightened by the limitations that he's sort of shackled with by the sport he plays.
SUMMERS: Look, I don't have to tell you this, but football has come under a lot of heavy scrutiny recently. We know that it can lead to debilitating brain injury for players. And it's such big business in both the NFL and college that a whole lot of money gets thrown around at the expense of the consumer or taxpayer. And yet, you argue it's still a net positive for society, right?
KLOSTERMAN: Yeah, and it's - but it's close. I think that there are things that football specifically allows us to tap into that help us understand the other part of the world we live in, and that we have to in some way consider, you know, does the value of something's entertainment alone create some justification for its existence? You know, it's so kind of imbued in things that should normally have no relationship to football or sports in general. There's got to be meaning in that, right?
SUMMERS: And of course, nothing lasts forever. Do you believe that these same trends that we've sort of talked about - about affordability, injury concerns and what have you - will eventually lead to football's decline in popularity?
KLOSTERMAN: Well, you know, I've given a lot of interviews about this book now, and that really is the section of the book that people focus on the most, this idea that late - in the book I kind of argue what I think's going to happen to football in 60 or 70 years. There are economic issues - particularly with television, advertising, some of these things - that as they balloon to even greater and greater heights, where the amount of money is so great that the NFL can only continue expanding, it does become fragile. To be honest, there were signs of this during COVID. They still got to play these NFL games. The Big Ten doesn't have classes, but they still got to try to have these football games. It's not that football is too big to fail. Football is too big to stop, and at some point, it's going to.
SUMMERS: Will that reality make you sad?
KLOSTERMAN: Well, I hope I'm wrong about it. It kind of does. I would like the - I mean, I would love the idea that when I'm in the old folks' home or whatever, I can still watch football on the weekends and still have the same relationship with the game and my friends and my family and stuff that I do now. I don't think that's going to happen. Now, there's many people - you can make many arguments against that. I mean, the main argument on the other side is that hasn't happened with anything else in the history of the world.
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SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Chuck Klosterman. His new book is "Football." Thank you.
KLOSTERMAN: Thanks a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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