American Football Is Bigger Than Ever. It’s Also Dying.
In ‘Football,’ Chuck Klosterman argues that the sport’s violence and made-for-TV pacing drove its success, but may now be pushing it toward irrelevance.
Illustration: Dave Murray for Bloomberg
Fifteen pages into Chuck Klosterman’s Football, I’m convinced the author must be a Dallas Cowboys fan. The way he writes about the game — soberly, analytically, even apologetically, with the detachment that can only come from closely following the business dealings of billionaire owner Jerry Jones — thrusts me into the dissociative state in which I find myself at least 17 game days a year.
Within a few chapters, Klosterman acknowledges that he is indeed an apostle of Roger Staubach, the quarterback known as “Captain America” who led the Cowboys to five Super Bowls in 10 years. (This revelation would make Klosterman welcome at my family’s dinner table across four generations.) Over the next 200-plus pages, however, he thoroughly deconstructs the game, its icons and its evolution as a media phenomenon, rendering the nature of fandom immaterial.