Chuck Klosterman

This is the book.

Well, it wasn't like that for me.

It wasn't an incident in that way.

You know, I mean, the Kaepernick thing is mentioned in the book.

I mean, the CTE stuff is in the book, certainly.

But I think it had more to do with the fact that I just I'd always wanted to do a sports book.

And you and I have talked about this a lot over the years.

I think that maybe as a game, we both prefer basketball, like the purity of basketball, the idea of basketball.

I think if someone said like, what is the greatest game?

I would say basketball is a team sport.

But football is so much more important.

It weirdly matters to me so much more than the other sports.

The actual application of the game itself, like what I'm actually seeing and experiencing.

And about, I think about 20 years ago, I just kind of made this decision that like, I'd like to write a book about football that was all encompassing, that it was, it was about sort of, you know, it was about players and it was about teams, but it was really sort of about the idea and the meaning of this.

And as football evolved into this thing, that is not just the most popular sport in the United States.

but more popular than all the sports in the United States, really.

I mean, like I mentioned earlier in the book, how in 2023 of the top 100 broadcasts on television in the United States, 93 of them were football games, pro football games.

And then like three or four more were college games.

There's nothing else like that.

I mean, I'm a person who's kind of interested in the monoculture.