Chuck Klosterman

And football, it probably won't completely disappear, but it's going to radically recede and will not be the center of the world as it is now.

And when that happens...

people in that time are going to explain or try to explain what it was, you know, in the same way that people now sometimes try to describe, you know, the meaning of Roman gladiators or, or the meaning of jazz or these things, you know, that from the past that are still around, but they're kind of gone.

never works.

It's always wrong.

Because people are always basically projecting the present onto the past.

They're taking the, this is how we think about things now, so therefore this was the failure of this thing in the past.

Because it's also always sort of framed as a failure.

The thing ended, so something must have went wrong.

And I know that's going to happen with football.

I can see it already.

I can see people just preparing for this almost unknowingly.

That when football starts to change and starts to become less important and moves away, they're going to say, well, this was why that happened.

This is what football meant.

And I'm trying to describe what football means now and why it sort of became the thing that it is.

I mean, if somebody said to me, what's the best way

to describe the last half of the 20th century, like 1950 to 2000.

You need some vessel to sort of use as the way you describe that.

I would use football, which is why a lot of this book in some ways will seem like it's a little bit, I wouldn't say mired in the past, but involves the past.

I mean, most of the things discussed in this book, many of the players, not all of them, but a lot of them are players who are retired now or things that have happened already.