Chuck Klosterman

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, all three of those sports,

when football or when television was created, I think would have been like, this is what this box will let us do.

But one of the big arguments I make early in the book, and the reason it's the first essay is because in many ways, it's the most important, is

an incredible coincidence happened, is that football is better experienced through television.

And television, for a whole variety of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game.

The way it's designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it's just ideal for football.

And this is why football became the thing that it did.

It's this

kind of enforced marriage to television that ended up being the best possible thing for both sides of the equation.

That's why when I say football was more popular than baseball in the 70s, we were still kind of operating from this idea that what mattered is what we said mattered.

So if we say baseball is the national pastime, it was.

But at some point that changed, where the consumer had more control than the person dictating what the meaning is.

And football now is so pervasive that

It kind of informs the lives of people who don't care at all.

It's a cliche thing to say, but really, as somebody who's into the monoculture, it's just football and Taylor Swift.

That's it.

All that rest of it is gone.

And that's why I would say football is really a way to understand the last half of the 20th century.

I'm not sure it'll be the best way to understand the 21st century.