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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm finished with Sayers' Whose Body. Lord Whimsey was great, and it had enough intensity at times to grab my interest. I feel like the confrontation was a missed opportunity, given the convergence of themes which was implicit in the scene. A good read nevertheless.
Picking up Churchill's Savrola, because it has occurred to me that I've read more Hitler and Stalin than Churchill.
Finishing up Chuck Klosterman's Football, which isn't so much a book about football as a series of essays about the phenomenon of American football as it exists in 2026. Most of these are at least somewhat controversial: The fact that the game only has eleven minutes of action counterintuitively is what makes it ideal for television, that Jim Thorpe is actually the greatest player of all time, a brief diversion on how the US customary system is superior to metric. The assertion that received the most press during the book tour was that football as the country's most popular sport would end sometime within the next fifty years, and nobody would notice or care.
I've often said that I generally don't like books written by journalists, but Klosterman is an exception, mainly because he knows how to write a book that doesn't come across as a magazine article. His worst books are the anthologies that include a combination of new and previously released material, and it's always clear what the new material is, because he's writing about theoretical concepts that wouldn't make sense in most magazines.
The best book about football is The League, which is also by a journalist but reads as if it were written by a historian. While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting. I've read a ton of books about hockey and they were all obviously written for someone who was already into hockey . Klosterman is primarily known as a music writer who almost apologized every time he writes about sports, so while I'm obviously already inclined to read a book about football, it's clear that he's aiming for a broader audience, as one of the book's themes is that football is so pervasive in American culture that nobody can avoid its influence, as even not liking it says something about who you are. The main reason The League is better is because its subject, the machinations of NFL ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, is so esoteric that most football fans probably aren't interested in 800 pages on it, but the story he tells is so intriguing that it obviously doesn't matter if anyone was predisposed to read the book.
The only other football book I would say is better is Pat Kirwan's Keep Your Eye Off the Ball, which is an in-depth look at how the game is actually played. Unlike the other two books, the only person who could live it is someone who is so into the game that they want to learn all the esoteric stuff that allows one to watch the game not like a fan but like a coach (the second edition was spiral bound and contained extra margin space for notes, a feature included by popular request). It has the position it does because the only conclusion one can draw after reading it is that 95% of fans and sports journalists simply do not know what they're talking about. It's the kind of thing you can't unsee and completely changes your relationship with the sport. It's no surprise that Kirwan's radio show is one of the few I can enjoy listening to.
Bit of a digression on this point but your opinion on Klosterman is exactly why I love Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction so much; even more than his science fiction. He managed to turn my interest to topics other people always kept it away from. Hockey is actually where I got my handle. When I was a kid I hated physical sports. I was very good at playing it, I just never had an interest in it. Not out of an intrinsic dislike but was never properly acquainted with it by someone who could relate it to me, and it wasn’t until I was a teenager when that began to change and I’d play sports outside frequently with family, friends and neighbor kids across the street.
Anyway, one day we went to play Basketball on the black top at a church very close to where I lived. When we got there there were a bunch of kids playing street hockey. They asked if we wanted to play (we never tried it before), but we agreed. I played goaltender (and was pretty good). One of the kids randomly remarked at one point,” “You play like Tretiak.” I had no idea what he was talking about and he asked if I ever watched the Disney movie Miracle (the one where the US hockey team defeated the Soviets) and I said no. Later we watched it and he goes, “You play really good defense like that guy (Vladislav Tretiak).” And among my friends and neighborhood kids, it stuck ever since. To this day, they will still call me “Tre,” or “Tret” when they see me. There’s only one single person I’ve ever met in my entire life who when he heard what others called me he looked at me and said “Hockey?” I had one of the biggest grins when he said that. He knew the reference.
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