By virtue of the broadcast’s antifragile sublimity, football is, says Klosterman, “always, always, always better on television than in person.” He goes so far as to say that the physical game only exists to “facilitate the broadcast version,” and even when there is “no camera, our mind inserts one,” meaning we’d automatically reframe what we saw from beyond the end zone, for example, to the standard sideline view. With the same characteristic dogmatism that animated his criticism in Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman insists “this is how it works for most people, including most who insist it does not.” I am, apparently, deluding myself that it doesn’t work like that for me, though I’ll concede that the broader theory holds true insofar as I’ve been mentally conditioned to impose the rules of television onto live sports. Attending games in person, I’ve found myself reaching for a phantom remote to pause for bathroom breaks; resisting checking stats on my phone because I’m worried my “broadcast” is delayed; and waiting for a color commentator to clarify the most recent play.
What is unusual is Klosterman’s unabashed embrace of his (our) simulated experience: “This is what I want,” he writes of his relationship to football, “I want to be controlled.” There is no praxis that follows his analysis, there is just wholehearted embrace of America’s favorite “prolate spheroid.” Klosterman may often be subversive, kind of lazily seditious, but he is clearly self-aware about his counterrevolutionary inclinations, accepting and even celebrating football as a stabilizing—some might say paralyzing—force on the American imagination.
A Fan’s Notes: On television, Texas, and Chuck Klosterman’s Football, Michael Knapp
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