Eating the Dinosaur

by Chuck Klosterman

  “Also, I am an alcoholic.”

  The best response to allegations that you used steroids throughout your playing career, particularly if those allegations are true and verifiable.

  “I did experiment with steroids. I am not denying that. But the fact of the matter is that I only took them for a short while, simply because my body did not respond the way I anticipated. They did not help me the way they helped other athletes. Look: I’m a very competitive person. I will do anything to win, because that’s what my character dictates and what my fans demand. I’m like Michael Jordan. I’m like Tiger Woods. So, yes, I did try steroids. That was what virtually everyone I knew was doing. It didn’t feel like cheating. It felt like not using steroids was not trying to win. But they didn’t work for me the way they worked for the others. I felt more susceptible to injury and less in control of my emotions. It deadened my sex drive and gave me acne, and I’ve always been a narcissistic guy. I saw no dramatic improvement in my on-field performance, so I quit using them. I’m ashamed to admit that I would have kept taking them if they had helped, but they didn’t. So if I am on trial for competitive immorality, I plead guilty. I’m dangerously cutthroat. But if the larger question is whether or not my career statistical achievements are less valid because I used stanozolol and testosterone cypionate, I can honestly say they are not. History may judge me as a vain person who was willing to cheat to win, but my actual attempts at cheating didn’t work. I’m the same natural athlete everyone always imagined.”

  The best response to having the film you directed go $200 million over budget while single-handedly bankrupting the movie studio.

  “Critics will say I lost control of this project, but that’s not accurate. The reason my film became so sprawling and costly is because—for the first time in my life—I was completely in control of the creative process. The film inside my brain was literally being transferred onto the celluloid, image by image by image. It was almost akin to a scientific breakthrough. This has never happened before, to anyone. In the past, movies were merely an interpretation of what someone intellectually conceived, inevitably falling short of the ultimate intention. But this was different. This was the perfect transfer of theory to reality, and that did not come without a cost. I realize the constraints of capitalism have inflicted a degree of collateral damage at the studio, and that disappoints me. There were a lot of fine people working there, and I hate that this endeavor has caused them to lose their jobs. It’s awful. But on balance, $200 million seems like a small price to pay for this kind of aesthetic advance. Even if all the reviews are negative and it does no business whatsoever at the box office, this will have to be remembered as the first truly successful film.”

  The best response to not remembering the name of someone you’ve met several times before.

  “This might seem weird, but you really, really remind me of the best friend I’ve ever had. My friend’s name was Jamie. You look the same, you act the same, you have the same mannerisms, and you exhibit the same depth of humanity. When I see you, I see Jamie.1 But ten years ago, Jamie died in a boating accident. That accident still feels like it happened yesterday. I’ve never gotten over it. And because of that, all I can think about whenever I see you is this dead friend of mine. It blocks out everything else in my consciousness, including your first name. I always want to call you Jamie. It’s the only name my brain will accept.

  “Also, I am an alcoholic.”

  The best response to being arrested for carrying an unlicensed handgun into a nightclub and accidentally shooting yourself in the leg, thereby jeopardizing your pro football career.

  “First of all, you people probably don’t know anyone who’s been shot. I, however, know lots of people who’ve been shot. In fact, I know lots of people who claim they want to shoot me, and some of these people are technically my friends. So that’s why I carry a gun. Second, you people probably trust the government, and you probably trust it because your personal experience with law enforcement has been positive. I’ve had the opposite experience all my life. I’m afraid of the government. I’m afraid of the world, and you can’t give me one valid reason why I shouldn’t be. So that’s why I did not apply for a gun license. Third, I shot myself in the leg, which is both painful and humiliating. What else do I need to go through in order to satiate your desire to see me chastised? The penalty for carrying an unlicensed weapon is insane. How can carrying an unlicensed firearm be worse than firing a licensed one? I broke the law, but the law I broke is a bad law. Would you be satisfied if the penalty for unlawful gun possession was getting shot in the leg? Because that already fucking happened!”

  The best response to a police officer who’s just asked the question “Have you been drinking tonight?”

  “That’s a great question, and I totally understand why you’re asking it. I can see where you’re coming from, sir. I realize my behavior seems a little erratic. I smell vaguely of alcohol, I’m in a motor vehicle, and it’s three o’clock in the morning. It’s a unique circumstance. But I’m not intoxicated. I’m distraught. I’m a hyper-emotional person who can’t accept the inherent unfairness of the universe. Have you ever read Arthur Schopenhauer? You know, that dead German pessimist? He once said that the vanity of existence is revealed in the form that existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Crazy, right? I don’t really get what he’s saying. But I do know this, officer: That’s how I feel all the time. And to make matters worse, I’m an insomniac. I haven’t slept more than two hours in any given night since I was sixteen. That’s why I’m awake right now, wandering the roadways of quasi-reality, living my wretched, vampiric existence. I suppose you could say I was suicidal, but too depressed to kill myself. And then, when I saw the rolling blue lights of your squad car in my rearview mirror, I realized that nothing I could say or do would reflect positively on my condition. The game was over. I’ve lost. Why fight it? I pulled over to the side of the road, depressed the parking brake, turned off my vehicle, and imbibed one full shot of Bombay gin, which I happen to keep in the glove box of my car, precisely for this type of situation. That is the alcohol you smell. In fact, it’s still coating the inside of my mouth. Which also means that if you give me a Breathalyzer right now, the remnants of the alcohol will still be there, so I’ll fail the test, even though I’m not intoxicated. So—to answer your original question—yes. I have been drinking. I’ve had exactly one drink tonight, thirty seconds ago, in response to the hopelessness of existence. Do I still need a lawyer?”

  The best response to the final jury on Survivor, assuming you’ve made it through the entire game by lying, breaking promises, and relying on other players who were more physically talented than you.

  “This game is an imaginary universe we have created, as both players and fans. The idea of people being dropped onto an island with no food and forced to compete in weird contests and asked to conduct secret votes has no relationship with the rest of the world. But this is what we choose. We willfully look into the cameras and speak the fabricated language of this game show—we use words and phrases like alliance and immunity and going to tribal as if they have the same meanings outside of this TV program. Basically, we are living inside a fabricated society that we all appreciate. We became contestants on this show because we liked the idea of a mediated reality that would not intersect with who we are in the mundane game of real life; we preferred the high-definition world we saw on CBs, where the morals and values were specific to the experience of the game. This being the case, it’s your responsibility as a member of the jury to uphold the ideals that originally made you want to watch this television show. And what values are those? Well, think about the first season of Survivor fro
m 2000—the year it was really popular, even among people who didn’t care. The final vote came down to a decision between two people—a naked gay guy who lied to everybody, and a female wilderness guide who won almost all of the individual challenges. In real life, the naked gay guy would not have survived on a deserted island. But the naked gay guy won the game. He got the votes. You see, those first voters made a critical distinction: They decided that the ability to succeed at Survivor without natural skills was more impressive than succeeding by one’s own aptitude and work ethic. They decided that the ability to drag everyone down to the middle required more strategy than transcending the group alone. They invented what success at Survivor was supposed to signify. So this is the game we must play. You may not like the idea of rewarding someone for being deceitful and opportunistic, and you may not like the symbolism that such a practice expresses to audiences watching at home. But if you like this TV show—and since you’re here right now, you obviously do—you have no option but to uphold the precedent that made Survivor the experience that it is. If you don’t, you’ll disrupt the framework of the show. You must vote for the person who seems to deserve it less, because that person ultimately deserves it more. And if you don’t agree with that concept, you’re killing Survivor itself, which means your own personal participation will eventually become unimportant. So if you want this experience to be meaningful, vote against your conscience.

  “Also, I am an alcoholic.”

  Football

  1 As I type this sentence, I’m watching the Michigan Wolverines play the Minnesota Golden Gophers in football. Michigan is bad this year and the Gophers are better than expected, but Michigan is winning easily. They’re winning by running the same play over and over and over again. Very often, it seems to be the only effective play they have. It has certain similarities to the single-wing offenses from the 1950s, but the application is new and different. It’s called the read option, and it looks like this.

  As of this moment in 2008, the read option is by far the most pervasive offensive play in college football and an increasingly popular gadget play in pro football, especially for the Miami Dolphins (who run it by moving quarterback Chad Pennington to wide receiver and using running back Ronnie Brown at QB, a formation commonly called the Wildcat). If somebody makes a movie about American life a hundred years from now and wants to show a fictionalized image of what football looked like, this is the play they should try to cinematically replicate.1 Every week of autumn, I watch between nine and fifteen hours of football; depending on who’s playing, I probably see this play eighty to a hundred and fifty times a weekend. Michigan has just run it three times in succession. This play defines the relationship between football and modernity; it’s What Interesting Football Teams Are Doing Now. And it’s helped me rethink the relationship between football and conservatism, a premise I had long conceded but never adequately questioned.

  2 Okay … Let me begin by recognizing that you—the reader of this book—might not know much about football. In fact, you might hate football, and you might be annoyed that it’s even included in this collection. I’m guessing at least fifty potential buyers flipped through the pages of this book inside a store, noticed there was a diagram of a football play on page 125, and decided not to buy it. This is a problem I have always had to manage: Roughly 60 percent of the people who read my books have a near-expert understanding of sports, but the remaining 40 percent have no interest whatsoever. As such, I will understand if you skip to the next essay, which is about ABBA. But before you give up, let me abridge the essence of the previous paragraph: The aforementioned “read option” is an extremely simple play. The main fellow for the offense (this would be the quarterback, whom you might remember as a popular guy from high school who dated lots of girls with bleached hair) receives the ball deep in the backfield and “reads” the weakside defensive end (“read” is the football term for “looks at and considers,” while “weakside” refers to whatever side of the field has fewer offensive players). If the defensive player attacks upfield, the quarterback keeps the ball and runs it himself, essentially attacking where the defensive end used to be (and where a running lane now exists). If the defensive end “stays home” (which is the football term for “remains cautious and orthodox”), there’s usually no running lane for the quarterback, so the QB hands the ball to the running back moving in the opposite direction (which is generally the strong side). Basically, the read option is just the quarterback making a choice based on the circumstance—he either runs the ball himself in one direction, or he hands the ball off in the opposing direction.

  Now, why should this matter to you (or anyone)? Here is the simplest answer: Twenty-five years ago, the read option didn’t exist. Coaches would have given a dozen reasons why it couldn’t be used. Ten years ago, it was a play of mild desperation, most often used by teams who couldn’t compete physically. But now almost everyone uses it. It’s the vortex of an offensive scheme that has become dominant. But ten years from now—or even less, probably—this play will have disappeared completely. In 2018, no one will run it, because every team will be running something else. It will have been replaced with new thinking. And this is foot-ball’s interesting contradiction: It feels like a conservative game. It appeals to a conservative mind-set and a reactionary media and it promotes conservative values. But in tangible practicality, football is the most progressive game we have—it constantly innovates, it immediately embraces every new technology,2 and almost all the important thinking about the game is liberal. If football was a politician, it would be some kind of reverse libertarian: staunchly conservative on social issues, but freethinking on anything related to policy. So the current upsurge of the read option is symbolic of something unrelated to the practice of football; it’s symbolic of the nature of football and how that idea is misinterpreted because of its iconography.

  So there you go.

  If you’d still rather get to the shit about ABBA, you should go there now.

  3 The single most radical aspect of football is something most casual (and even most serious) fans take for granted: Football added the forward pass. It was an extraneous addition to the original game, implemented long after the sport had gained national attention. There is no corollary for this in any other meaningful spectator sport. The DH rule in baseball and the three-point line in hoops are negligible when compared to the impact of passing; it would be like golf suddenly allowing tackling on the putting green. By now, watching football on television is mostly the act of watching passing—in 2008, the NFL’s worst passing team (the Oakland Raiders) still gained more yards through the air than all but five teams gained rushing. At the NCAA level in ’08, seven of the starting quarterbacks in the Big 12 Conference completed 65 percent of all the passes they attempted, a rate of success that made running the ball seem almost wasteful. Passing is what drives the sport and passing is what sells the sport. But passing only exists because of violence.

  Imagine football at the turn of the twentieth century, before passing was part of the game: How would it look? The entire game is contained in the middle of the field, away from the sidelines. There’s almost no benefit in aligning defensive players away from the ball, because there’s no way for the offense to take advantage of their tight proximity. Instead of ten yards for a first down, teams only need five. As a result, every single play is like a goal-line surge during a driving blizzard—the best strategy is to simply pound the ball straight ahead. And because this is the nineteenth century (which means equipment is essentially nonexistent), football is a laughably violent undertaking. It’s nothing but a series of collisions, sporadically interrupted by one or two touchdowns and a whole lot of punting. In 1905, eighteen college kids die from playing football. President Theodore Roosevelt sees a photograph of Swarthmore lineman Bob Maxwell walking off the field after a game against Penn, and he’s so utterly pummeled and disgusting that Roosevelt (despite being a fan) decides that football needs to be outlawed. This becomes
a hot-button issue for a year. Finally, Roosevelt decides that football can continue to exist, but only if some of the rules are changed. One change increases the distance needed for a first down. Another legalizes passing, which has been going on illegally (but often unpenalized) for decades. Essentially, Roosevelt decriminalizes the passing game. And this decriminalization actually makes the rules of football easier to comprehend: Previously, it had been unclear how referees were expected to enforce a penalty for forward passing—there wasn’t a rule against passing, much as there isn’t any rule against making your slotback invisible. How do you legislate against something no one had previously imagined? When an illegal forward pass was used by Yale against Princeton in 1876, the ref allegedly decided to allow the play to stand after flipping a coin. Action had evolved faster than thought.

  Interestingly, Roosevelt’s rule changes did not significantly alter the violent nature of college football; by 1909, the number of nationwide deaths from football had risen to thirty-three. But these changes totally reinvented the intellectual potential for football. It was like taking the act of punching someone in the face and shaping it into boxing. Suddenly, there were multiple dimensions to offense—the ball could rapidly be advanced on both its X and Y axis. The field was technically the same size, but it was vaster. You could avoid the brutality of trench warfare by flying over it. It liberalized the sport without eliminating its conservative underpinnings: Soldiers were still getting their skulls hammered in the kill zone, but there was now a progressive, humanitarian way to approach the offensive game plan. Size mattered less (Knute Rockne’s 1913 Notre Dame squad was able to famously slay a much bigger Army juggernaut by out-passing them), but it was still a game where blocking and tackling appeared to be the quintessence of what it was about. It was at this point that football philosophy forked: There were now two types of football coaches, as diametrically opposed (and as profoundly connected) as Goldwater and McGovern.