FOOTBALL BOOK CLUB

Building Something: On Childhood Memories, ‘Against Football,’ the New York Jets, and My Future Kids

Posted on September 7, 2015     3 Comments

By Dan Bjork

Dads as quarterbacks.

When I signed up for this, I didn’t think my chances of making it were all that good. I thought, best case scenario: I’d schedule my Sunday workout for Jets’ kick-off and most of the time they’d be well on their way to losing by the time I finished — it’d be easy enough to skip those games — that and I’d obviously fold and watch both Patriots games and almost certainly develop (yet another) unhealthy relationship with Madden. I said yes because the Jets are woeful enough for this workout scheme to be successful, because I’m so worn out from the clown car we’ve become under Woody Johnson, so much so that a huge part of me wishes it were socially acceptable to simply follow Rex to Buffalo. I said yes because Addy asked and he’s my ride-or-die homie — he gave me a place to live when I was at my lowest and homeless, twice — and I would run through a brick wall for that dude. I could easily try and not watch the Jets for season. But a tiny wrinkle I found early on in Against Football quickly became this rabbit-hole inside which I found a real sense of purchase. I’m going to make it. I’m not going to watch football this year, I’m damn near certain.

There’s nothing really new in this book, not if you’ve been paying attention. Rather, it’s a full-bore, fire-hose barrage of it, years of whispers and fleeting, single reports — usually squeezed between highlights and commercials — here concentrated and backed up with the sort of breadth of evidence short-form news reports do not provide. It’s a chapter-by-chapter survey of everything that’s toxic about football (the majority of which are cataloged on our Breaking Up Is Hard to Do page). But it is all presented by one of us, by a genuine football fan, by a human being and an active well of empathy struggling his way through digesting this all; meaning we get Steve Almond’s reaction to each toxicity along the way, along with several instances of the slippery logic employed by someone who’s found solace in something he knows he should be ashamed of. And that had its effect, to be sure. It’d be near impossible to engage the book with any sort of earnestness and not walk away knowing that the game in its current state is killing its players, and that the NFL’s insistence on ever-increasing profitability actively makes this worse, and, most of all, that by even passively consuming this, you are indeed part of the problem.

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