FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTLESS
I chose the history of football for my first term paper topic. Early 1950’s.
FOOTBALL by Chuck Klosterman (2026 ) is available. He adds a lot to “kicking the head of the Dane.”
Mr. Klosterman’s work is unique, well written, thorough, and entertaining. And frightening.
He covers sports history, great players and coaches, teams, and fans.
He covers controversial topics (CTE and injury, Gambling, NIL and PORTAL dangers, Salary, owners, TV limits. Plus others. )
Here are some samples:
HIS GOAL ( page 11 )
*“This is an expository obituary, published before the subject has died, delivered by someone who wants to explain why the victim mattered so much to so many, despite so much evidence to the contrary.”
On the future of football: People will always need to watch football.
*“This, I must concede is true—if the scenario I described were happening today. But it is not happening today. It is something that will happen in the future, to different people, and those future people will not be like you. They will live in a version of society where football stops and no one cares. And that is inevitably why I wrote this book.”
NOTE–Klosterman describes this “future scenario” in detail, later in the chapter entitled NUCLEAR FOOTBALL.
CHILDHOOD ( page 57)
*“ In the summer after fifth grade, I spent a lot of time imagining me and my friends playing football and winning championships. These daydreams were not just mental visions”
Deja Vu. *My small high school played 6 man football. Mr. Klosterman comments on this
wide open variation of a game that was fun. ( Page 77 )
“But 6-man is its own animal, too arcane to be seen as the bastardized version of anything else. It’s structured bedlam with jankier rules….
EDUCATION/TEACHERS (page 120 )
**Here’s what I mean;Let’s say the salary of every public school teacher was tripled over night. A third grade teacher making $45,000.00 a year on Monday is now making $135,000.00 on Tuesday. In the short term, that change would make little difference in how well third graders are educated. A teacher doesn’t become a different person just because their paycheck changes. But the long-term impact this would have on education would be seismic. The realization that becoming a public school teacher was now a six-figure profession would change the type of person who decides to pursue teaching as a vocation.
*Every member of society would live a life conditioned to believe that becoming a public school teacher was a rarefied human experience, reserved for the elite and worth whatever sacrifice was necessary in exchange.”
*Triple the average U.S. teaching salary and the public education system is reinvented within ten or twenty years.”
CANADIAN FOOTBALL (page 208,209 )
*“ I Love the people of Canada. They are self-deprecating, well informed, and open to drinking in the afternoon.” See Joke by Donald Sutherland.
2040 -THE FUTURE (page 246-249)
- “ College football becomes a less interesting version of pro football, nothing more than a feeder system for the NFL. That’s the part that is visible. The invisible part is the corrosion of football participation at the high school level.”
*So this is how the future will go….
For the next 5-15 years, football becomes eleven more dominant than it is right now. This, incongruously, results from the mismanagement of college football. ( i.e. the Portal /NIL impact).
*Football is now an exclusively professional pursuit, watched and supported by millions of fans who have no personal relationship to the game itself.The sport has progressed to its social and economic end point. This is where the plane hits the mountain.
Economic escalation has made pro sports fragile.
The NFL’s total revenue hit one billion dollars for the first time in 1988. By 2065 the number will be two hundred billion, and the face value for a ticket will exceed $3000.00 .
*For more than a hundred years the NFL only got bigger and richer. It was designed only for imperial expansion, which is the only thing it did. But now it has to somehow get smaller, and that is something it cannot do..
- “Somewhere in the middle of the current century there will be a panoramic realization about TV advertising. The realization will be this : It doesn’t work, at least compared to what it costs.”
- ”…and when it happens the reaction will be startling, unsuspected indifference.” “ ` ` ` ` `***********************************
This is a timely book.
The Little Green Book of Tennis 