A review by ben_miller
Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond
4.0
This treatise pulled off a neat double trick: articulating why I once loved American football and why I don't anymore. Almond's description of solitary afternoons watching his favorite team at a cheesy bar, in the company of—but also depressingly isolated from—other fans, made my blood run cold in its familiarity.
For me, football is no longer a temptation. It's not just that the sport is morally and culturally bankrupt—I now find it unbearably tedious, a stuttering and bloated carnival of ads, replays, and penalty reviews punctuated by occasional fits of mostly dull action. So it's been easy to give up a sport that I no longer have any interest in, while feeling conveniently righteous for having done so.
But other big-business sports are still central to my life, and they're not as different as I might like to pretend from the hideous cesspool that is the NFL...still an unconscionable waste of money and resources, a bonanza of greed and corruption, and a system of exploitation of labor at all levels. I still have to believe they have redeeming qualities, too—but the veil of innocence with which I enjoyed sports as a child has been further lifted by this little book.
For me, football is no longer a temptation. It's not just that the sport is morally and culturally bankrupt—I now find it unbearably tedious, a stuttering and bloated carnival of ads, replays, and penalty reviews punctuated by occasional fits of mostly dull action. So it's been easy to give up a sport that I no longer have any interest in, while feeling conveniently righteous for having done so.
But other big-business sports are still central to my life, and they're not as different as I might like to pretend from the hideous cesspool that is the NFL...still an unconscionable waste of money and resources, a bonanza of greed and corruption, and a system of exploitation of labor at all levels. I still have to believe they have redeeming qualities, too—but the veil of innocence with which I enjoyed sports as a child has been further lifted by this little book.