The Book Is Done... Just In Time for Tonight's Big Baseball Zoom with Molly Knight!

OK, just sent in WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL to my editor, John. This is, wow, the ninth book that I’ve delivered, counting a collection of columns that came out in 2001 called, The Good Stuff. I look over my bibliography now:

2001: The Good Stuff

2007: The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America

2009: The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season and a Heart-stopping World Series.*

2012: Paterno

2015: The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus

2019: The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini

2021: The Baseball 100

2023: Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

2024: Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments

Whew. I was wondering why this book deadline felt even more intense than the others—gee, maybe it’s because there’s only a one-year gap from the last one.

I think I’ve briefly talked about how this happened: John and Dutton Publishing actually bought The Football 101 that ran here on JoeBlogs, my countdown of the 101 greatest football players ever. They planned to publish it in September. That was going to be a super-easy turn; the book was already written, so all I needed to do was some rewriting. I would have had it finished months ago with no stress at all.

Then, probably late summer, I made the admittedly crazy decision to instead start entirely from scratch and write a completely different book. I did this for a very personal reason that I will share with you.

First, though, I will not deny that my thinking did begin not long after The Athletic announced that they were releasing a book called The Football 100. I have not spoken about that book or The Athletic and I’m not going to now. I’m grateful for my time there and I’ll just leave it at that.

John and the good folks at Dutton Publishing honestly didn’t care at all that another football countdown book was coming out a year before mine. They were totally fine with me staying with The Football 101, and they were totally fine with me changing it slightly, and they were totally fine with me changing it a lot—they encouraged me to follow my heart and write the book that I wanted to write.

And, for the first time in the process, I thought hard about that: What book did I want to write? I probably spent a full week in a fog thinking about that. And it hit me, I knew exactly what book I wanted to write: I wanted to write a book that got at the heart of why football has had such a hold on me. I went to my computer and somewhat blindly wrote a few paragraphs.

These paragraphs are more or less how I started WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL:

I live a double life. On the outside, in public, I am a full-blooded baseball fan—mild-mannered, somewhat cultured, fascinated by poetry, swayed by romance, a student of history.

“Stan Musial, you say?” I might remark at a party while wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. “Why, did you know that Stan Musial had exactly 1,815 hits both at home and on the road? Doesn’t that just speak directly to the mathematical rhythms of baseball and life?”

But this is only the face I show the world.

I have another face, another side, a part of me that, as Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men, I don’t talk about at parties. This is a part of me that prefers gray days, that feels most alive as the days grow short, that eats Doritos by the handful and wants to head to the local Buffalo Wild Wings to bark at a television set, that still feels a little bit dead when the “60 Minutes” clock starts ticking and another football Sunday has passed by.

I live a double life. Down deep, I am a football fan.

I enjoyed writing The Football 101. But there was something about it that felt just a little bit off. I have had theories about it; at first I thought that my problem is that as absurd as it is to count down the 100 greatest baseball players, it’s more absurd in football, where comparing Anthony Muñoz and Walter Payton and Reggie White and Tom Brady and Deacon Jones and Sammy Baugh and Jerry Rice and Jim Brown and Patrick Mahomes feels like comparing a Mac computer with a Hammer Black Widow Bowling Ball with a La-Z-Boy recliner with a Firestone All-Season tire with a Standard Poodle with a piece of chocolate cake with a…

You get the point. It’s entirely different because everybody has a different job and the game changes every year.

But, I’ve come around to thinking: That wasn’t it. I never cared so much about getting the order of these countdowns right. I cared about telling the stories. And I was able to do that in football just like in baseball.

No, I think what was off is that in The Football 101 I just wasn’t doing as good a job as I wanted to of expressing myself as a football writer and lifelong fan. I wasn’t getting quite to the heart of what it is about football that enthralls me even while being fully aware of the game’s many drawbacks.

And as I thought and thought and thought how to get at that heart, it occurred to me: What if I gave football the “Why We Love” treatment, where I counted down not the greatest players, but the greatest moments? And the more I thought about that, the more I sketched out what the book might look like, the more excited I got.

And so I asked John if I could go for it. He asked me if I could still get it done by the beginning of February, in time to publish in 2024. I said I could.

You gotta have faith, right?

And I absolutely love this book. It has all kinds of surprises and incredible stories and I was able to unload my whole self into it. I cannot wait for you to see it.

You probably know that we’ve got a fun preorder campaign going with Quail Ridge Books—you can get a copy of the book signed with any inscription you like. I said that anyone who preordered by the time I delivered the book would get a special thank-you email from me talking a bit about some of the fun stuff in the book. Well, I’m going to extend that deadline for this week to celebrate my finishing the book—so if you preorder by the end of the week, you will get what I hope is a cool preview.

In the meantime, I’m going to go take a long nap.

Actually, I can’t take too long a nap because I’ll be with Molly Knight tonight at her delightful book club! Would love to see you there if you can make it, All you have to do is subscribe to Molly’s Substack—something you should have done already, anyway—and I believe we’re starting at 8:30 p.m. Eastern!

Details over at The Long Game.