Our Interview With Chuck Klosterman

By Ryan Corazza

I originally e-mailed Chuck Klosterman because I wanted to, in part, interview him about his new novel, Downtown Owl. However, he had two stipulations: 1) that I ask him a maximum of six questions and 2) I only ask him questions he’d never been asked before. As such, here was my attempt to do so. Read on for his thoughts on sports blogs, a Palin vs. Obama basketball match, the Olympics and AMC’s “Mad Men.”

Q: Back in your days at SPIN, you wrote a column identifying the most accurately rated bands of all-time — eschewing the “overrated” or “underrated” meme once and for all. Using similar criteria, who are the five most accurately rated athletes of all time?

A: This is a great, great question. In descending order, they are:

5.) Phil Simms: A very good, non-Hall of Fame caliber quarterback.
4.) Mike Schmidt: The finest third baseman of all-time, but never regarded as one of the all-time 10 best players overall.
3.) O.J. Simpson: Probably the third-greatest pure rusher in collegiate and NFL history, but — because his statistics have been long surpassed — he would have been a forgotten footnote. By murdering his ex-wife, Simpson remains historically relevant as a person (and thereby accurately rated as an athlete).
2.) Craig Ehlo: Bring up Ehlo’s name in a conversation and somebody will always say, “You know, in retrospect, Ehlo was actually okay.” This is true.
1.) Tiger Woods.

Q: We know you read – or have at least run across — the Big Lead. What other sports blogs do you read and why?

A: There is no reason not to read any blog, simply because they are free. That said, there is no single blog that is “required reading” every day, or even every week. This has become more and more true as the blogosphere has expanded. All the information is shared. If something legitimately interesting happens on any specific blog, it’s immediately going to be linked to on 200 other sites, so there’s no need to consistently go to any one source. That’s the biggest philosophical difference between old media and new media: If a sportswriter at the Washington Post breaks a story the New York Times doesn’t have, the Post wins that day — the NYT will have to play catch-up the following morning, and readers will start to see the Post as a better product. But blogs aren’t like that. If something on The Big Lead gets linked to Deadspin, nobody who finds it on Deadspin gives a shit how it got here or where it came from originally. Following the link is no different (and no less efficient) than reading the original content in its original setting. The experience is identical. Both sites win, as does any other random blog that connects to the content. They all share the same traffic. Unlike journalism, blogging is not competitive — its cooperative. Networking is far more essential than writing or reporting. Which is why I don’t need to read any specific sports blog on a day-to-day basis; I will eventually get all that information without even trying. It aggregates itself.

The problem, of course, is that I don’t even want most of the information I end up acquiring. The main thing I want from the sports blogosphere is statistical number crunching. That should be its primary objective. But what I usually find are unfunny people trying to be sarcastic and edgy. In 1998, it was rare to find sports-media personalities who put a lot of emphasis on being entertaining — there was Kenny Mayne and Norman Chad and Bill Simmons, but almost everybody else was hyper-straight and weirdly serious. As such, the handful of guys who tried to be funny were legitimately refreshing. They seemed different, and they had more voice. But now EVERYBODY wants to be funny. That’s all there is. You can’t blog about any subject without making some sort of obvious joke, and that kind of thinking has spilled into the mainstream media. I guess what I’m really waiting for is a legitimately smart guy who wants to write a totally unentertaining sports blog.

Q: Both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have basketball backgrounds. (Palin was dubbed “Sarah Barracuda” in high school; Obama likes to play in sweat pants and a tucked in t-shirt.) Who wins in a one-on-one game to 11 and why?

A: Obama has the size and the skills, but Palin would probably want it more. However, if it was a game of 2-on-2 and you had to pick a  teammate from your own region, Obama would win easily. An Obama-Mark Aguire tickets destroys Palin and Carlos Boozer.

Q: You’re not a traditional sportswriter. But many of the best sportswriters – Gary Smith, David Halberstam — didn’t approach sports as internally driven sportswriters but as writers who deigned to touch on the subject. Do you read much sportswriting — both new and old? Do you think this theory applies?

A: I read a lot of sportswriting. Whenever I’m bored, I read the Sports Illustrated on-line archives. That tends to better than almost all the contemporary sports writing that’s happening now. At the moment, I suppose the best working sportswriter is Michael Lewis (who certainly fits into the model you described). Gary Smith is weirder now, but still awesome. The place that has the best in-depth sportswriting on the most consistent basis is that E-Ticket feature on espn.com (this is like Wright Thompson and Michael Weinreb and all those people). I just finished reading “America’s Game” by Michael MacCambridge, which is probably the best book on pro football I’ve ever found. But these are generally the exceptions.

What really damaged sports journalism (probably irrevocably) is the concept of sportswriters becoming TV personalities. Every one of the guys who made the jump from print to TV immediately became a bad writer. The only possible exception is Frank DeFord. It’s so fucking crazy. I don’t understand it at all. What kind of person would rather be on TV when they could still be a writer? That’s like giving up the guitar to become a hand model.

I was a sportswriter before I was any other kind of writer. Sports was the first thing I ever wrote about, and I still like writing about sports for the same reason I like writing about rock music and film and religion and politics and science: All those things are interesting to me. What was so great about Halberstam was that he wrote about the Portland Trailblazers the same way he wrote about the Vietnam War. To me, that’s the goal.

5) Is “Mad Men” the best show on TV?

A: Yes. How awesome is your show when January Jones is only the second hottest woman in the cast?

6) Did you budge at all on your dislike of the Olympics this summer? Or did you roll your eyes at every Shawn Johnson backer you ran across?

A: I watched the track and field and a little of the basketball. The time difference was a problem, because it was impossible to avoid finding out the results for just about everything. Generally, I did not care. I realize the Michael Phelps stuff was meaningful, but a friend of mine brought up a good  point: While it makes total sense that we have a competition to see who can swim from Point A to Point B in the shortest amount of time, it seems idiotic that we award medal for all the individual strokes. What is the value of the backstroke? Why do we care who can swims BACKWARDS the fastest? We certainly don’t have a competition to see who can run 400 meters in reverse. We don’t have a competition to see who is the fastest at crawling a marathon. It seems like part of Phelps’ dominance was a product of how that sport is designed. If there was a 100 meter hopping contest, I suspect Usain Bolt would have dominated that, too.

Posted at 1:55 pm
on September 4th, 2008
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