What's the Most Literary Sport?

Why aren't there great American football novels?

When combining the NFL and NCCA, football has clearly been the number one spectator sport in America for the last 40 to 60 years. Add in high school football, and football has probably been the sport with the most fan interest for even longer.

An interesting question, however, is whether football has a relative large highbrow footprint.

Clearly, the most literary sports are ones like mountain climbing. But what about the major team sports?

A reader writes:

Have been having a back and forth with my friend on why there has been no good history of football, and he had the following thesis. Would be curious your thoughts if you have time.

Thesis: This is because the triumph of football over baseball is probably the most significant red state over blue state cultural victory of the 20th Century.

Before 1950 baseball dominates NY, Philly, Boston, Chicago, all the cities of the literary intellectual class. They’re openly willing to wax poetic about it.

Football was nurtured in the Midwest and South, look at all the midsize towns in Illinois and Ohio where the NFL played in the early days.

The Green Bay Packers are the beloved remnant of the 1920s NFL’s history of having franchises in random factory towns, like the Canton Bulldogs, Decatur Staleys, and Kenosha Maroons.

On the other hand, college football had started out a half century before among elite Northeastern colleges, which tended to be Republican-oriented back when F. Scott Fitzgerald was poring over Stover at Yale in 1911.

The literary intelligentsia has always fundamentally disliked football for a while, shit like Ken Burns’ Baseball is at times an implicit attack on football. Liberal intellectuals dislike its gladiatorial nature, old RINO pundits like George Will disliked the downscale athletes it attracts. This is also why the NYT takes a bizarrely hostile approach to the NFL, and actively spent the early-mid 2010’s cheering how the NBA was gonna supersede it after the concussion scandal (LOL, LMAO). Course there’s stuff like Jon Bois, the worm is turning.

Tough question.

Baseball has always enjoyed good writers (I found a newspaper sports section report from the 1850s on a New York City ballgame filed by Walt Whitman).

I just reread Bill Simmons’ big history of the NBA and I’d love to read something similar on the NFL, but I haven’t heard of one.

Even golf has gotten attention from great writers like Wodehouse, Fitzgerald, and Updike, not to mention Bernard Darwin.

Football had fine writers like Dan Jenkins 50-60 years ago, but not exactly literati.

In practice, baseball, for example, is kind of a lowbrow sport -- bookworms tend to not have good enough eyesight to hit well. But it has always had fine writers on its side. Note that it was revolutionized over the last 50 years by Bill James, an English major who was also good with arithmetic.

So, what’s going on?

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