Since I read it in the run-up to the most recent installment of the reading series I do with Patrick Sauer in Brooklyn, I have recommended Seth Wickersham's book American Kings widely. The book is an excellent biographical history of the quarterback as a concept, job, and cultural construct; it is also weird. This is greatly to its credit, because Wickersham takes some chances with storytelling, structure, and perspective, up to and including his own brief high school quarterbacking career in the narrative, that he could just as easily not have taken. I enjoyed talking to him about the book in Brooklyn, and was happy to pick that conversation back up this week when we welcomed him back to the pod this week.
We only had Seth for the first segment of the episode, so we got right to it. We talked about the bracingly strange and ambitious choices he made in the book, the inevitable Uncle Rico Factor in writing about quarterbacking, and the various ways of engaging with the mythos surrounding what it means to be a quarterback. We talked about the much more practical realities of quarterbacking as a lifestyle and job, the industrial process that creates contemporary quarterbacks, the individual manias and parenting disasters that have created (and destroyed) quarterbacks forever, and the extent to which any of what it takes to do this impossible and brain-breaking job can really be learned. Our conversation moved at a clip between the cast of characters in the book, from John Elway's tentative later-life experiments with insight and lifelong struggles with empathy, to what led Andrew Luck to walk away from the job at something like the height of his powers, to the expanding and contracting hype cycle around Caleb Williams.
In the back half, we ... continued to talk about quarterbacking, actually. Drew broke down the peculiar and unresolved J.J. McCarthy situation in Minnesota, and explained Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell's strange and exacting but possibly not wrong understanding of where a quarterback needs to be mentally to do the job well. We continued in this vein for a bit before Drew hit a very bold segue that connected quarterbacks and bloggers, which allowed us to talk about our own bad habits, competitiveness, and creative processes. There's some stuff about oblivion in there, which is naturally where I go when I'm struggling to write, but it makes more sense than it seems like it should.
Then it was time for the Funbag, and things stopped making sense entirely. The game had sped up on us, maybe, but we were still making plays. We were like kids out there. It was like throwing it around in the yard. That sort of thing.
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