Exhibition games are already underway in the NFL, and college football is just days away now.
Don't ask Steve Almond to watch a game with you. He loves football, but hates what it does to the people who play it and the society that celebrates it.
We thrill at great catches and long runs, but overlook the toll on brains and bodies. As Almond puts it, "we want the bacon, but we don't want to see the slaughterhouse." He takes us inside the slaughterhouse in his book Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.
Steve Almond visited early in football season in 2014; we present an encore of the interview here.
