Episode 190: Solving That Puzzle with Joe Posnanski

The Other 51

“I feel like my place as a writer is sort of that place between what happened and the mythology of what’s happening.”

Joe Posnanski joins Brian for a deep dive into his new book, Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments.
Joe talks about how he started with a list of more than 300 football moments and the process of whittling those down. It’s an honest and super nerdy discussion about how early drafts of the book weren’t working, what Joe did to work through those struggles, and how writing about The Drive unlocked the book for him

Joe also talks about how we was able to write a collection of essays while maintaining a central theme, how the Don Beebe-Leon Lett play is the perfect example of why we love football, and what kind of athlete “Brian Moritz” would be.

“For me as a writer, the moment where the book came alive for me was when I started to think of it as a football game … every play is its own little universe in football.”

Links

Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments

Joe Blogs

The Poscast

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard (the best thing Joe’s read lately.)

Support

The Other 51 is and will always be free, but if you like my work (and the stuff I do at Sports Media Guy) and want to kick me a few dollars, you can do so here. I really appreciate your support.

Follow us on Instagram and Threads. We’re on the decaying corpse of Twitter, but only because for some reason sports media won’t abandon the site.

Subscribe:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify