In addition to trying to go undefeated, the ‘72 Miami Dolphins were trying to become the first NFL team with 2 1000-yard rushers. Larry Csonka was well past that mark by the last game of the regular season but Mercury Morris was short. Miami played the Colts and I don’t know how many yards Morris needed going into that game. But when it was done, Morris officially ended up with 991 yards — 9 short of the mark.

Then the Dolphins convinced the NFL to review a play in which Morris lost 9 yards, and they concluded it was a dropped lateral instead of a rushing attempt, so the League adjusted his yardage total to exactly 1000 for the season. The Dolphins now had the distinction of 2 1000-yard rushers. Yet the League never went through all the Atlanta games to see if Dave Hampton had another 5 yeards out there somewhere that could also put him at the 1000 mark. Why not? I always figured that Morris and the Dolphins were just bigger news back then than Dave Hampton and Atlanta.

I had long forgotten that Hampton eventually cracked 1000 yards — Morris never did again. Good to know this story ended well.

I find the idea that Chuck Klosterman could be less pretentious than I would expect to be odd. In his writings he consistently depicts himself as a barely functioning, adult-only-by-virtue-of-age and his writing aesthetic is almost entirely based on a wholehearted embrace of the anti-cool.

He wrote an entire book attempting (and failing) to justify his pre-teen love of Motley Crue, for god’s sake. I mean a pre-teen love of Motley Crue is both both completely indefensible and entirely understandable. Pre-to early-teens are idiots, through-and-through hormone addled messes of taste, choice and judgement that would be entirely unforgivable in people of any other age. If you ever want a glimpse of what humanity would look like in the absence of all laws and social restraints, watch a batch of unsupervised 12-15 -year-olds. After an hour or two you’ll be praying for the Utopian vision of Lord of the Flies.

I’ve read three of Klosterman’s books, all three pretty much in one sitting. I disagree with him about almost everything, yet I find him almost compulsively readable. I can’t think of another writer about whom I can say the same. There’s a gift there, I think.

I guess, weirdly enough, that I would recommend any and all of Klosterman’s books and would immediately dismiss any argument that relies on one of this points. I’m pretty sure that relates to the point at hand, although I can no longer remember how.