via Mike McClure
Every great interviewer has one that got away. For best-selling author Chuck Klosterman, it was a 20-minute phone call with Tom Brady, conducted while the most decorated quarterback in NFL history drove himself to practice, at the exact moment America wanted to know what he knew about some suspiciously soft footballs.
Klosterman is the author of Football and the newly released Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music Rock, now available on Amazon and wherever you buy books. The writer and culture critic sat down with Mike McClure for a conversation that wandered from Paul Thomas Anderson to the Beatles’ back catalog.
The stretch that’ll get people talking came when McClure brought up Brady, and Klosterman calmly walked through one of his stranger interviews for GQ in 2015. Back when this particular interview came out, we here at BroBible questioned GQ’s glazing of Brady at the time (had he not been glazed enough?), writing “GQ Names Tom Brady ‘Man Of The Year’ And Can Someone Please Tell Me Why?“
The Incredible Shrinking Access
Anyone who has chased a celebrity profile knows how this goes. You start with an invitation to the house and end up riding along in someone’s commute.
“I was supposed to go to his house, and that fell through,” Klosterman said. “And I was supposed to see him in Boston, and that fell through. And then it finally just came down that I was going to be with him on the phone for, I think, 20 minutes while he drove to practice.”
Twenty minutes is barely enough time to get through the weather. Klosterman knew he had to spend it wisely.
“I’m Cutting Right to This”
The context of this particular conversation is crucial. Deflategate grew out of the January 2015 AFC Championship Game against the Colts, and whether Brady knew anything about deflated balls was the only question anyone cared about.
“It was when Deflategate was still really in the news,” Klosterman recalled. “I asked him a few other questions, and I’m like, I’m cutting right to this. And he’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to answer that. I can’t answer it for legal reasons.’”
The Murder Analogy
This is where Klosterman’s mind goes to work, and it’s a delight to watch.
“Well, you can’t answer it for legal reasons if there’s anything that you are hiding,” he said. “If someone accuses you of murder and a journalist comes up to you and says, ‘Did you kill your wife?’ you don’t have to go, ‘I can’t say anything.’ You can say, ‘No, I didn’t do it.’”
He had walked in expecting the easy denial, which would have opened the door to the interesting part of the story.
“All I needed him to do, and what I expected him to do, was to say, ‘I had nothing to do with this. This is crazy,’” Klosterman said. “And that would have led to a different conversation about how this happened, why this happened.”
Brady, a man who has spent 25 years reading defenses before the snap, saw that one coming and declined to take it.
“Not Really a Successful Interview”
From there, the call circled the drain.
“I just assumed he would say no when I said, were you involved with this? But he wouldn’t do that,” Klosterman said. “And then it just sort of became this escalating, kind of repetitive thing. Not really a successful interview. I wouldn’t put that among the most successful interviews of my life, but that’s what happened.”
McClure pointed out that the piece itself turned out great, which is the dirty secret of magazine writing. Sometimes the wall you hit makes for a better story than the door you were hoping to walk through.
The Move He’d Use Today
Klosterman has since developed a tactic for subjects who arrive with their guard up, and he says it worked beautifully on Kobe Bryant. He lays out the terms on the front end.
“We’re not going to have a relationship beyond this conversation,” he explained. “We are not going to become friends. I’m not going to pretend that we are. I want to ask you things that I’m legitimately interested in, and I’m just going to ask you them. And of course, you don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but we both know why we’re here.”
His read is that the right kind of star respects the honesty. “I think that makes them take you more seriously. It certainly did with Kobe Bryant.”
Would it have worked on Brady? We’ll never know. Klosterman figures it would work on Tom Cruise, whom he’d happily ask about Scientology, though that’s a story for the full video.
Grading Brady the Broadcaster
For the record, Klosterman holds no grudge. He’s actually bullish on Brady’s second career in the booth, especially when TB12 lets his inner film nerd out. He pointed to a recent clip where Brady explained why Randy Moss broke the usual rules for deep throws.
“He is extraordinarily good, I feel, in podcast clips,” Klosterman said. “If he decides that what he cares about is being an analyst and being a great analyst, he will be good. He will put the time in and do it.”
His one caveat is the one plenty of NFL fans share. “I think the fact that he’s a part owner of the Raiders is the most kind of complicated part of this.”
Watch Chuck Klosterman’s full conversation with Mike McClure below or on the BroBible YouTube. It also including his theory on why LeBron James still can’t be the GOAT. Klosterman’s books Football and Rock* are available now wherever books are sold.