One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War.
One reason I won't compromise is because I believe honesty helps you win over the long haul. You can win a game tomorrow and lose a team. You can lose a game tomorrow and win a football team.
Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers, which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject. So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn't expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.
It's not like I had to throw the football and deal with that as well. It was more disheartening, to be honest with you, just to kind of see how the National Football League really is.
The way to be successful is through preparation. It doesn't just happen. You don't wake up one day and discover you're a lawyer any more than you wake up as a pro football player. It takes time.