Do you like college football and also work for a civilized company that gives you today off? Then consider watching the game here, where we keep all the books about how playing football leads to brain damage.
Do you like college football and also work for a civilized company that gives you today off? Then consider watching the game here, where we keep all the books about the exploitation of college football players. Kelly O

FYI: The Seattle Public Library is showing the Apple Cup game on the television today.

What it is: The Wazzu footballers face off against our hometown dawg pound in a battle for a trophy that sounds delicious.

Game time: 12:30 pm.

Reason: Good question. Let me check on that.

In a press release announcing this event, Valerie Wonder, community engagement manager for the Library, says that showing the game helps build community. "Every day, the Library brings people of all ages and backgrounds together for shared experiences, whether it is around education, culture, or a popular event like the Apple Cup," she said.

I got curious about what Wonder meant by "community." According to a Marist Poll, people who watch college football tend to be men who earn more than $50,000 per year and who tend to live in the Midwest, West, and South. My hunch is that a community of alums and college students already knows what the library is all about. So I called up Wonder to figure out why the library decided to show the game today.

Heyo, Valerie. So who comes to these things anyway? Is it very poor or homeless people?

I would say that 1/3 of the people who come are homeless or insecurely housed. I know that because they're people who I see in the library all the time.

There's also these power-users who like the library and who want to watch their football there, too. They're library users who are out in the neighborhoods and they want to go watch the Seahawks or the World Cup in a community space. They've got kids and we've got the space.

College football fans are different from NFL fans, right? Who do you expect to see this time?

I expect to see the same kind of people. There was a significant overlap between the people who came to the World Cup and Seahawks post season games. But we'll see if it's the same sort of broad spectrum. We're trying it out.

But. Why football?

The reason we do this isn't because we prioritize football over other things. I will be honest—showing the games did make me uncomfortable. But we drew such a diverse crowd when we showed the playoffs. I do refugee programming, and I'd never seen that level of socio-economic and ethnic diversity gathered together in one place. There's no other program that we do that draws that kind of diversity.

We're not going to show every game. We did post season because that's a moment of city pride and enthusiasm. We don't want to be all sports all the time, but we do look for opportunities to bring people together around a community event that people have extra enthusiasm about and that has a local connection.

Have you ever been? There's 275 seats. It's like you're there in the stadium but it's warm. Or like watching it in a bar—but not everyone can watch in bars.

Do people check out books at halftime or something? Or are they there just to watch the game?

People do check out books! We put out big displays of books and materials about football and sports. We're trying to promote it as a family program, so there's some kids' books, too. That stuff gets checked out.

By and large we want to facilitate reading and engagement with ideas and stories. But we want to do that in a way that people relate to, whether they're here for literary fiction or for sports.

But here's the thing I can't get over. Sure, the game of football showcases athletes operating at the peak of beauty, grit, and grace. However, it's also a brain-ending hellhole that exploits students players for the financial benefit of a very few. Do you see any irony in a library encouraging and enabling people to support football? Shouldn't you have books about concussions and stuff out there?

Libraries are about learning and knowledge and literature, of course, but we do a lot of work to encourage people to be thinking broadly and connecting with ideas and expanding their experiences. But we want to honor what peoples' interests are. If a huge swath of the community is interested in football, then we want to support that interest and link it back to literacy and ideas.

I agree that there should be value added by showing football at the library. Right now, the value added of people watching sports at the library is that they're sitting with this diverse set of community members, many of whom they don't spend time with in their day-to-day lives. But you're right that having some kind of dialogue or thought provoking discussion should be apart of that experience.