Last year’s Super Bowl netted nearly 163 million viewers. Has football taken the place of baseball as America’s favourite pastime?

There’s no question. The interest is greater and the sport fits the personality of the United States better than the lazy pastoral aspect of baseball. TV has embraced the brutal elegance of football. The replay and slow motion effects make the game mesmerising to watch. So I’d say, “Absolutely!” It’s replaced every other sport as America’s favourite pastime – soccer never came close; boxing used to be a big deal, and basketball remains important, but it’s nothing like football.

You played college football and you’ve written about the sport for nearly 40 years. How, specifically, does the sport suit the personality of the United States?

Football entails being aggressive, being independent and taking what you want within the rules. The United States was formed by intrepid individuals who came to stake a claim. They didn’t wait for a land grant. And, like football, there’s a lot of violence in the United States. We have more guns than anywhere in the world and a huge part of the reason why is that we don’t want to be controllable, certainly not by government. Americans like to live right up to the edge of our laws. It’s the same with football – a lot of violence is within every person on the field, playing up to the edge of the rules.

In football, beauty, violence and sex are mixed. The game is beautiful to watch in replay – there is violence in almost every play and then they cut to half-naked dancing girls shaking pom-poms. It’s a uniquely American television spectacle.

Some of our readers won’t be initiated in the pleasures of football – can you just brief us on them? What is the essence of the game, what makes it so interesting to so many people?

It’s all about aggression – that’s the essence of football. If there were no rules these guys would just kill each other. Two teams face each other on the line of scrimmage and try to move into their opponents’ territory. It’s like a battlefront – trench warfare without weapons. All the rules – offside, penalties, motion rules and passing rules – make it complex but the essence of it is very simple: We’re going to go as far as we can toward a goal and you’re trying to stop us. It’s about taking the ball or territory however it has to be done and making it yours as you move up and down the field. In soccer and hockey the line of scrimmage is less precise. In football you can score at any time, through an interception or fumble. I don’t think there’s another sport like it.

American football has been compared to chess on a playing field. Please clarify the comparison.

Chess is a board game, but it’s clearly one of aggression like football. Dumb aggression doesn’t work in chess and it doesn’t work in football. In chess many moves invite mistakes from opponents and in football many plays are based on anticipating an overly aggressive response from the other team. In both the game and the sport, you plot 10 plays ahead and wait for one false move to open up a king for checkmate or the field for a deep long pass. In both games you’re always looking to take someone out, whether it’s your opponent’s knight or your opposing team’s running back. They are extremely analogous, except in football the violence is real and in chess it’s make-believe.