Gen Z Punts On the NFL
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Illustration by Pete Ryan
For reasons that are not immediately apparent, the kid a few seats down the row from us is trying to drink a can of Four Loko through one of the eyeholes of the pillowcase he’s wearing over his head, and it’s going about as well as you might expect. After lavishly splashing his homemade balaclava with the high-octane sugarbooze, our neighbor in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center is trying to scoot the fabric around so that his mouth is at least marginally closer to one of the two apertures. As the contraband beverage finds its target, the girl next to him takes a mid-swig selfie of the two of them with her iPhone and, in the owl-inflected argot of her generation, lets out a little “woot!” before returning her gaze back to the palmed screen.
It’s the second NFL Sunday of the 2017 season, and as much as I’m sort of mentally scrolling through a list of other places I’d rather be right now, I’ve committed to sticking out this live eSports thing. Joining your perplexed, increasingly cranky correspondent at the ESL One New York playoff event in Brooklyn are a couple of bemused Gen Z types who are at that age (18 and 19 years old) when the default reaction to any anomalous situation is to pretty much just bombard it with undiluted ridicule.
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