Ah, the National Football League in this year's Super Bowl, featuring the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Guaranteed to draw a big audience on TV and one crowd with a lot at stake in the outcome, inmates at Sing

Sing Prison on the Hudson River 30 miles north of New York City. John J. Lennon has written about that

for Sports Illustrated, and he's on the phone now from the same tier inside Sing Sing, where he does

his podcast. This is a collect call from Sing Sing.

Hi, John. Welcome to my podcast.

Hi, Warren. Thanks for having me.

This is all about escape.

It is. I think anybody that, or most people that watch football, you know, come the weekend,

whether they're in a fantasy league or even they put a couple bucks on a parlay bet, say, and draft kings, you know, look, they're just looking to escape and just get away from the monotony. Same in prison.

Okay, so escape is a word with a lot of different meanings for different people.

I have to tell our listeners, John is a 43-year-old inmate at Sing Sing.

He's been doing time for murder and selling drugs since he was 24.

That was 19 years ago.

He has 10 more years to go.

He also contributes to Esquire Magazine and the Marshall Project. He's written for the Washington

Post magazine, The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. And for that

Super Bowl issue of Sports Illustrated, he wrote the piece I talked about, which is called

Just Go to NFL.com Real Quick. John, what does real quick mean?

I mean, that was just a quote.

I was quoting one of my characters.

He's on the phone, sort of getting the stats for his fantasy football league.

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