Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby
July 10th, 2006 @ 6:32 pmIt was almost too perfect that I chose to read Nick Hornby’s wonderful and engrossing football fan memoir Fever Pitch during World Cup month. Of course, it’s more than a football book, but I was really drawn to his frank admission of the very depths of his football obesession at the same time that the World Cup was reminding me how much fun and how intense it is to watch real top flight soccer. After a season of my own that was ultimately good, but at times beyond trying, it was nice to be reminded why I love soccer, to see impossible goals, to see the dramatic upsets and disappointments, the unexpected successes, the fact that, yes, on any given day, any team can beat any other team (sadly, the U.S. men’s squad never got that day), and all the ways the same result can mean radically different things to different teams.
I finished the book a few hours after Grosso sent the winning PK past Barthez into the back of the net. (At kickoff, Matt asked whether Barthez was “an adventure in goal,” the trite, by the end of it all, expression used for every keeper with a history of brilliant stupidity and stupid brilliance, which seemed to account for fully half the goalies there.) Excellent timing and closure, but now I’m ready to go into the backyard every night to kick around.
The writing is great. I can’t say much more about that. His good rep is well-deserved and I feel that I’ve been properly introduced and can go one to one day read High Fidelity, About a Boy, and all the rest. So on to the content.
It’s hard not to admire, and perhaps envy a little bit, Hornby’s obsession with football. I can think of nothing that I have been so devoted to for even close to the length of time chronicled and I’m only a few years younger than he was at the writing of the book. There are maybe obsessions that have been intense, but brief, flaming out when the quality declined, I got tired of waiting for the next big thing that would justify my affinity, or I inexplicably relocated the object from full-blown obsession to ordinary fandom - The Beatles, Cal Ice Hockey, Chris Noth, possibly soon Pete Yorn. To be able to count on one hand the number of games missed in the relevant lifetime is more admirable than lamentable. However, the book fairly recognizes the difficulty of cultivating such a devotion anew in this day and age. For one thing, even if I lived in London, I probably couldn’t afford to see every home game of my favorite team for the next couple of decades.
And there has been no comparable opportunity to get obsessed stateside. Once I was old enough to be aware, full professional soccer was non-existent in this country until I was in college, car-less and generally limited on funds, and that the closest team was in San Jose - and unfortunately named (seriously, the Clash with that crab-like logo?) - didn’t help either. Sure, I could have fixated on the Cal soccer teams - the oft nationally ranked women or the men. I did attend a number of Cal men’s games my freshman year for many reasons, love of soccer being only a tangential motivation for a 17 year old, but there was always an excuse not to go - they played up the hill at the rugby field, I could never get anyone to go with me, my idiot friend on the team quit, etc.
But still, I identified with Hornby on so many levels. For example, his fairly arbitrary reasons for being an Arsenal fan - they were the first team he ever went to see. Aston Villa is my favorite English Premier League team because the founder of the Oakland Soccer Club chose Villa’s colors as the OSC’s and, consequently, they were the first professional soccer team I ever heard of. That’s not much of reason, hardly defensible, but that was the reason.
The book is also fascinating because it reflects a soccer world I don’t really know. I’ve been to one measly MLS game, watching the Earthquakes beat the Galaxy last season before the MLS proved it wasn’t really interested in keeping soccer in the Bay Area. But an Arsenal game, any Arsenal game, is clearly another world (even with the new luxury apartments at Highbury), with the only thing in common being the number of players and the presence of the goals. The fans, the game, the feeling, the quality, all must be different animals entirely. Further, I was appropriately troubled by how pervasive the hooliganism and the racism that echoed stories from Foer’s book - and I’m still curious about what motivates people to behave so terribly just because they’ve surrounded the pitch. And Hornby’s perspective and description of soccer tragedies and the almost inappropriate way the game just goes on are so well put.
A last bit of curiosity is the fact that for most of the book, the Arsenal Hornby describes is hardly the Arsenal I know. I won’t pretend to be a fully-engaged Premier League fan: I get the Aston Villa newsletter, which I’m more likely to delete than read; I check the tables every few months; I’ll watch a game on Fox Soccer Channel, but it’s not appointment television; and that’s the extent of it. (Notably, I probably have a much better idea of what’s going on in English pro soccer than the MLS. I suppose I’m part of the American soccer problem.) The Arsenal I know is one of the consistently good teams. They were entering this era toward the tail end of the book, in the early 90s, right before I would have started paying attention, but they had been so dismal, so good enough to avoid relegation, but not good enough to threaten to win almost anything for most of his recollection. But now, they are a powerhouse, one of the first teams I knew after Aston Villa, probably only behind Man. U. Heck, they were in the UEFA Cup in May versus Barcelona - sure they lost, but it’s an accomplishment, and I rolled into the World Cup thinking about how I had just seen the world class efforts of Ashley Cole and Thierry Henry. I find it interesting and ironic how much the club’s success has mirrored his own. He does have some thoughts on the subject on how football has changed since the book.
Next up - Jodi Picoult’s Harvesting the Heart. Picoult was recommended to me by a very nice girl I used to see on the bus who was getting her MFA in writing who I talked about books with a couple of times. I’m also starting Ozma of Oz.
