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Soccer Inspires Literature Lite
With the World Cup upon us, where is the great writing about the world’s most popular sport?
—The Globe and Mail, June 1, 2002
In the spring of 1998, near the middle of his five-year stay in Paris, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik threw himself into soccer. The World Cup had come to France and the one-time Montrealer — hardly a neophyte when it came to baseball, basketball or hockey — was determined to follow the month-long tournament from start to finish. He wanted, he explained, “to figure out what exactly it is that the world loves in a game that so many American sports fans will sit through only under compulsion.”
Ambivalence, however, soon set in. There was the dearth of goals, to be sure (“odd, hallucinatory matchups out of some fractured game of Risk”) or the hyperbole that passed for wisdom (“soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics — anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius”). “I had a hard time,” he explained, “making a case for soccer as spectacle.” Only as the tournament moved into its final stages, as the matches became increasingly tense, did he finally understand an English friend’s advice: To expect entertainment is to miss the point entirely.
“Soccer,” Gopnik concluded, “was not meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be experienced. The World Cup is a festival of fate — man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life.”
Four years on, as the World Cup begins this weekend in Japan and South Korea, I’ve returned to Gopnik’s Paris Journal. As the sports pages reintroduce us to soccer once again — to its stars and tactics, its ancient rivalries and arcane statistics — I’m reminded how opaque the game is to most North Americans, how foreign its nuances. Most of us just don’t get it.
So where, then, should we look for guidance? How might we pierce through the 90 minutes of, what Gopnik called, the tedium and injustice, to work up something even remotely resembling the passion billions around the world have for the game they call football?
To put it simply: Who should we read?
If, say, baseball has Ring Lardner or Bernard Malamud or W. P. Kinsella, shouldn’t it follow that soccer has its own body of literature, too? Writers who get under soccer’s skin, who weave the game into their art, who tell us about something more than merely fixtures and results.
“In my local library there are as many books about bridge, coarse fishing, and badminton as there are about football,” the English writer and editor Ian Hamilton once wrote. “Soccer is notoriously a sport without much of a literature: unlike cricket or rugby, it has few links with higher education. The soccer-intellectual tends to treat soccer as an off-duty self-indulgence, like old movies or detective novels — it’s strictly trivial pursuit.”
Strange as it may seem, soccer has only appeared in snippets in English literature over the past 100 years — in Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns novels, for example, with their descriptions of working class life in the Potteries (the towns surrounding Stoke-on-Trent) before the First World War; or in George Orwell’s essays, where the game is often mentioned with disdain, mainly for its destructive role in international affairs, reinforcing as it did the bitter hatreds bred by nationalism.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, soccer enters only briefly. But these few pages still contain some of the finest images of the game ever written. Here, while describing his days as a student at Cambridge, Nabokov recalls his affection for goalkeepers:
“In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.”
Albert Camus might just have been this crack goalie — he played, to much acclaim, for the University of Algiers — but even he only referred to soccer occasionally in his fiction.
Really, it wasn’t until the 20th century’s end that the British literati took a long look at the game. Then in the 1990s, soccer became legitimate: a novel subject, something daring.
It was Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, a splendid little memoir about his lifelong affair with London’s Arsenal soccer club, that probably got this subgenre off the ground. “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain and disruption it would bring with it.”
And so begins the archetypal soccer memoir. Part confessional, part coming-of-age story, we’re taken full throttle into the rhythms of a European soccer fan’s life: the minutiae of a culture that invades its narrator’s every waking moment.
With prose that rambles and clenches, Hornby’s story is sometimes base and often truly exhilarating. But Fever Pitch isn’t just about the game: As one critic suggested, it’s about everything from obsession and family to masculinity and class.
And it’s also about nostalgia. Hornby sets a laser beam to the trappings of his generation, Brits who came of age in the late 1970s and ’80s. (It isn’t a coincidence that his first three books, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, were made into hugely successful films.)
So, suddenly, soccer writing was fashionable. Martin Amis, who had once followed Elton John’s team, Watford, to China, periodically took on assignments for the Sunday papers. Paddy Doyle wrote a long essay on the Republic of Ireland’s run to the 1990 World Cup. Even the New Yorker wanted its own authentic soccer journalist, commissioning Salman Rushdie to write “The People’s Game”, an astonishingly over-the-top paean to his favorite English club, Tottenham Hotspur. (Littered with errors, the piece was excoriated in the soccer press.)
Soccer’s newfound respectability opened the way for more serious work, as well. Bill Buford, an American living in England, the former editor of Granta and now the literary editor of the New Yorker, wrote Among the Thugs, an extraordinary and deeply disturbing account of soccer’s hooligan culture.
No one had ever documented this world from the inside. And his first-hand descriptions of life on the terraces (the standing-room only sections that are now almost entirely abolished throughout Europe) are riveting: the ferocious racism, the interminable police escorts to and from games, the constant fear of violence.
Tim Parks, an Englishman living in Italy, who might be best known for his translation of Roberto Calasso’s Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, put soccer front and centre in a series of essays on relationships. While he, too, wrote his own Fever Pitch-styled memoir — the recently published A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and Goals — in Analogies, from Adultery and Other Diversions, he tried something very different.
“I want to establish the difference between fidelity and faith, in football and in love,” Parks declares, before using a series of episodes in a single season of his local team, Hellas Verona, as a metaphor for his friend Giorgio’s affair.
“It’s insulting,” Parks’s wife eventually told him, “the way you keep comparing Marina and Giorgio’s troubles to the football season. It’s ridiculous.”
“I only do that,” he explained, “because it’s the only way you’ll let me talk about football.”
While Parks and Buford may finally give soccer a place among grown-ups, the literature still veers away from anything majestic or overly ambitious. (Nothing, for instance, compares to Don DeLillo’s Underworld — where a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants is the starting point for an 800-page epic.)
In the end, however, the pleasures are rather simple, and often quite endearing: the exuberance, the wit, the uncomplicated emotion. Just try Fever Pitch: You’ll not only be drawn into the game, you might even want to pick sides.
Then again, the images that stick are more likely to conjure up a dim, damp November afternoon than an early summer evening in Pasadena or Mexico City of World Cups past. But who can resist the thought of Vladimir Nabokov minding a muddied net in the middle of an English winter.
“As with folded arms I leant back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as an exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.”