Fever Pitch: Ballfieber - Die Geschichte eines Fans

És un relat autobiogràfic de la relació que te l’autor amb el futbol, i essencialment amb l’Arsenal, des dels 13 anys i durant més de 20 temporades. Una persona que viu pel futbol, esclau del calendari de partits, un maniàtic de les dades, que deixa d’anar a casaments o festes si coincideix que juga l’Arsenal. Narrat des del seu punt de vista, sincer i no mancat d’humor. Es conscient de la irracionalitat del seu comportament, però no pot evitar-ho. El gaudiran molt els aficionats del futbols i la resta també per que està molt ben escrit, entretingut i de pas entendran una mica el comportament a vegades poc racional dels que sí els agrada

Ovaj tekst ne mogu drugačije da čitam nego kao autoironiju koja govori o jednoj čovjekovoj osobini – biti ovisan o gluposti. Ovdje se mogu primijeniti na djelu one Borgesove riječi „da je fudbal estetski ogavan“ odn. „da je to najveći zločin Engleske“, što u nizu primjera Hornby i ocrtava, ali ni u jednom momentu ne isključujući sebe iz cijele te priče, nego je, on, kao pripovjedač u prvom licu, sastavni dio svega toga: „Ali eto šta je fudbal učinio meni. Pretvorio sam se u nekog ko ne bi pomogao ni kada bi moja djevojka počela da se porađa u nemogućem trenutku (često sam se pitao šta bi se desilo ako bi trebalo da postanem otac onog dana kada Arsenal igra u finalu kupa); a tokom utakmice ja sam jedanaestogodišnjak. Kada sam opisao fudbal kao sredstvo za usporavanje razvoja, mislio sam upravo na to.“

Tras leer este libro hace ya 20 años, aún sigo pensando en Nick Hornby cada vez que el Arsenal aparece por la tele. NH nos cuenta su historia de amor con el club (el Arsenal es un histórico del fútbol inglés, con base en Londres), empezando, como suele ser habitual, en su más tierna infancia yendo al estadio acompañando a su padre. Consigue hacernos un retrato de un hooligan ilustrado, alguien cuyas alegrías y tristezas están ligadas a un equipo pero que es una persona normal, después de todo. Nos cuenta su vida y la liga a la historia del club, de manera similar a lo que hace en 31 canciones, en la que imbrica su vida con las canciones que le sirvieron de banda sonora.
Al final es un relato magníficamente escrito, sobre un señor que es mucho más forofo que yo pero al que puedo perfectamente comprender. Muy, muy recomendable.

Good insight into the strange world of being obsessed with something you have zero control over. I'm as guilty as anyone. Slightly dated now but still entertaining.

The cover of the edition I have is quite slick.

It 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.

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. 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.

Further, 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. 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. I find it interesting and ironic how much the club’s success has mirrored his own. In an afterword, he does have some thoughts on the subject on how football has changed since the book.

I first discovered 'Fever Pitch' when I first discovered Nick Hornby years back - we read one of his novels for book club. I got it at that time and have been waiting for the right time to read it. Last week when I was thinking of which book to read next, 'Fever Pitch' leapt at me. I thought it was the perfect time to read it, with the World Cup on.

'Fever Pitch' is Nick Hornby's account of his life as a football fan. In the book, he talks about how his father took him to his first football match when he was around eleven years old and how by the end of the evening he had fallen in love with the game. The football team he fell in love with was Arsenal and in most of the rest of the book he talks about Arsenal's ups and downs over the next twenty five years, how he was part of it as a fan, how his life as an Arsenal fan was entwined with his life outside football and how during this same period he became a teenager, graduated from high school, went to college, had a girlfriend for the first time, how football affected his relationship with his mother, father, stepmother and half brother. He also talks about what it means to be a loyal obsessive fan of a particular team. Hornby also explores the changes that have occurred in football from the time he started watching the game till the time he wrote this book. He also talks about many of Arsenal's important matches and some matches involving other English clubs. The whole book is structured as a compilation of accounts of a series of matches through which Hornby explores the above themes.

I loved 'Fever Pitch'. It is Nick Hornby's love letter to football, and his love for the game shines through in every page. There are beautiful lines and passages in every page which delight and warm one's heart. My highlighting pen didn't stop working. Football is not my favourite sport - cricket and tennis are. I follow football only during the quadrennial World Cup. But while reading this book, I almost wished I was a football fan, an obsessive one. Though Hornby mostly talks about players that I haven't heard about (the only known names I encountered were Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst, George Best, Paul Gascoigne, Gary Linekar, Pele, Johann Cruyff) - as the book covers mostly English club football from 1968 to 1992 - the descriptions of those times, the players and the matches was so beautiful and vivid, that they transported me to those times and made me feel that I was watching the scenes that Hornby was describing. When Hornby gushes about Liam Broady, I felt that I was there in the Highbury stadium watching Broady playing for Arsenal, making beautiful moves in an important match. Hornby's humour shines through in every page and there were many passages which made me smile and laugh. I wish I had read this book when I was younger. I would have become a lifelong football fan.

'Fever Pitch' is fan's beautiful ode to football. It is the most charming, passionate book in football that I have ever read. Maybe, not even football. It is probably one of the most passionate accounts of any sport ever written by a fan. It is a book I will be reading again. If you are a football fan, this is a must-read.

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.



"Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal really haven't had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us : passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflated bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football's prettiest accessory (a good player could pass to a team-mate we hadn't seen, or find an angle we wouldn't have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefore stopped bothering to produce any players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths."

"Like everyone, I have lamented long and loud the deficiencies of the English game, and the permanently depressing ugliness of the football that our national team plays, but really, deep down, this is pub-speak, and not much more. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear : it misses the point somehow, and this is what Alan Durban understood : that football is an alternative universe, as serious and as stressful as work, with the same worries and hopes and disappointments and occasional elations. I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don't go for entertainment, and when I look around me on a Saturday and see those panicky, glum faces, I see that others feel the same. For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle : you presume it happens, but you are not in a position to appreciate it. Sports journalists and armchair Corinthians are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do - but in another way they know much, much less."

"One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this : it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are miss the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing - not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team's fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps of Wembley stadium to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like that is not a celebration of others' good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realize this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nevertheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham, and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it."



Have you read 'Fever Pitch'? What do you think about it?

OK, OK, it took me five months to read this book. Wait, I can explain.

I picked up a used copy for a buck at a library book sale. I started reading it during the last couple of weeks of my employment at the company where I'd worked for 19 years. So, it was a pretty heavy time. And during that last week.... I lost the book. Could not find it anywhere. Wasn't at the office; I'd packed up the office. But it wasn't at home. Did I leave it somewhere? That would be very unlike me. It would have to turn up. Or I could buy another copy? That seemed wrong; I'd only paid a dollar for it. But more importantly, it was, I don't know, symbolic. This was a major period of change for me and I want my mommy, uh, I mean, my BOOK.

A week later, it turned up in the apartment. Whew. We need some stability in our lives, after all.

And then, well, I had plenty of time to read, right? With the not-having-a-regular-job and all. I'm like Burgess Meredith on the Twilight Zone. Except, malaise was my broken glasses. Malaise and no routine. Because I would read a lot waiting for the train on my commute. And on the train. And now I wasn't taking the train so much.

And then a friend asked me to read his book, so that took precedence. And then I wanted to review a book for a friend's website so I read that. And then I was editing a book so I read that....

And maybe just maybe, Dr. Freud, part of me didn't want to finish Fever Pitch, as it was a connection to the old place.

Well... I finished it! In the New York Department of Labor office, for those who enjoy irony.

Oh, have I not reviewed the book yet? OK, there's a little more backstory required, sorry.

High Fidelity changed my life. Top 5 all-time books, you might say. My friend Nancy gave me a copy when I was fairly down in the dumps and I will always appreciate that gesture.

So of course I read About a Boy. And it... wasn't as good. It was good, just not... as good.

And I meant to read How to be Good but... didn't. Songbook, I read Songbook, another gift, that was solid, but didn't capture the High Fidelity magic. Juliet, Naked--that sounded like it might be a "return to form." But, I didn't get around to it either. So when I saw that copy of Fever Pitch, I snapped it up. Always meant to read that one. It would be like going back to an early album by a favorite musician who's now lost a step or two. Back to the hungry, early, passionate days.

I hadn't seen the Fever Pitch movie. The High Fidelity movie was terrific, I thought. (A very good job of Americanizing the story, in my opinion.) About a Boy was... eh. But Fever Pitch I was not going to see. Why? It was about the Red Sox! I hate the Red Sox. I'm not going to read a see a movie about them. (Though I did read John Updike's Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, and it was absolutely perfect.)

Which is why the Fever Pitch book was ideal. It's not about the Red Sox. It's about Arsenal and soccer. Perfect! I mean, I like soccer--played it from 2nd through 7th grades. And i follow it a little. But... I don't have a rooting interest. So I could just enjoy the book for what it is. The equivalent of me watching a game between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros.

And it is a really good book. Not quite High Fidelity good, but, you can see it. The obsessive nature. The over-thinking. The sensitivity. The humor. The format is very clever: each "chapter" is a different game, excuse me, match, and we learn where he was (literally, but also, in his life). So there's family and school and lovers and jobs and triumphs and failures and celebrations and tragedies. And the game is always there for him. There's a brief window where he thinks the game will no longer be so important to him but--to our relief--it quickly passes.

Hornby really provides great insight into what it means to be a fan. (A much better look than that Joe Queenan thing I read many years back.) And along the way makes some great points, about economic classes, racism, hooliganism, fan safety, incorporating a lover into your obsessions, and more. Saddam Hussein even makes an appearance. We see Hornby go from boy to man, and the book ends with him just on the cusp of traditional "adulthood." (By the 1996 paperback edition I was reading of the 1992 book, he had a wife and a son.) I wonder how the last 20 years have gone. I like to think he's still at all the home matches, even if it's not at Highbury.