Yes, the ball is round, but all the rest is wrong

In the decade or so since it first appeared, as unexpected as an English World Cup victory, Nick Hornby’s peculiar, touching, and obsessive “Fever Pitch” has established itself as part of Britain’s pop-cultural canon, a bestselling book that wowed both snooty critics and a legion of fans rarely seen studying a page without pictures. Just as remarkably, it was a memoir centered on football that won over those who knew little, and cared less, about a game of 90 minutes devoted to the kicking of a small round ball.Round ball? Ah yes, Mr. Hornby was writing about what we Brits call “football” – something never, ever, to be confused with the ponderous spectacle known internationally, and with some disdain, as “American football.” Nor, for that matter, should it be muddled up with the effete “soccer” played in the United States. That’s a genteel game favored by high school girls and Title IX vigilantes, a pastime of great importance to the moms who are this country’s most annoying political demographic, but which has had little to offer the rest of us since the sad moment Brandi Chastain pulled her shirt back on.A few years ago, Mr. Hornby adapted his book for a British movie version of “Fever Pitch” (1997) transforming his oddball chronicle into a routinely soapy romance with the home team playing the role of the Other Woman (a theme which he dealt with more effectively in “High Fidelity,” with old records, his other obsession, standing in for the Gunners). Now it has been again adapted, this time by the Farrelly brothers, into a disappointing film about, of all things, baseball.Don’t waste your time with either of these movies: Read the book.The sport Mr. Hornby describes so well is not the glossy, celebrity-drenched “beautiful game” of English myth and Latin reality, but something altogether more dreary – something very specific, mercifully, to its awful era and depressing place, the disheartening, despondent England of 20 or 30 years ago. The games were dull, uninspired, and bloody, 11-a-side recreations of the battle of the Somme, marked, only (to borrow Mr. Hornby’s phrase) by “dingy competence.” If “you want entertainment,” snarled one well-known coach, “go and watch clowns.”This was a time long, long before David Beckham, gentrification, and all-seater stadiums. It is a time remembered best with the help of driving rain, damp discomfort, and the smell of cigarettes and stale beer, a time when the game was dominated by characters like Arsenal’s burly and menacing Charlie George, a creature whose very existence was proof that Neanderthal Man had survived into modern times. Mr. George was legendary, Mr. Hornby explains, for his inarticulacy, lack of savvy in dealing with the press, and, above all, the way in which the player’s “long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies.” No Posh for you, mate.Back then, attending the Saturday afternoon footie, a blue-collar staple stretching back for a century, was an old rite rapidly turning rancid, marked by squalid, dangerously cramped stadiums, declining attendance and the constant threat of punch-ups, and worse, between warring fans. In the 1970s the violence was bad enough, but in the decade that followed “it was,” Mr. Hornby wrote, “less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons … things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking out of his nose.”Under the circumstances, it’s a relief to report that, while its distinctly local flavor means that “Fever Pitch” is a book that will always be a minority taste in the United States, there’s much more to it than reminiscences of a North London team whose exploits, however beautifully retold, are unlikely to compete with the fall of Troy as a saga with staying power. “Fever Pitch” is as much the self-mocking story of one man’s obsession as it is a chronicle of games long gone: “With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend … promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the … ambulance men; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equalizer.”If you are contemplating those words and thinking Mr. Hornby demonstrated an admirable sense of the right priorities, “Fever Pitch” is the book for you, and even more so for those understanding enough to be your friends. The stats-crazed, emotional roller-coaster, monomaniacal mind of the madder type of sports fan has rarely, if ever, been better described or, for that matter, more seductively. Following its publication, a startled nation suddenly found itself engulfed by copycat football nerds – boring, but essentially benign, and rarely associated with things with spikes.But it is as autobiography that “Fever Pitch” really excels. Mr. Hornby was introduced to the game by his father, desperate to find something, anything, he could share with a young son hurt and angered by dad’s departure from the family home. And it worked: “Saturday afternoons in North London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about … and the days had a structure, a routine,” Mr. Hornby wrote. “The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn; the Gunners’ Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home.” Supporting Arsenal (“the Gunners”) became the means by which the boy finds himself and, finally, gradually, rather belatedly, comes of age, a story Hornby tells in a manner that is distinctively his own.Mr. Hornby’s own film adaptation was an agreeable enough effort, but it never won the audience of the original. To understand why, just compare the movie’s conventionally happy conclusion with the book’s final paragraph: “Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold. … All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me.”You don’t get better than that.

Yes, the ball is round, but all the rest is wrong

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