For Christmas, Michal gave me the book Bloody Confused! A
Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer by Chuck Culpepper. It is
about just that; an American sportswriter is fed up and jaded by
American sports culture. Having spent most of his life around sports,
but not really as a fan because it was work, he was tired of owners and
managers and teams and athletes and all of it. So, his proposed solution
was to go to England and try and learn about the largest league in the
world, the Premiership. So begins his journey from ignorance to mild
understanding.
It is incredibly well written and very funny. The insight,
as an American keenly interested in the Premier league, was really
interesting and his honestly about his complete cluelessness was
endeering. He moved to London hoping to find a team to support and after
some shopping around, decided on Portsmouth (beginning his fandom as
they struggled for survival in the end of the 2006 season and setting
the book throughout the next year through Portsmouth's best Premiership
season on record (2006-2007)). He recalls various matches (mostly at
Fratton Park although he dedicates quite a bit to insights on being an
away fan) and chronicles his transformation into a true supporter. He is
even accepted throughout the season by Fratton Park regulars who at the
end of the season present him with a gift. There were just so many
great snippets in this book that I wanted to share some of them here.
First, just random smatterings of humour throughout:
About the Brit's creative use of profanity:
"I have never--never-- heard the English word f--- used in so many
creative forms, despite prior residence in New York, despite spending an
inordinate chunk of life near sports fans, and despite seeing almost
every Martin Scorsese film. At Newcastle that day I heard it as a noun,
verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, pejorative,
subjunctive, and maybe even a gerund."
About American's knowledge of Newcastle:
"Furthermore, some unfortunate Americans might've seen Goal!, the
movie about an American who reaches the United States the traditional
way--by running across from Mexico in the middle of the night so that
his family can provide cheap labor to American businesses and lawn
owners-- then gets discovered in Los Angeles and winds up playing for
Newcastle. This movie leads us to beleive that a soccer player's life of
rampant sex and partying somehow represents an unwise tack. Our hero
winds up scoring a goal on a free kick, but its unclear whether he wins a
trophy for Newcastle because the creators of the movie didn't want to
stretch the truth any further than they already had. They did make a
sequel."
In reference to watching Portsmouth fans celebrating their current position in 8th place:
"That's what I learned about myself at that moment: having emerged
from a U.S. birth canal, I'm simply not conditioned to celebrate eigth
place, especially after a chance to vault into sixth fails to lend my
side even the slightest apparent inspiration. What's that old poll
result about American children who'd finish, say, tenth in the world on a
math test but when asked where they suspected their country would
finish, always answered, "first"? I had come along in that. We emerge
from the womb with a pancreas, a spleen, and a built in arrogance. We
simply don't handle eighth all that well, which might help explain why
we don't live as long as do Britons.
About the reactiong in the US when our national team loses:
"When we lose at a game we invented--example: basketball, 2004
Athens Olympics semi-final to Argentina-- we often just opt for some
excuse (didn't bring our best players) and get on with it. Or if we lose
at a game of privilege we ought to dominate--example: Ryder Cup,
repeatedly-- we just turn our attention to something else, usually the
NFL, where we'll never lose, mostly because almost nobody else actually
plays the game."
About the one-goal-lead:
"the terrible strain felt when you care about a match and you hold a
one-goal lead through almost its entirety. In all of sport, there might
not be another routine scenario so nerve-shredding"
About money in football. He was talking about Chelsea (whom he
refered to as ChelseaTheyBoughtTheirTitle) but it applies to City today:
"The system allows four or five clubs to outspend the others, then
pretend they've achieved something when they finish in the top four...
Around and around and around we go, we sports people, paying attention
to sports and paying for sports and even writing about sports, thus
generation money, then reeling from that dulling sense that comes from
the proliferation of...money."
About the agony of late equalizers: "An equalizer in the 70-75
range would smart; an equalizer in the 75-80 range would sting a bit; an
equalizer in the 80-85 range would sting for real; and an equalizer in
the 85-93 range could make you wonder why you continue to put yourself
through this kind of thing."
About extra time: "What a cruel concept is this soccer. Then, just
when you might exhale, there 's added time, the slowest time in life,
far slower than even the five minutes before the cinema lights dim, far
slower than the unbearable time it takes to unload all the rows in front
of you on an airplane, far slower than church, even while clearly its
own form of church."
About drinking. I learned this one was true very early in my time
in England: "A pint, when translated into England's England, means
"pints""
Going from London to Portsmouth many weekends (and
travelling to several other stadiums for various matches), Culpepper
spent a lot of time on trains and had some interesting observations
about them. He also wrote some brilliant stuff about the horror that is
the Rail Replacement service.
"We Americans tend to consider trains exotic. We don't ride them
much because we inhabit a gigantic country and because train rides
require us to be with other people when we'd much prefer to be alone in
our cars stuck in traffic and gorgin on oil products and getting
infuriated at the uninformed rants of on of our cast collection of dim
bulbs to whom we've given talk-radio shows."
"I'd come to recognize the true skylines of England, for they were
built not by architects and eastern European construction workers but by
drinkers. The skylines of England appear on the tables of trains, and
they're often impressive. THere'll be a smatter of empty beer cars,
forming the veritable Greenwich Village of the skyline, the smaller
"buildings." There might be some taller beer bottles, say, an overgrown
green Carlsberg can here or there, forming the less ostentatious part of
midtown Manhattan. Then the big honchos, the empty wine bottles, the
Chrystler buildings, the Empire State buildings. All together, these
cans and bottles will merge on a table, especially late in the ride, a
Hong Kong of consumption. I have seen these configurations on many a
train, but never so many as on a train on a Saturday night."
"I once viewed trains as metallic vessels that transported people
and luggage, but during the course of my Premiership wandering, I came
to view trains as living, respirating agents of the soccer experience,
almost as important as strikers or referees... To ride a train through
England on a Saturday or Sunday can be to drink in a soccer day in the
entire country, even while often drinking in other properties as well.
On trains, you can hear people giving scores from other matches,
discussing the events of other matches, stating their relegation fears
and maybe even arguing."
He had lots of little gems about players and managers. Some of the best were:
Neil Warnock: "They had a manager, Neil Warnock, whose filter
between brain and mouth either had eroded or had come congenitally thin
from the get-go. Impolitic thoughts went straight from the mind into the
TV microphone and onto the page, and in the American sportswriting
business, we have two wods for managers like him: "thank" and "you."
Steven Gerrard in the FA Cup final: "West Ham fans, in some cases,
probably celebrated winning the FA Cup, what with a 3-2 lead in the
ninetieth minute before Liverpool's Steven Gerrard sent a heat-seeking
device from about central Dublin into the left side of the net."
David James: "Our wacky, tackling goalkeeper, so nattily coiffed for such a mindless ruffian."
Mourinho vs Fergie:
"As an added backdrop, the wondrous but chatty Chelsea manager,
Mourinho, and Sir Alex Ferguson had some little back-and-forth snit-fit
going, a reminder that at the helm of great teams stand unmitigated
divas, their diva-ness contributing inescapably to their success... In
life, high school never actually ends, even through they hand you a
paper and tell you farewell. The prom kings and prom queens continue to
snipe at each other for the duration of existence."
Ronaldo:
"Even a lost novice could see that Ronaldo had spent the year
bolstering Portugal's hopes in the Olympic diving competition in both
Beijing 2008 and London 2012, in both platform and springboard."
"Ronaldo began treating us to a recital of his catalog of dives. He
dived often enough that I began to wonder if he missed opportunities
that would've come moments after the dive had he merely stayed up and
not dived. Other teams like Tottenham and Middlesborough had complained
about his diving, and Ferguson and Ronaldo more or less had accused
other teams of enby, when in reality other teams had complained about
his diving for a completely different reason: because he had been
diving.
Bellamy (in reference to the golfclubs/karaoke incident): "In most
groups of males, however idiotic, golf-club threats would stem from
insistence upon karaoke rather than from refusal."
To finish it off, here are some of the more insightful and moving bits, including his final conclusion.
"I'll never forget feeling the entire stand inhale during those
pregnant milliseconds that precede most goals and help make soccer
uniquely orgasmic. By that I mean the millisecond just after the
seasoned viewers have made a realization. They have realized that their
side will score, but they have not yet had the time to exult. They're
inhaling, I suppose. There's a moment tucked in there, and I find that
moment almost matchless upon this troubled coil, not least because you
know euphoria's coming in the very next moment."
On beating United (top of the table) then losing to Watford
(bottom) within 42 hours: "Oh, the predictable perversity of this game.
These 48 hours exemplify the beauty--and pain-- of football"
About singing a song about Benjani referencing Zimbabwe: "My love
for this I could not overstate. To me, this song almost justified
following the bilge of sport on a regular basis. Here I was, an
American, joining part of England in expressing our love for an African.
Here we were in Hampshire, a crowd of mostly white people who had been
to Zimbabwe an aggregate next-to-nil in all our 20,165 lives, some of
whom knew it only from media coverage as having a lousy president, yet
we serenaded a Zimbabwean. It reminded me of 1990s surveys that queried
white Americans and black Americans for their ten favourite prime-time
television shows and only one show appeared on both lists: Monday Night
Football. Only sport seems to construct such bridges."
About how sport deals with tragedy: "You witness these things and
you just hope people won't get so embroiled in life as to forget. That's
where, to an outsider, Liverpool fans seem to have taken something
unbearable and implemented it into their fandom as a way of giving
homage. So, fully eighteen years and three weeks down the line in life,
Anfield's Hillsborough memorial teemed with fresh flowers and careful
attention. I found myself gazing and reading until I had no idea how
much time had passed. At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the
wall with 58,000 names, I always try to read the notes from soldiers'
family members or friends, and at Anfield I found myself reading a poem
typewritten on a full sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. It came from the
family of Adam Spearitt, who died that day at fourteen, less than the
number of years that have passed since his death. The poem went along
for two or three stanzas about the day, April 15 1989, and about the
fans going to Sheffield for the FA Cup semifinal.
'Some got there early
Some arrived late
Hard to say more
Pain's too great'
Even as a foreigner who spent the spring of 1989 living in Los
Angeles and hearing of Hillsborough only vaguely, those last two lines
just staggered me."
'I'd fled my homeland for the motherland, fled the staleness for
some freshness. I'd run across new legacies and new protagonists and new
thugs, as well as beery trains and untold goosebumps. I'd left behind
all my misgivings about sports and found...some fresh misgivings about
sports. After a year following the biggest league on earth, I may know a
little about a little and not much about much, but I do know one thing.
I think it's hard being a fan."
