although they never prosecuted the case. When British troops in the south of France shot him in the stomach and legs, everything in his life suddenly and strangely inverted. The Allies captured his riddled body and mer-cifully sent it to heal in an Edinburgh military infirmary. As he lay sprawled in his medical dress and entirely dependent on the goodness of his adversary, he fell madly in love with his Scottish-Jewish nurse, and she with him. In 1946, they had Alan, the first of their three Aryan-Jewish children. It was a match made to inflame. Both the mother’s family and community fero-ciously shunned them. When this shame and stigma became too great to bear, they fled with their baby to a new, less fraught, more anonymous life in London.
From the looks of Alan’s adult visage—doughy
face, droopy eyes, English teeth, big glasses, feathery gray hair—he would have had a hard time on the play-ground no matter what his pedigree. His mixed parent-age didn’t help his case on the asphalt. “Dumb kike,”
the heartless kids would call out one day, kicking and bullying him. “Fuckin’ Nazi Hun,” they would yell the next, reenacting their anti-Semitic pogrom as a heroic advance against Hitler’s bunker.
Alan’s identity became a drag. When his mother wanted him to become a Bar Mitzvah, he flatly refused.
He told her, poor lady, that he had given up on the Jew-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
ish religion all together. From that day forward, he would practice paganism and worship the goddess Isis, part of a faith his art teacher had explained in a course on ancient civilization. Alan made other resolutions to himself. He would become strong. He would take up boxing and use his combinations against any fool who dared insult him. He would do whatever he could to ingratiate himself with the crowd of tough lads. By befriending them, he would be surrounding himself in a protective bubble that could repel all attackers.
On Alan’s fifth birthday, his father, now an accountant, gave him a break from the pummeling. He took him to watch their local club, Chelsea, play in the Stamford Bridge stadium. West London in those days didn’t yet have sushi restaurants or latte bars. Chelsea, both the neighborhood and the club, had hardly a hint of the glamour or cosmopolitanism that so define it now. On weekdays, dogs would race on the track that wrapped around the soccer field. In the Shed, like large parts of English soccer stadiums before the 1990s, there was no place to sit, just terraces of concrete. You could cram a seemingly unending amount of humanity into these terraces, and the ticket-takers were never really inclined to cut o¤ the flow. The stadium, so filled with passion and camaraderie, overwhelmed Alan. This, too, he wanted in his life. As he got a bit older, he began going to games on his own and grew chummy with the other kids who haunted the Shed. They loved the football, to be sure, but they also liked to behave badly.
They set a new standard for their naughtiness during a 1963 match against a club from the industrial north called Burnley. A few hundred Burnley fans sat in the North Stand of Stamford Bridge, opposite the Shed.
Alan and his friends fumed over this presence of so many outsiders. They decided that they would pay a surprise visit to the North Stand and teach Burnley a lesson about the etiquette of visiting Chelsea. Because Alan wasn’t even sixteen—and many of his mates were even younger—their attack was easily repelled by a bunch of thirty-year-old men, whose jobs in mechanic shops and factory floors had bequeathed them imposing biceps. “It was a right kicking,” Alan recalled to me many years later. Within minutes after he launched the attack, Alan was sent tumbling down several flights of terraces. The young men needed many pints of lager to make the pain go away.
But even the alcohol couldn’t erase the humiliation.
From that evening in the pub, Alan and his mates began planning a visit to Burnley the next season.
Stealth tactics would guide them. They would melt into the Burnley crowd, and only then mount their attack. It worked masterfully. Nobody can be sure how many men of Burnley were sent to the hospital that day. But enough fell that the newspapers took notice. The English press wrote about a menace it called football hooliganism.
II.
When I first met Alan in a pub, he looked like a man who spends a significant amount of time straddling a Harley Davidson. He wore a black satin Oakland Raiders jacket. His hair was short on the sides and HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
thick on the top, a half-mullet. A Wiccan amulet—an inverted pentacle—dangled from his neck on a piece of string. Upon seeing his middle-aged physique, I thought, if worst comes to worst, at least I’ll be able to outrun him.
Alan had arrived for our interview twenty minutes late and greeted me brusquely. “All right,” he said, shaking my hand, failing to acknowledge his tardiness.
I guided him to a table in the corner.
“Let me get you a drink,” I o¤ered.
“A Coke. I don’t drink,” he replied. “I learned the hard way that it disadvantages you in a fight.”
Very quickly in our conversation, he ostentatiously advertised his bona fides. “The police have nicked me twenty-one times. . . . I’m addicted to violence. . . . I’ve tried to stop, but I can’t.” He showed me battle scars, a bump on his wrist from a shattered bone that healed funny; an arm that folds around in a direction that would defy a healthy network of joints and tendons. But in making this presentation, he began to undermine the image he intended. Alan is a compulsive talker, with endless opinions on an endless number of subjects. My pen struggled to match the pace of his pontifications on the deficiencies of authoritarian governments, the morality of the Anglo-American war
