The main di¤erence is that it’s an integrated crowd, labor and management, street cleaner and advertising executive together. In the course of English history, this may be an earth-shattering development.
In response to the rise of corporate power, there’s a natural inclination to believe that self-interest hadn’t always ruled the market. Soccer writers in England often portray the old club owners as far more
beneficent, public-minded citizens doing good for their old working-class friends. But this is nostalgia for a social market that never existed. Before the nineties, there was so little money in the game that owners let their stadiums decay into reprehensible safety traps. In e¤ect, owners treated their fans as if their lives were expendable. Their negligence resulted in a complete breakdown, the broken-windows theory of social decay in microcosm. Fans began to think of life as expendable, too. They would beat the crap out of one another each weekend. To be sorrowful about the disappearance of this old culture requires grossly sentimentalizing the traditions and atmosphere that have passed. Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous, even when they deserve to be left in the past. So, in a way, a hooligan’s nostalgia for his youth is the most honest kind of nostalgia.
III.
Before I met Alan Garrison, I had dipped into his writings. Surfing Chelsea Web sites, I had stumbled upon a page maintained by Alan plugging excerpts from We’re the North Stand, an unpublished novelized memoir of his early days as a hooligan. It is a picaresque work about a circle of friends who travel England and Europe picking fights. In the manuscript, he refers to himself as Alan Merrill—a nom de plume which separates him further from his nom de guerre which separates him from any self-incriminating admissions.
Garrison writes with surprising clarity and panache.
But as a novelist, he has a few shortcomings. The Merrill character has an unbelievable streak of heroic self-sacrificing interventions that remove innocent HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
bystanders from harm. He wins fights like a superhero disposing of common criminals. (“One [hooligan]
throws a desperate punch back towards Merrill, who ducks it easily before grabbing hold of the extended wrist. He then quickly pulls the youth around, using himself as the pivot-point, sending the helpless body crashing into the gate’s upright.”) Still, in many ways, it’s an astonishing bit of self-sociology. Garrison doesn’t try to elevate his friends into rebels pursuing a higher cause or monsters acting out the pathologies of poverty.
They are simply average guys stuck in a world of violence from which they don’t have any particular desire to escape.
Garrison is the thinking man’s hooligan, a careful reader of military history and newspapers and a devoted Hellenist, who spends his free time poring over works on Alexander the Great. He doesn’t admit it, but it must have irked him that he hadn’t thought of writing a memoir earlier. By the time he put pen to paper, three of his friends had already sent o¤ manuscripts to publishers. Steve “Hickey” Hickmont, who assumed Alan’s place in the Chelsea hierarchy during his prison years, had published Armed for the Match.
His buddy Chris “Chubby” Henderson wrote another memoir. Yet another comrade called Martin King hit the shelves with Hoolifan, a di¤erent perspective on the same tale. Convinced that he had his own crackling version to tell, Garrison sent his manuscript to his friends’
publishers. Where his friends had worked with co-authors, Garrison wrote his by himself. Perhaps he hoped that the authenticity of his unadulterated voice would provide his competitive advantage. It didn’t. He received polite rejections—the only way really to reject a hooligan. “They told me that the book was too violent and right-wing.”
If they were honest, however, the publishers would have given him another explanation. The market simply couldn’t sustain another memoir about hooliganism—or at least it shouldn’t. Aside from the Chelsea books, hooligans from West Ham’s Inter City Firm, Cardi¤ City’s Soul Crew, Portsmouth’s 657 Crew, and virtually every other major and minor club have produced their own tediously repetitious memoirs, with such titles as Want Some Aggro? and City Psychos. These days, the sports section at corner London bookshops largely consists of this hooligan lit. The genre goes far beyond these first-person tales. Two brothers called Dougie and Eddy Brimson, whose dust jacket shows them with appropriately shaved heads and comically attempting menacing gazes, have made a franchise of publishing pop anthropological studies of soccer violence. Their books quote heavily from hooligans and have names like Eurotrashed and Capital Punishment: London’s Violent Football Following. A novelist called John King has added a shelf full of hooligan fiction, mostly about Chelsea. Another shelf includes books on hooligan fashion and the underground hooligan economy, as well as tomes by academics hoping to cash in on their sexy specialization.
On a smaller scale, the English hooligan has
become like the gangsta rapper or the Mafioso, a glam-orized, commodified criminal. When the BBC finds itself in need of a ratings boost, it airs one of its many hooligan documentaries. Every month, it seems, one of HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
the British men’s magazines rolls out a piece documenting some new wrinkle of domestic hooliganism or its foreign o¤spring. The full breadth of this phenomenon hadn’t struck me until I went to see Chelsea in person. Walking down Fulham Road, I came across a vendor laying out tables with a collection of hats and pins bearing the skull-and-bones symbol of the infamous Headhunters gang. In the stands, I saw one teen with spiky hair wearing a blue Headhunters T-shirt.
Stadium security
