This hooligan industry only started in the late nineties, when the gentrification of the English game was already in full swing, at a point when hooliganism had ceased to flourish in its traditional form. Of course, hooligans still fought, just not inside the stadium. As Alan explained the mechanics of fighting to me, “You call up the leader of the other firm and say, ‘Right, meet you at Trafalgar Square at two.’ And then you hope that the police don’t get there before it goes o¤. Sometimes it goes o¤. Sometimes you see the coppers and walk away.” For Alan, this new mode of appointment hooliganism trampled the pleasure of pure art. It was far more exhilarating when fights took place in narrow cor-ridors of stadiums or in the stands. And with all the prearrangement, “fighting has lost it spontaneity.” He poses the existential question of the modern soccer hooligan: “If football violence doesn’t take place in the stadium, is it even football violence?” Even though it pains him to admit it, he believes that hooliganism has been domesticated, or domesticated enough to become an object of fascination and adoration.
You can understand why the market might have an appetite for the hooligan. On the most basic level, he’s a romantic rebel, willing to risk bodily harm and battle police. He’s not just a nihilist. He fights for the colors of the club, the same colors that the average peace-abiding fan loves. Because the hooligan is so similar, he is so fascinating. Why would some fans—guys who are part of liberal, peaceful England—take full leave of conventional morality and become thugs?
The hooligan literature doesn’t try to answer this question analytically. The mode is confessional and it aims to shock. (To quote at random from Alan’s work,
“The body fall[s] face downward on the platform, blood gushing from a deep cut in the back of the skull.”) Nevertheless, the authors feel the need to justify their violent behavior. They may have left conventional morality, but they still live near it. The hooligans typically describe themselves as practicing a virtuous violence: They never assault innocent bystanders, and they never use weapons. Too often, the desire to self-exculpate combines with the narrative imperative to shock to produce comic book writing, all bams and splats.
Garrison, like all the rest, sanitizes the story, omit-ting some of the most interesting biographical details.
That’s too bad, because it’s quite a story. From his early days as a Chelsea hooligan, he had become a self-admitted addict of the violence and the adrenaline that precedes it. “Fear is a drug,” he says, “There’s a very thin line between being hero and coward. It’s better than sex. It lasts longer as well.” He decided that he HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
wanted a career that would deliver the rush in regular doses. After school, with London in full swinging sixties mode, he bucked the emerging hippie zeitgeist and enlisted in the army. More specifically, he volunteered for a unit in the elite special services that would give him the most opportunities to practice his beloved craft of violence.
Alan began living a strange double life. During the week, and for long stretches of the year, he would serve his country. At times, this would involve taking part in secret missions to fight and train armies whose identity he’s reluctant to divulge. On weekends, he returned to his teenage football fighting. He reckons that the army knew about his double life—how could they not, with such a long sheet of crimes?— but didn’t much care about any weekend havoc so long as he performed his weekday duties. As part of this double life, he began acquiring the trappings of conventionality. He married and had a daughter. Although his wife would plead with him to cut out the violence, she had no leverage to push her case. By the time they first met, “she’d heard about me from a friend who’d worked with her. We met at an oªce Christmas party. I introduced myself to her and she said, ‘I don’t want to know you. You’re a fucking hooligan.’ ” She could never accuse Alan of selling her a false bill of goods.
His two lives fed o¤ one another. “I was trained to fight and I couldn’t turn it o¤,” he says. His other comrades didn’t want to turn it o¤ either. Garrison says eight fellow soldiers joined him in the hooligan ranks.
They brought a measure of professionalism to the fight.
On a trip to the States, Garrison smuggled back CB radios, then illegal in Britain, and used them to coordi-nate assaults. The hooligan soldiers would carefully map out stadiums and their surroundings. Alan would stand back from the fray and track proceedings using binoculars and radio reports. “We were the fire brigade.
When someone got into trouble, needed some help, we would come in and sort things out.”
But there was tension between his existences, and in 1977, they ceased to be compatible. Chelsea traveled to the southwest of the country for a match at Ply-mouth. As the game ended, Garrison and his friends began bullying their way into the section holding Ply-mouth fans. Garrison had settled into combat with an opponent when, without his ever seeing it coming, an iron pipe made solid, shattering contact with the back of his skull. The furtive attacker struck him on the hand, too. Unfortunately for the attacker, he failed to knock the consciousness out of Garrison, who rose to his feet, seized the pipe, and began extracting vengeance. A blow to the face knocked his adversary’s eye from the socket. “It was hanging by a string,” he admits. It was Garrison’s ill fortune that a police oªcer entered the scene at this moment, with the eye and pipe weighing heavily against Alan’s protestations of innocence.
When he came to trial, Garrison supplied the court with x-rays of his
