He left his family to spend nearly five years in Dart-moor prison. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
IV.
On my next trip to London, Garrison met me at the Finchley Road tube stop near his home. We walked down the street for a drink at Weatherspoon’s Pub.
When I took out my wallet to buy drinks, he pushed it away.
“I’m Jewish, but not that Jewish. You bought last time.”
Alan wore a T-shirt with air-brushed scorpions that he had purchased at a market near San Francisco a few years ago. He told me, “Bought it for seventy-five dollars o¤ the artist. I later found out that was quite a good deal.”
Conversations with Garrison invariably lead back to the Bay Area. In the eighties, after his release from prison, he fell into a career as a graphics designer, with a specialty in video games. When one of his friends landed in Silicon Valley, just in time for the dot-com boom of the nineties, Alan followed him to California.
Miraculously, the Immigration and Naturalization Service overlooked his convictions and granted Alan a work visa. He bought himself a house in the San Francisco suburbs.
“So what was the dot-com boom like?” I asked.
He paused uncharacteristically to think it over and then responded with a non sequitur. “Jesus Christ, but the women out there are sharks. Sitting at a bar, they’re around you like flies to shit. One day I was chatting with one bird and she says, ‘Are you coming back to my place?’ Then she got into her purse and pulled out this thing. ‘This is my AIDS certificate. I’ve been tested.’ And I’m like what? She says, ‘I’ve been tested.’ I said,
‘When was that?’ She said, ‘Three weeks ago.’ And I said, ‘How many blokes have you been with since then?
Fuck o¤.’ ” He waved his hand, laughing at his story.
“Women out there are like sharks, especially around English accents.”
In his book, he constantly flashes to scenes from his life in California and juxtaposes them with life in England. It makes for quite a contrast. But Alan also credits himself with bridging cultural gaps. The first time we met, he wore an Oakland Raiders jacket. It was an entirely appropriate outfit. Of all American football clubs, the Raiders have a reputation for surly, working-class fans that most closely approximate English soccer hooligans. During his years as an American, Garrison supported the Raiders as fervently as he could support any organization that wasn’t Chelsea. “We tried to teach them how to behave like proper hooligans,” told me. At a game in San Diego, he organized Raiders fans to make “a run” through the parking lot, throwing punches and asserting dominance over the home crowd that stood turning hot dogs on their portable grills. “They didn’t know what hit them.”
Liberal northern California is hardly a place fit for a Chelsea hooligan. More than any club, Chelsea has been associated with the neo-Nazi right. I had just seen a BBC documentary that showed how many of the
Chelsea hooligans—people that Alan knows—travel to concentration camps on tourist trips so that they can admire Hitler’s accomplishments. They deliver sieg heil salutes to the tourists and confiscate artifacts for their HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN
personal collections of concentration camp parapherna-lia. Back in London, they’ve provided protection for Holocaust denier David Irving.
This history of English hooliganism can best be told as a distorted version of mainstream youth culture. At first, in Alan’s heyday, hooliganism imitated the early “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Beatles’ nonpolitical rebellion. It was all a good laugh, just for fun. Then, in the seventies, hooliganism began to dabble in radical politics. Only, as practitioners of hate and violence, they couldn’t credibly join with the peace-love-dope crowd.
They went in the opposite direction, becoming the vanguard of the proto-fascist British nationalist movement.
And just as the youth movement veered toward mindlessness, nihilism, and punk, the Chelsea movement became even more mindless, nihilist, and punk. During Alan’s imprisonment, admiration for the Nazis became a virtue.
As their numbers grew, Chelsea hooligans began subdividing into groups called “firms.” The most famous of the groups called themselves the Chelsea Headhunters. After their assaults, they would leave a calling card with their skull-and-bones logo that read,
“You have been nominated and dealt with by the Chelsea Headhunters.” In addition to linking up with the far right, the Headhunters joined with criminal ele-ments. They began peddling drugs and used other criminal rackets to become quite rich. Like the Bloods and Crips of L.A. street gang fame, they spent their money on fancy cars and designer clothes.
Another group formed a coalition of hooligans
across teams called Combat 18. It derived its moniker from a numerological breakdown of Adolf Hitler’s
name, with the A yielding the 1 and H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Originally, the group began as a security force for the racialist British National Party, which had some horrifying luck exploiting xenophobia for electoral gain. But in the early nineties Combat 18
grew disillusioned with the softness of the BNP, even though the party unabashedly admired the Nazis.
Combat 18 had no patience with the BNP’s reformist embrace of electoral politics. They wanted White Revolution and they exploded nail bombs in immigrant neighborhoods, instigated race riots in Oldham, and plotted to kidnap the left-wing actress Vanessa Redgrave.
Although Alan identified himself as a right winger, he also presented his own politics as reasonably mainstream. Most of his judgments could have been issued by any conservative pundit on a TV chat show. But he also obviously hailed from the Combat 18 milieu. Many of the hard core from the terrorist right shared his demographic profile precisely. A slew of these thugs had even served in the special services, like Alan, before the police caught up with them. So I asked,
“What about Combat 18?”
Occasionally, on these sensitive subjects,
