Stan Isaacs
A Veteran Sports Columnist Pays A Visit to the Headwaters of the Hooligan Tide
By Stan Isaacs
I have returned recently from England, the home of the hooligans,
the
lager-mouthed louts who sully the sport of soccer and bring shame
down upon proud Britannia. There is no excuse for the dastardly
behavior of people who see the sport called football as an opportunity
to load themselves up on booze -- well, beer, to be exact --
and taunt players, fight opposing rooters, and stage battles
in the streets against the police.
 Hooliganus Britanicus |
 Hooliganus Americanus |
As an American I would tut-tut disapproval that this is outrageous
behavior except that it is beginning to be obvious that too many
of our own fans are going in the same direction. No sooner had
I landed on these hallowed shores than we all witnessed the riot
in Los Angeles following the Lakers winning the National Basketball
Association championship.
Our fans haven't approached the depraved level of the British thugs, but they are getting there. We have had other riots. And the taunting "So-and-so sucks" by louts in the stands has become something of a national anthem of our arenas.
For all the angst that accompanies the events in English soccer there are rewarding aspects for an American reading the British press coverage of football. On the one hand I am confused; on the other I am amused.
As a long time sports columnist, a trip to England is always educational for me. I have gotten many a journalistic lesson about how not to write about sports just from reading the English tabloids. On my first trip to England more than 40 years ago I found upon reading the sports pages there that I -- a fairly knowledgeable sports observer --didn't understand much of the writing on the English sports pages because it was so in-group. It used terms and phrases that only insiders grasped.
I vowed never to get so involved with what
we call "inside baseball"
terms that I'd be beyond the understanding of intelligent, yet
less-than-passionate sports fans readers. I went by the rule
that I would write for the regular sports page reader, but also
hope to be understood as well by women with a moderate interest
in sports.
In this recent trip I gobbled up anew the
British papers and the sports
papers. The tabloid stories were, as ever, almost indecipherable
to me. I was as lost as ever with the strident tabloids -- the
Mirror, Mail, Express and Sun. On the other hand I understood
and enjoyed much of the writing on the broadsheet papers, the
respectable Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Times.
All the papers overplayed Euro 2000, the European Football championships that are the equivalent of our World Series. The papers, respectable and tabloid, have been full of them with three, four and five stories a day.
Most of the stories before the tournament
began focused not on the
teams' makeup and chances of victory but on the threat of violence.
The British have a long history of dealing with hooligans, and
the stories all centered on precautions being taken by the host
Belgium and Netherlands police anticipating violence. They were
right because violence erupted during the tournament. More than
1,000 fans, mostly
English, were arrested following a weekend of violence around
the
England-Germany match.
The tabloids went wild over one particularly ugly incident in the stadium. A group of bums shouted the worst kind of obscenities at English star David Beckham, not withstanding that he assisted on the two English goals in a crushing 3-2 defeat to Portugal in England's opening game. The louts lambasted Beckham with words decrying him, his son and his wife, who's one of the Spice girls. The tabloids headlined the taunts calling his wife "a whore" and wishing cancer upon his son. Beckham responded by giving the fans an eloquent gesture -- the finger.
That led to a national debate in the tabloids
upon the propriety of
Beckham responding in such a manner. There was more or less general
agreement with the statement by a football English official that
"Some of the players were subjected to disgusting, foul-mouthed
abuse from a small group who we would hesitate to describe as
England fans. It is fair to say that everybody who heard what
was being said was deeply shocked that their own people could
have behaved in such a way." He added, apparently with a
straight face, "We believe they were drunk."
These developments in the opening game
were all a bit too much for
Michael Henderson, a cricket correspondent for the Telegraph,
so he
vented his spleen with the outrageous declaration that he hoped
England would lose the next game and be eliminated from the tournament.
He wrote, "Oh dear. It's all gone too far. A wonderful game that emerged in its modern form from Victorian England and became a fully blown professional entertainment is now so much in hock to the fraudulent world of showbiz that those who grew up with a deep love of Association Football no longer recognize it. The game has become a bullying, swaggering juggernaut driven by the half-wits of television and by reporters who, knowing nothing beyond football, are unable to supply the perspective that all sports need if they are not to become a substitute for life itself."
The letters to the editor of the British
papers are far more enjoyable
than the rather dull missives penned to papers here. A columnist
who says right out that he is rooting against the home side knows
he will hear from his readers.
Henderson particularly stirred the cockles with two particular comments.
He wrote, "Not all England followers are low-income manual workers from the inner cities, but that is how they feel they have to behave when they go abroad."
Reader Simon Alstead of London responded, "I cannot believe that in this day and age an article can contain the sentence [quoted above]. Perhaps Mr. Henderson would rather they act like upper class delinquents who spend all their family's ill-gotten gains on designer drugs, get paralytically drunk and smash restaurants, then vandalize other people's property."
Henderson also wrote, "Not all England fans are disgusting, loud-mouthed, frequently-drunk and usually violent, but thousand upon thousand of them leave these shores close-cropped and tattooed, and very unhappy indeed if the trouble they intend to cause fails to materialize."
This inspired Richard O'Neill of Leiceister, who proclaimed that he wears a tattoo with a red rose surmounting a Latin legend, to object that "Mr. Henderson should cease to judge and condemn from appearances. He might consider that Milton was the champion of a crop-headed faction. Drake and Nelson may well have been tattooed. Turner was, by most accounts, an ill-dressed and sometimes foul-spoken curmudgeon."
The night of the opening match for Britain my wife and I attended a play in London. The taxi that drove us to the performance of "Copenhagen" flew a white flag with a red cross, not unlike the flags of the Scandinavian countries. The driver explained that it was the flag of England -- as opposed to Great Britain, which includes Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- and it proclaimed his support of England's football team in Euro 2000.
I felt the need to participate to the extent
that I bet one pound
($1.60) on England at 9-1 odds with the legal bookmakers. It
seemed the proper, patriotic way for an American visitor to show
support. My
one-pound bet will not enrich me in any way. England was eliminated
from Euro 2000 when it was beaten by Romania.
© 2000 by Stan Isaacs
The cartoon images contained in this column are from the IMSI
MasterClips collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael,
CA 94901-5506
ABOUT STAN ISAACS
Stan Isaacs is a longtime former Newsday sports and feature columnist.
He wrote the popular column, "Out of Left Field" which
won a National Headliners Award. He is an Eastern District H,S.
and Brooklyn College, '50. Alumnus.. He had a one-year National
Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Stanford University.
He worked for the Daily Compass before Newsday and wrote a column
for the ESPN page on the Internet. His acclaimed Isaacs Ratings
of Esoteric Distinction (which include the famed Chocolate Ice
Cream evaluations) now appear every April in the Viewpoints section
of Newsday. He lives in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., is married to Natalie
Bobrove, a retired social worker, and has three daughters and
four grandchildren.
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