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I’ve only recently got round to Nicholas Shakespeare’s Bruce Chatwin. It’s just as well: the forensic standards he sets for biographical research might have deterred me from ever starting my own book if I’d read it in advance.
Of the domestic football literature that has bunched into Nick Hornby’s slipstream over the past decade or so I’ve read very little. I’d be surprised if any of it surpasses Hunter Davies’ classic season-in-the-life of a team, The Glory Game; not least because – from the vantage point of the brand-managed Premiership – the idea of a club allowing the kind of access Spurs granted Davies in 1971 seems as quaint as a kipper tie. Of course getting in is only half the trick. Davies retains his perspective and his eye to produce a benchmark-setting piece of journalism.
Tim Parks’ A Season with Verona is an outsider’s journey with a group who are themselves Italian football’s ultimate outsiders, the pariah fans of Hellas Verona. As usual, though, the expatriate clergyman’s son ropes in all kinds of passing material to support an elegantly constructed sermon on racism, politics and the power of belonging.
You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting tells how the Japanese dismantled America’s national sport, culturally reconfigured it as Bēsebōru, then imported highly paid US stars who found that, although the rules were identical, they didn’t understand it and couldn’t play it.
It’s not a sports book – despite cropping up on a recent list of the fifty greatest – but Don DeLillo’s Underworld opens with a brilliant evocation of what it’s like to go to a game; baseball in this case, but it could be any sport. If you want to read about sport at length there’s his Cold War college-football novel End Zone – surreal and very funny.
Matthew Rendell is the best writer on cycling in the English language. A Significant Other combines some genuinely original thinking about the sport with a dramatic account of the centenary Tour de France from the viewpoint of one of Lance Armstrong’s lieutenants.
Finally back with football, Kicking & Screaming is the only source book I read both for research and for pleasure. Rogan Taylor and Andy Ward have compiled a three-way oral history of the game from the standpoint of fans, players and officials. The closest thing to Studs Terkel we have.
Gary Imlach Is a highly respected sports journalist. His first book My Father and Other Working Class Heroes has recently been published to great critical acclaim. |
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