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| Poet Ian McMillan had an inspired idea and talked Barnsley Football Club into helping him to achieve his goal. Here he talks about being the first poet-in-residence at a British football club. |
| Jim Sells from the Literacy Trust is manager of the Reading the Game project that aims to get young people into books through their love of football. Further details of that initiative can be found here. |
| Tim Parks has written on sport in both his fiction and non-fiction. Here he explores the dramatic impact of sporting thrills and spills in literature. |
| The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Here, British Council organiser Marijke Brouwer talks about the impact of this stunning event while writer Chris Dolan explains what it all meant to him. |
| Will Buckley and Sarah Wardle are both keen football fans and here explore this great British obsession. Will talks about how it is reflected in our literature generally while Sarah takes on football, poetry and fiction. |
| Sports journalism in the UK is in a great state. The broadsheets are producing their own supplements, the tabloids have some fantastic writers and even the fanzines are going strong. Kevin Mitchell looks at exactly where it's at. Meanwhile Hunter Davies offers an overview of footballing biographies and how they have changed over the years. |
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Although some may argue that sport and politics aren’t a comfortable mix, in the end it’s hard to keep the two separate. Simon Kuper examines the ties that bind literature, politics and sport.
If you had spent a summer early in the 20th century going around London watching friendly cricket matches, you could have written literary history. Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes),
A. A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh), P. G. Wodehouse (of Jeeves), E. W. Horning (of Raffles) and Barrie himself (of Peter Pan as well as of the Allahakbarries cricket club) often played in the same teams. The tea-time repartee over cucumber sandwiches must have been pretty good. The quality of these elevens weren’t matched even when Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter teamed up more than half a century later. Yet it’s conventional to moan that there is no good British sports literature, and that they do these things much better in America. This is not quite fair.
The grumblers note that Hemingway, Runyon, Lardner, Mailer and Jack Kerouac were all sports journalists. It was a higher-status profession in the US than in Britain, because Americans never drew as rigid a line between 'high' and 'low' culture. Hemingway, in fact, was the best paid sports hack of all time, once pocketing $30,000 from Sports Illustrated for a 2,000-word piece on bullfighting. In American fiction, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Don de Lillo are among the legions who have set novels in sport. One of Richard Ford’s novels is actually called The Sportswriter.
In American fiction, unlike in British, the athlete had an important job to do: serving as metaphor for the 'American dream'. He was the kid who came from nowhere to great fame because he was a winner, but who always risked having his bubble pricked and deflating in an instant, with nowhere to return to. That is why, when the American dream went out of fashion after the war, American literature became populated by deflated former star high-school athletes: Brick Pollitt, in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Arthur Miller's Biff Loman, and much later 'Swede' Levov in Roth's American Pastoral. The former boxers played by Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront are of the same type. Once all-American heroes, they embody broken American dreams.
Because every American high school had its 'star athletes', most American writers had grown up close enough to athletes to write about them. This used to be true in Britain, too. There was a time when the best cricketer or footballer in a public school was a hero, and at least until the second world war a genre of 'school stories' existed in their honour. The most famous are Frank Richards’ Greyfriars stories; the best are by P. G. Wodehouse, whose main character is the great boy cricketer Mike. Wodehouse knew the milieu he was describing: once a quick bowler at Dulwich College, he would follow the college’s cricket results even after emigrating to Long Island. While there he discovered golf, which would inspire one of his great characters: the 'Oldest Member':
"Love (says the Oldest Member) is an emotion which your true golfer should always treat with suspicion. I have known cases where marriage improved a man's game, and other cases where it seemed to put him right off his stroke. There seems to be no fixed rule"
Hunting had been Trollope’s great love, but in the 20th century cricket and golf became the sports of the British writing classes. Samuel Beckett, born into Ireland’s Anglocentric Protestant elite, is the only person named in the annual Wisden cricket almanac to have won the Nobel prize for literature. No wonder that the best of English sports fiction tended to be about cricket: aside from lovely stories by Milne and Wodehouse, there are great vignettes of prewar village cricket matches in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, A. G. MacDonnell’s England, Their England, and Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match, later rewritten for the 1970s by John Parker. Whereas in American literature sports was human striving, in British it tended to provide sense of place.
In British golf writing, one man ruled: Bernard Darwin, golf correspondent for The Times from 1907 to 1953. The grandson of Charles, an authority on Charles Dickens, and a great stylist, Darwin was so close to the action that he sometimes participated in it. An excellent golfer, who won many amateur titles, he played in the first Walker Cup match on Long Island, New York in 1922: having accompanied the British-Irish team as a journalist, he stepped in when the captain fell ill. When compelled to write about himself, he did so with modesty: mentioning, for instance, 'an elderly gentleman whose name for the moment escapes me.'
But during the 20th century, football became the British national game. Unfortunately, few members of the writing classes played it. This precluded great literature. 'Novels about soccer tend to be written by educated gentlefolk who have observed the game from afar' writes D. J. Taylor, novelist, critic and football fan, 'while the cast of such works will necessarily be thick herberts, and [so] a certain amount of patronage, or rather distance between writer and raw material, is inevitable.'
There are a few good British soccer novels, most of them by Brian Glanville (Goalkeepers are Different, The Rise of Gerry Logan and Glanville’s own favourite The Dying of the Light). Glanville resembled the Americans in that, as a sports journalist, he had got close enough to professional footballers to render them as three-dimensional characters (his Gerry Logan was based on the great Spurs player Danny Blanchflower, much to Blanchflower’s irritation). Nonetheless, Glanville felt that as a middle-class boy he was writing at one remove too far 'essentially the football novel should have been a branch of the proletarian novel' he told me.
A few 'proletarian' novelists did have stabs at football, notably the since-forgotten Gordon Williams in the 1960s, but Glanville feels that the one who best rendered working-class sport was David Storey. This Sporting Life, a novel about rugby league and the northern working classes worked because Storey himself was a northern working-class rugby league professional.
But in football, writers could never quite capture the 'thick herberts' 'It’s hard to think of any football novels that I really liked' admits Glanville. Hornby once said 'I've never particularly wanted to read a football novel. And I'm not sure what the point of such a book would be. Real-life sport already contains all the themes and narratives you could want'.
Such postwar British football fiction as there is, is mostly fantasy. There is J. L. Carr’s How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup, a story about a village team, a re-working of the village-cricket genre; the Roy of the Rovers and Billy’s Magic Boots comics, on which generations of British boys were raised before the era of video games; and their posthumous parody, 'Billy the Fish' in Viz magazine. The Roy stories themselves were a sort of working-class recasting of the old school stories, which died out together with the notion of the public-school hero. When I visited the ancient public school Marlborough this winter, I found that the boys revered not the school’s cricket captain but Wayne Rooney.
Yet the appetite for football writing has grown. Football, once a working-class game, is now a universal one. Readers have therefore been deserting cricket, and even this summer’s delirium over the Ashes probably won’t change that. John Gaustad, the New Zealander who came to London and in 1985 founded Sportspages, now the world’s largest specialist sports bookshop, told me 'It’s like pipe-smoking: the cricket market is actually dying. The men are dying, and they are not being replaced. People used to brag in the mid-1980s that you could publish any book on cricket and you would sell at least 2,000 copies'. By the time Gaustad was eased out of Sportspages in 2003, football was the shop’s single biggest sport.
However, professional footballers were still almost all working-class, and as the British working classes still tended not to write, there was still few good writing coming from within the game itself. Perhaps typically, the best footballer’s account of British football, Eamon Dunphy’s Only A Game? is not by a Briton but by an Irishman.
The best British football writers to have emerged since the 1990s have tended to write about what the game means to fans. Nick Hornby, in his memoir Fever Pitch, caught the psychological role of fandom in the life of a typical English supporter. A flood of British fanzines - most of them now online - revealed literate amateurs in provincial towns across the land devoting their oeuvres to Grimsby Athletic or Plymouth Argyle. David Winner, Phil Ball, Alex Bellos and others uncovered the social role of football in foreign countries.
But in the age of celebrity, the bestselling sports books are autobiographies. Footballers’ memoirs used to be famously inane '… and then we won the World Cup final. I was lucky enough to score the winning goal, so it was a great day all round'. Nowadays, however, the market is so big that publishers can afford to hire top-class writers as ghosts: Hugh McIlvanney for Alex Ferguson, Dunphy for Roy Keane, or Hunter Davies for Paul Gascoigne. As for the few footballers who do write themselves, a publisher once told me he was reminded of Samuel Johnson’s adage about the dog who walked on his hind legs 'It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all'.
Cricketers, by contrast, often write their own books. Thanks to the hardiness of the British class system: many of them still come from the country’s traditional writing classes. The Cambridge men Peter Roebuck, Mike Brearley and Ed Smith write as well as they bat.
Their articles fill the ever bigger and more literate sports sections of British newspapers. Glanville, though he is old enough to remember the philosopher A. J. Ayer writing football reports for The Observer in the 1950s, thinks the quality of prose is far higher now: less flowery, fewer clichés, more honest.
It’s just a shame the athletes themselves barely notice. Anything not published in the tabloids tend to escape them. Still, who cares? They’re only the 'raw material'.
Simon Kuper is a freelance sports journalist and has written a number of books including Football Against the Enemy and Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War. |
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