Arsenal America

For many Arsenal Americans, Fever Pitch was a major factor in their development as a Gooner. It was our entr?e into the history of the club. It has, in fact, become the Bible for Arsenal fans.

It would be hard to underestimate the importance of this book. Today it seems every team has a fan who writes about the trials and tribulations of rooting for the hometown XI. But in the early 90s, when admitting you were a football fan was like admitting you liked pro westling or demolition derbies, these autobiographical odes were a rarity.

Nick Hornby helped change the perception of who a football fan was. He did so with style, sincerity and passion. He then went on to write some more great books, High Fidelity and About A Boy among them.

Nick was gracious enough to take a few moments and speak with Arsenal America:

ArseAm: As a lifelong supporter of Arsenal, what is your honest opinion of those of us here in the States that may have just started following Arsenal during the Wenger era? Can a person who doesn’t live near the stadium, who may never even have seen the team play live, really be considered a fan?

Nick Hornby: I would never judge anyone’s fandom. There’s always someone who’ll tell you that true fans live in the borough, or travel to every away game, or haven’t missed a game for twenty or fifty or a hundred years - or that true fans always believe their team to be the best, even when it’s patently not true. It’s all rubbish. One thing I will say for you guys: if you began during the Wenger era, your response has the virtue of logic. This team plays fantastic football, even if they don’t win everything.

ArseAm: What are your feelings on the club leaving Highbury for the new stadium at Ashburton Grove?

NH: You can see both stadiums from my office window, and the landscape on my walk to work has changed - there’s this great concrete thing straight ahead of me. I’m looking forward to the move now. Highbury hasn’t been quite the same since the old North Bank went, and though I’ll be choked up on the last day, the benefits - the revenue, and a pitch large enough to let those attacking players breathe - outweigh the memories. I’m very disappointed about the Emirates thing, though. I understand the commercial pressure the club is under, but I’d hoped, foolishly and naively, that there might be some sense of romance and dignity left.

ArseAm: Many people may not realize that you’re a huge music fan as well. In your opinion, who is the second greatest English band of the last 20 years (with The Smiths clearly being the best of course)?

NH: I think in the US more people know about the music than the football! Twenty years? Teenage Fanclub.

ArseAm: Follow up question: Striker for Arsenal or guitarist for your favorite band, which would you rather be?

NH: Well, guitarist lasts longer, doesn’t it? My professional life didn’t really start until my early thirties - weird to think that’s when most footballers finish. I’d love the experience of scoring at Highbury, but I’d always choose a talent that stayed with me for my entire working life.

ArseAm: What are your thoughts on Fever Pitch being made into an American film, but centered on the Boston Red Sox?

NH: I think it makes sense. I was writing about the relationship between a fan and a team, and I know that it’s there in the US, but it’s not there with soccer - I mean, there can’t be the same relationship between US soccer fans and US soccer teams, because the teams haven’t been around long enough, and soccer doesn’t have the same cultural importance. I’ve been to a few baseball games, and it seemed to me the closest equivalent, in terms of the way people feel about it. There are too many games, of course - I’m assuming that more or less nobody goes to every home game, let alone every game, whereas that’s fairly common here.

As for the Sox - well, there can be no happy ending, as there was in the English movie! (I’m guessing that the people currently shooting the
Movie would be very conflicted if Boston wins the World Series this season. There’d be a lot of reshooting!)

[Ed. Note ? No chance of that now, is there? (Yes, I?m a Sox fan. No, I?m not bitter or anything.)]

ArseAm: How do you feel about your place in Arsenal history? When you were writing Fever Pitch did you ever imagine that people would connect with it so personally?

NH: It’s very strange, of course, writing a book about fandom and then somehow becoming a part of the thing you’re a fan of. They’re burying a time capsule at the new stadium, and my book is going in it, and I can’t tell you how honoured I feel, but also how inappropriate it seems, as if I’d jumped out of the stands and onto the pitch. Someone should be throwing me out, not inviting me to sit next to Arsene or Brady or Charlie George.

I did know, when I was writing it, that it would be a book that meant something to some people. The story of that kind of relationship wasn’t a story that had been told before, as far as I could tell, and I knew that a lot of my friends, and their friends, had had the same kind of experience. But I thought it would reach only people of roughly my age, and class, who supported my team - I really didn’t expect fans of other teams to read it, and I didn’t expect it to have a life beyond its time. But now I keep getting letters from kids who are studying it at school…More has changed in football in the ten or twelve years since it came out than in the whole previous history of the game, so I’m surprised it makes sense to kids now. Maybe it doesn’t! Maybe Fever Pitch seems as bafflingly remote to these students as Hamlet or Great Expectations. Ian Wright? Hooliganism? Terraces? It’ll need footnotes soon.

Nick, thank you again for your time, and thanks for sharing your fandom with fans everywhere. If somehow you don?t own this book, grab your credit card and click here. For the 99.999% of people reading this who have already read Fever Pitch 100 times, get ready for Nick?s latest: Nick Hornby’s Polysyllabic Spree