The Global Game meets the simplest game part 1

John Turnbull is the editor of a colourful, often beautiful and equally riotous, truly international, collection of football writing called The Global Game. What I’ve read of it is fantastic. When I’m done I will certainly include a review here. John and his friends in football, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, have done something that's a little special. Ye see, for the first time, that I know of anyway, someone has taken the time to seek out and translate football writing from around the world and put it in the one place. It's like a sampler, only smarter. With something to read from, and an introduction to, each author. It's an education, that's entertaining. And that's the way we like it here at thesimplestgame.

They aren’t all fiction. Some are just straight out quality football writing. There’s work in there by the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gunter Grass, Simon Kuper, Ian Jack, Ted Hughes and Elvis Costello. There’s a whole lot more. Writers from all over the world. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be looking at the book in much closer detail as well as adding some of the answers John Turnbull gave me when thesimplestgame approached him to discuss his work.

The sites are well worth looking at too. Here’s a link to The Global Game - soccer writers site.You can buy the book there too.

Thesimplestgame really like the site, what motivated you and your colleagues to kick it off?

John Turnbull: Certainly there is a promotional aspect to the Web-based material, but, speaking for myself, I wanted to use interactive tools and especially podcasting to reduce the artificial separation between anthology editors and contributors. We are lucky to live in a time when such connections can be made with relative ease. Given that it was our intent in the book to draw on material from cultures and languages unfamiliar to Americans, it was inevitable that we would include selections from writers that we, as an isolated country, had never heard of before.

For example, within the book and via Internet telephony - in a podcast on the Writers on Soccer microsite - we have the chance to hear from Elísabet Jökulsdottír of Reykjavík comparing the mystery of football to the mystery of the ocean. After our conversation, she said that she had never spoken before with an interviewer from North America. That her name and her work might reach a broader audience alone is one reason for the book and accompanying Web site.
I also spoke to Uroš Zupan of Slovenia. It would be an oversimplification to say that his prose makes him the Nick Hornby of Central Europe, but he does cite Fever Pitch as at least partial inspiration for essays on overlapping recollections of World Cup tournaments and of his upbringing in the former Yugoslavia. I was able to speak with him about his 2007 book, Textbook Panini, and how he grades both teams and players via a private set of aesthetic criteria. Interesting that, for Hornby, Arsenal Football Club to some extent
shaped his identity as well as his attitude to the wider world. Zupan, in contrast, samples from the menu on offer without prejudice as to nationalities, perhaps a trait acquired from having lived in a culture of restrictions. But, more likely, he is probably just curious.

There’s a whole lot more to come from John Turnbull - too much for one blog. Thesimplestgame are very grateful to John for his generosity and his time and look forward to many more electronic conversations with a man who, it has to be said, really knows his football writing. We're also grateful for the opportunity to put Elvis Costello and Gunter Grass in the same blog.

Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s account of his obsession with his favourite team is a football fiction hall of famer - if ever there was such a thing.

It should be famous for the quality of the writing, the humour and the incredibly moving chapter regarding the Hillsborough nightmare, but it’s mostly about a sad wee football fanatic who can’t keep a girl.

Hornby’s style keeps his work from falling easily into transparent genres. More importantly the book vindicates the unrequited love people like us (I mean geeks like me ’n him at least) have for something as ungiving as a football team. It allows us to get away with justifying the irrational. (Almost). It provides depth and meaning to our resentment of the phrase “it’s only a game.”

Unless, of course, you’re this guy…ESPN Soccernet's review of Fever Pitch. Sean didn’t do enough research and read the book with a preconceived agenda in mind and I think kind of missed most of the point as a result. Still I’m glad he liked it.

For me the issue of the book’s notoriety does come from its spawning of a horrible film adaptation. Two horrible film adaptations to be precise.

For a stiff English man playing a stiff English man, Colin Firth did reasonably well. The US version with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon (another SNL movie flopper) had to be baseball to make it more, I dunno…accessible? It smells like shite, primarily because it is.

As a writer myself, or at least someone aspiring to make a living from the written word, I have to commend Hornby for doing it, getting away with it and keeping on doing it. Not too many authors have managed a film from a book let alone two. Even fewer writers have been responsible for two large scoops of celluloid poo and maintained as much authorial credibility as he has. I think it's because he’s a decent bloke and a great writer.

I’ve been told that one of the secrets of Hornby’s success, particularly his earlier ostensibly boys books, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy, is there’s always something in it for the girls. His work has an emotive largesse which appeals to the eh, more emotional in our football fiction tribe. I wondered if it was what Dougie Brimson was driving at when he talked about ‘making blokes sound like limp wristed tossers’. (See the Dougie Brimson Interview this blog, April 9th 2008).

In the aftermath of the books success he was kind of held up as editor in chief of all things football and has put his name or his work or written introductions for a number of collections of football writings – I’ll get to those in a later blog.

Nick Hornby has been held responsible for the initial breath of life given by the now bloated corpse of ‘lad’ lit. To me Fever Pitch was always more than that though, it was the book that helped me, and a lot of others I'd imagine, realise football writing, something far more durable than a notional category, can be literary. Of course, I then read McIlvanney, Walvin, White and Davies and found that people had been writing football literature long before Hornby, but he opened the door, he seemed to make it easier to get the ‘it’ of literary football fiction. I’m grateful he did.