Fever Pitch - Softcover

Hornby, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575059109 ISBN 13: 9780575059108

Publisher: Gollancz, 1994

Synopsis

Chronicled from the perspective of a besotted ten-year-old Arsenal fan, through disillusioned adolescence, to an adult "who should know better", this book examines the absurdities, idiosyncrasies and traumas of everyday life and football. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. Interweaving his personal and familial upheavals with the varied fortunes of Arsenal over two decades, Nick Hornby has produced an insight into what it is like to be a fan. Combining anecdote with a wider commentary on the state of the game, the book touches upon many issues, from pre-match entertainment to the availability of FA Cup tickets, hooliganism, the tragedies at Heysel and Hillsborough, non-League and school football, and Arsenal's reputation as a boring team.

About this title

Review:

Fever Pitch is both an autobiography and a footballing bible rolled into one. Nick Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasises that even if a girlfriend "went into labour at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle. Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems." Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humour and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain- soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prison-like conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of police officers waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger

Review:

Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby s obsession and the state of the game. GQ
"Hornby has established himself... as a maestro of the male confessional. [His] books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity; the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams." The New Yorker
"Utterly hilarious." Elle
"Fever Pitch transcends the mundane and the sporty to say something about the way we live." The Observer"

"Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby's obsession and the state of the game." --GQ

"Hornby has established himself... as a maestro of the male confessional. [His] books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity; the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams." --The New Yorker

"Utterly hilarious." --Elle

"Fever Pitch transcends the mundane and the sporty to say something about the way we live." --The Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0575059109
• ISBN 13: 9780575059108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256