Fever Pitch

The first half of Part 1 of Fever Pitch covers the years of 1968 through 1972, beginning when the author is 11 years old and his parents have just separated. Having an absent parent was unique for the time and place, so Hornby’s father attempts to maintain a strong bond with his children, but he runs into what Hornby calls a “one-parent Saturday-afternoon-at-the-zoo problem” (13), meaning that they have run out of things to do together. Hornby and his father find something to do together every Saturday afternoon in the form of football, and despite not really wanting to go the first time, he is instantly hooked. It is not necessarily the football that captivates him, nor the size of the crowd, but rather the atmosphere of it all. It is the first time that he has experienced people clearly not enjoying themselves at a public entertainment that they have paid to attend. Hornby calls this “entertainment as pain” and says that “it seemed to be something I’d been waiting for” (13).

Although it was not planned that way, Hornby’s love of football revolves around Arsenal because it was at Arsenal’s Highbury stadium that he saw his first match. Both the club and the stadium provide Hornby with a new identity as an Arsenal supporter, which helps him to fit in with other football fans at school. The new identity, however, also comes with a deeper level of fandom that begins to be problematic. Just before he turns 12 years old, he sees Arsenal play for the first time away from Highbury and gets a taste of opposing fans celebrating, realizing for the first time that losing can make one bitter. Worse, his father stands up to applaud the underdogs, Swindon, which Hornby sees as a betrayal; afterwards, his father angrily explains sportsmanship to him. When his father takes him to watch England’s National Team, the defending World Cup champions, a few months later, he also realizes that other football teams are not his team, regardless of how good they are.

While Hornby’s father had the idea to take him to Arsenal matches, he is not particularly a fan of the club. Arsenal is considered a boring club to watch, and Hornby is displeased knowing that his father would likely rather be watching a different club. However, due to his obsesses fandom and his father’s desire to bond, they continue with their regular matches at Highbury. In 1971, Hornby first sees Brazil and its star player, Pelé, play against Czechoslovakia and, later, England. He comes away amazed, and Hornby suggests the team “ruined” the sport for everyone by setting the bar so high.

Hornby’s father moves out of the country before the start of the 1970-71 season, his third as an Arsenal fan. This means that the seated section of the West Stand at Highbury will no longer be possible for him, and in order to continue with his fandom, a new routine will be needed. The new routine emerges with his friend Rat, who begins traveling with him to the games each week. The pair stands in a cheap section of the terraces known as the Schoolboys’ enclosure, which Hornby refers to as “a breeding ground for future hooligans” (32). One aspect that almost certainly plays a role in Hornby’s obsession with Arsenal at such a young age is the club’s success during the 1970-71 season. The club not only won the league title for the first time since 1953, but it also won the Football Association (FA) Cup for the first time since 1950, making it only the second club to accomplish The Double in the 20th century.

Over the second half of Part 1 of Fever Pitch, Hornby explores his ever-expanding fandom through the issues of identity, hooliganism, loyalty, and personal growth. In early 1972, Hornby’s father takes him to a match at London’s Stamford Bridge Stadium, home of Chelsea F.C. In his essay “Another City,” Hornby examines the differences between Chelsea and his beloved Arsenal, most notably that the former was the glamourous team with celebrity fans, flashy players, and a posh neighborhood surrounding the stadium, while the latter team more closely resembled his own personality. In the following essay, “Islington Boy,” Hornby writes “ever since I have been old enough to understand what it means to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else, preferably North London” (40). This sentiment comes from the fact that Arsenal and Highbury Stadium are in North London, roughly 30 miles from his home in Maidenhead.

When Hornby is nearly 15 years old, his mother finally allows him to travel to away games by himself, a development that surprises him in retrospect because of the danger involved due to rampant hooliganism in the early 1970s. Fever Pitch examines the dark side of football culture in a number of ways, but it primarily focuses on the violence. According to Hornby, during the first half of the 1970s, “there was a fight at every single Arsenal game I attended” (47). Early in the 1972-73 season, Hornby’s level of fandom grows again when he leaves the Schoolboy’s enclosure to begin watching from Highbury’s North Bank, the area of the stadium where the club’s rowdiest fans gathered and the one most prone to violence. He considers the move a rite of passage, but it can also be seen metaphorically, as a 15-year-old taking a scary step into growing up.

Another issue that arises during this era of Hornby’s fandom is that of loyalty. In the essay “Me and Bob McNab,” he describes the time that he spoke to the aforementioned player prior to a match. While it might be exciting for him, Hornby is far from being starstruck because he understands that it is not the role of a true fan. Asking rhetorically where these players were 20 years ago, Hornby explains that “the plain truth is that the club means more to us than it does to them” (54). In May of 1972, Arsenal reaches the FA Cup Final for the second consecutive year, this time facing Leeds United. Hornby feels detached from the triumph of the previous season because he was not at the Final. That will not be the case again, as he now has his mother’s permission to travel and is assured a ticket to Wembley thanks to the many home program vouchers that he has accumulated. Concerning the loyalty inherent in his fandom, Hornby argues, “unless I had suffered and shivered, wept into my scarf and paid through the nose, it was simply not possible to take pleasure in or credit for the good times” (57).

As the 1972-73 season gets underway, Arsenal embraces, with great results, the Dutch-inspired “total football” approach, which de-emphasizes traditional positions. Hornby’s life away from the pitch is changing profoundly as well. Earlier that summer, he learned for the first time that his father and new stepmother had two small children, making him a half-brother to both. Hornby has also officially discovered girls and fallen in love for the first time, but he ended up with a broken heart only a few weeks later. He credits the breakup with giving him a real life, the kind “in which things happened to me rather than the club” (76). Hornby admits that he cannot even remember any of the games during the 1973-74 season, and he did not attend any at all in 1974-75. In closing Part 1 with his essay “Goodbye To All That,” Hornby describes the conscious decision that he was beginning to make to grow up and forget football altogether. In addition to a driving new interest in girls, he was becoming an intellectual in the year before he was to begin college. Hornby says that football “had saved my life in many ways,” but it was time for him to leave it “to those with less sophisticated or less developed tastes” (79).