Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (20 page)

As for baseball, I was born and will die a Mets fan—an allegiance dutifully served to my beloved maternal grandfather—but I am an extraordinarily lazy and ignorant one, whose grasp of the mechanics of the game will never be better than tenuous. I got excited about hockey for a short spell of two or three years, mostly during college, where the Vermont climate seemed well suited to the enjoyment of the game, and then abruptly stopped caring. For most of my life, sports were never so much my thing—in part, I'm sure, to distinguish myself among my kin.

Resentment figured into my resistance, too. I blamed sports, to some extent, on my father's frequent absences even when my parents were still together; he often had to go to games, as it was part of his job. In my adolescence, I often made some money by transcribing his lengthy interviews with athletes. After typing up hours and hours of conversation with one savagely mind-numbing dullard, I complained bitterly to my father. He seized this as an opportunity to teach me a lesson about not stereotyping people and told me that the first time he met Jerry Kramer—the celebrated Green Bay Packer of Super Bowls I and II and not, I hasten to add, the subject of the interview in question—the strapping right guard was sitting on a bed in a motel room somewhere in America, reading a book of poems by Wallace Stevens. Well,
I
hadn't read Wallace Stevens yet and was duly impressed. My lesson was learned: Jocks are people, too, and sometimes they even read really hard poems.

Many years later, I was working on a project at my father's office. He was sifting through a big pile of his papers from the sixties and came across a note that made him blanch. He looked at me and said gravely, “There's something I have to tell you.” I asked him what it was. He turned away from me and answered, “It wasn't Wallace Stevens. It was
Rod McKuen
.”

We never spoke of it again. I don't blame it on Rod McKuen—though I guess I could—but gridiron football would
never
do a thing for me. Soccer was another story. It probably didn't hurt that it is the sport in which the rest of my family seemed to have the least interest. Frank and I happened to be in France during the 1998 World Cup, and it was impossible not to share in the excitement of the people around us, not to get caught up in their collective
joie de football
. Evening after evening in a little Franco-Irish pub in the Loire Valley, we'd join the locals to watch the games. And as we continued our travels around Europe that summer, we watched matches as often as possible. I especially loved the Netherlands' national team, partly out of some sense of duty to my Dutch heritage, I suppose, but also because their style—even though it was by then little more than a shadow of the Total Football for which the Dutch had been famous in the 1960s and 70s—looked so intelligent and elegant, and when they lost to the indisputably great but far flashier Brazilian side in a penalty shootout in the semifinals, I was crushed.

Ian knew about my half-assed, fair-weather, World-Cup-centric interest in soccer. He also knew that I was at least nominally a Mets fan, and therefore predisposed to champion an underdog. To top it off he was certainly aware that I am Jewish, and Tottenham—for historical reasons about which there is considerable disagreement—has long been a team beloved of the Jews of north London and, by extension, elsewhere. This confluence of three key elements—
you seem to like soccer well enough anyway, you root for losers anyway, and you are a Jew anyway
—formed the heart of Ian's compelling case for my candidacy for Spurs fandom, which he launched in earnest in the fall of 2006. “Why don't you just come watch a match with us sometime?” he suggested gently and casually, not being a hard sell kind of guy. Okay, I agreed. Sure. Why not?

Let the record, an excited flurry of e-mails, show that I watched my first Tottenham Hotspur FC game on Sunday, November 19, 2006, a few days after I'd received this missive from Ian:

I'll be watching the Tottenham game at Central Bar. We'll be there for the 11 am kick-off. Come prepared to be disappointed, it's part of being a Spurs fan (“It's the hope that kills you, not the despair”).

It was an unremarkable, uninspired, even a little bit ugly match against Blackburn, a team I have detested with nearly irrational fervor ever since. I brought a pen and the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
with me; in the event that my interest waned, I would at least have a crossword puzzle at hand. The game, played on a rain-soaked pitch, ended in a 1–1 draw. Ian's brow was tightly furrowed throughout, his focus intent. I was not exactly riveted, but for most of the ninety minutes of play, the crossword puzzle stayed in my bag. When we went outside to smoke after it had ended, Ian scrunched up his face and shrugged his shoulders. I got the message: This was how it was, being a Tottenham fan, and I couldn't say he hadn't warned me.

As I wish to remember the chain of events, despite this lousy first game, I returned, week after week, and gradually started to catch on, to get into it, to figure out who was who, who did what, who was good, who was not, to pick favorites (the suavely skillful and broodingly handsome Bulgarian striker Dimitar Berbatov) and not-favorites (the beleaguered and often hapless goalkeeper Paul Robinson, whose best seasons with the Spurs were by then over). In the version in which I prefer to remember how my love for Tottenham Hotspur took hold, what happened was that I persisted until, to my utter amazement, I was hooked, I was invested, I
cared
. I like to recall it as an experience of natural and incremental engagement, in which each game I watched deepened my commitment, no matter if it concluded with a win or a loss or a draw.

But the same e-mail record offers evidence that something quite different had actually been going on. It reveals that once the seed of the notion of the possibility of my becoming a Tottenham Hotspur supporter had been planted, it instantly took root. It is a fact that the first Spurs game I watched was the dismal one against Blackburn on the nineteenth of November in the year 2006. It is also a fact that a few days
before
this momentous and ultimately life-changing occasion, in an e-mail to a college friend and fellow New York Mets fan, I wrote, “After the letdown of the baseball season, I am devoting all of my sportsfan energy exclusively to Tottenham Hotspur.” So it was
not
something as organic as I wanted to recall, but a deliberate and willful decision. It was, in its way, a lifestyle choice. I had made up my mind. I
wanted
to be a soccer fan, and, specifically, a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

Exactly what had brought on this ardent desire eludes me. Was it just that I craved something new with which to keep myself occupied? Was it that Ian's abundantly apparent joy in the game itself, and especially in his team, was truly infectious? Was it that, in soccer fandom, I recognized another means by which to effect my complete assimilation among the Golden Girls, to galvanize my place in the tribe, if that was in fact what I wanted to do? Probably all of the above. Still, the extent to which I came to care was, if not cause for amazement, surprisingly deep and consuming. It wasn't long at all before I was arranging my weekends around Tottenham games (“Sunday brunch? Okay. But it'll have to be after one-thirty.”) and taking lunch late at work to catch the second half of the occasional game that aired on weekday afternoons at a pub near my office. In soccer, the game loved so intensely by so many people throughout so much of the world, I had found a sport that I, too, could love—a straightforward game with simple rules, thrilling speed, admirable efficiency, and many instances of beauty. And maybe
that
was all I'd wanted: a sport I could call my own, and a team I could call my own, after having spent most of my life as an outsider.

Ian was, and remains, the best soccer mentor a novice could have—never pushing too hard, gently offering counsel as necessary, pointing out pretty plays and great runs and spectacular saves without any disagreeable air of didacticism, and I believe that he considers me one of the resounding successes among his disciples. I threw myself into my soccer education with gusto, and sought out sources independent of his tutelage. I read books and blogs, watched classic clips on YouTube, diligently followed news of transfers and injuries, learned all the words to a number of Tottenham chants (which Ian, being as well-mannered as he is, rarely partakes of and often frowns upon, and which I would never dare to vocalize in his presence, save for the tame and frequent battle cry of COYS:
Come On You Spurs!
). Here is a personal favorite, a filthy and bellicose little number set to the tune of the English music-hall chestnut “My Old Man”:

My old man said be an Arsenal fan.

I said, “Fuck off, bollocks, you're a cunt.

We took the North Bank in half a minute,

We took the Shed with Chelsea in it,

We hammered the Hammers,

With carving knives and spanners,

We taught the Millwall how to fight,

So I'll never be a Gunner,

Cos every cunt's a runner.”

That's what I told my old man.

Though the major historic rival of Tottenham is clearly Arsenal, its closest neighbor, I didn't instantly
hate
Arsenal; in fact, I often admired the way they played and looked forward to their games against the Spurs. I came to consider Chelsea the true villains of the league, adept but boring, newly cash-rich, and deservedly cursed with the most irritating and hotheaded fans (excluding, of course, those few among my friends). I reserved no particularly intense vitriol for the juggernaut that is Manchester United, by far the most favored team among American EPL fans. I hardly saw the point in despising them, much less in supporting them. What fun is a team that wins all the time? Where is the dramatic tension, the possibility of being surprised by joy once in a while amidst all the heartache? It seemed far too much like being a Yankees fan, an altogether weak and unimaginative proposition.

Ian's enthusiasm and pedagogy aside, I found Tottenham Hotspur irresistibly lovable, and not just on account of the team's adorable name or the downright poetic name of their stadium (White Hart Lane, which I figured might just as well have been the name of a spooky old folk song, or perhaps of a Fairport Convention record full of spooky old folk songs), their absurd crest (a cockerel, a flightless variety of fowl,
an immature male chicken
, perched atop a soccer ball), and their endearing, promising, but frequently losing ways. They are known for playing in an attacking style, and aside from being a polite way of saying that their defense often blows, this means that they play assertive, often nervy, entertaining soccer.

I established some ground rules by which I still abide. I continue to say
soccer
far more often than
football
, for I can think of few species more irritating than American fans of the game who consider faux British affect an essential part of its enjoyment. They can have their Man United; they can have their Ben Sherman and Doc Marten costumes; they can have their Mockney BS and dismiss such-and-such defender as a
hopeless fucking geezer
to their poseur hearts' contents; I will stand by the Spurs and I will call the game I love
soccer
. I am an American, for God's sake, and nothing can change that. During games, I generally refrain from commentary unless there is something I absolutely must say, or unless it is late in the day and I have been drinking and can't help myself. Otherwise, I am content to watch, and listen, and learn. And, above all, to cheer.

But with time, I started owning, and giving voice to, no shortage of opinions. To the amusement of some of the Golden Girls, I started speaking of Tottenham as
we
.
We
desperately need a new goalkeeper. I hope
we
don't get rid of (then manager) Martin Jol, under whose leadership Tottenham had ascended higher than they had in years.
We
played a great game against United. Some of them sometimes laughed at me, and at least one patently, if tacitly, declined to discuss the matter with me at all, having deemed me, I suspect, an absolute arriviste and thereby an annoyance to one for whom soccer was virtually a birthright. (I cannot help but wonder if things might have been different if I had decided to support
his
team.) But I had the support and encouragement of many others, including our friendly and civilized little crew of Tottenham fans—Ian and Laura and T.J. and Arnold—and Ian carried on with his campaign with delicacy, forwarding links of particular import, alerting me to the heartwarming news that the Spurs were the most charitable team in the league, occasionally sending along agonized, soulfully Slavic headshots of Dimitar Berbatov, texting messages of delight or distress depending on how a given game was going. And when, a year or so after my initial embrace of Tottenham Hotspur FC, I took the subway into Manhattan to watch games less and less often, opting instead to watch at home or at bars in Brooklyn, nearer to home, and when the list of soccer teams I cared about and made it my business to follow expanded to include Ajax and Barcelona in addition to the Dutch National Team and Tottenham Hotspur, he accepted that the time had come for this fledgling to fly off on her own, fully and correctly confident that it would
always
be the Spurs I loved best.

There is a Dutch commercial for Amstel beer. In it, three men are chatting at one end of a bar. At the other end of the bar stands a tall blonde in a tight pink sweater. One of the men approaches her, all smiling and friendly. “Look, if the striker gets the ball between the keeper and the last defender,” he asks, arranging three glasses by way of illustration, “what is it?”

“Offside,” she answers without skipping a beat.

He thanks her and returns to his buddies, to whom he reports, grinning,
“It's a man.”
They all have a good laugh.