Achievement unlocked
Today: Ian Williams, academic and sometimes writer, blogging at Stuckness.
Issue No. 571
American Football Fan
Ian Williams
American Football Fan
by Ian Williams
No professional sports team of which I am a fan has ever won a title, at least not while I was an active fan. Until Tuesday, that is, when Arsenal won the English Premier League. I became very sports happy, which is a specific sort of happiness, somewhere between delirium and euphoria. I threw on an Arsenal shirt from the 2012 season, drove to my weekly gaming night, and proceeded to try to talk to my friends about Arsenal, though what they really wanted to talk about was elves and hobbits.
Arsenal have won numerous titles, but they hadn’t won the EPL title since 2004, long before I became a fan. I came along in 2010 in circuitous fashion. I had been a lifelong American football nut—a long-suffering Carolina Panthers fan, appropriately, with a soft spot for the Green Bay Packers. Soccer was too bougie for me, possibly even suspiciously effeminate. I wanted 300-pound men in body armor slamming into each other, which we now know the terrible cost of. Where I grew up, in postindustrial central North Carolina, soccer was for the preppies, and I was a working class kid who slowly grew to hate those people. The class politics of my hometown were legible down to the street names, and even more definitely down to which sports you sorted yourselves into.
But a strange thing happened in 2010. Every four years, I’d halfway tried to pay attention to the World Cup, but now a buzz had developed around the USA team, and I decided I’d really watch it. In the USA’s match against Algeria that year, Landon Donovan scored a magical goal, deep into stoppage time, and I started to get hooked. When the World Cup was over, I decided to watch pro soccer as a neutral, and slowly I fell in love with an awkward, ambitious team with a funny name: Arsenal. They played with style and panache even though they bumbled enough to never quite win; I didn’t want to be a front runner. The manager, Arsène Wenger, was an erudite, oddly charming Frenchman in a league mostly staffed with what seemed like subliterate oafs. Arsenal’s players were small and crafty and almost always injured, especially Robin Van Persie, my favorite of all. I became addicted, little by little, game by game. The rhythms of soccer matched what I found I most needed from sports, and with no commercials; a perpetual swell and eventual release which, at its best moments, seemed to mirror sex.
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