How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer [reading eggs books txt] 📗

stood on the sides. Eventually, all the Catholic clubs in Northern Ireland followed Belfast Celtic in withdrawing from interfaith competition. Stripped of its own rivalries, it was natural that Northern Ireland turned to Scotland.

On the ferry, Jimmy keeps slipping from playful-ness into earnest discourse. Sipping his lager, he leans back in a banquette, his sneakers propped up on a table. “Glasgow’s not like here.” He pauses. “You can walk down the street there in a Rangers top and nothing will happen to you. It’s life or death here, mate.

They’re fucking animals. They’d kill little children.”

Glasgow, he explains, allows for a strange kind of political escapism. It’s not that you leave your politics behind at home. In fact, the opposite occurs. People like Jimmy can indulge their deepest political passions in Scotland.

They can indulge them in the most fanatical ways. The di¤erence is that in the safety of the Glasgow soccer stadium they don’t have to incessantly calculate the consequences of screaming their beliefs.

Before the ferry lands in Belfast, Jimmy’s friends begin to settle themselves into a less frenzied state.

One of them had been jumping up and down on the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

deck of the ship singing a song called “Bouncy, Bouncy,”

an orange Rangers jersey clinging to his beefy frame. If you canny do the Bouncy Bouncy, you’re a Tim. Set against the night, the fluorescent shirt made him the only visible sight on the horizon. Disembarking at the port, he puts on a navy windbreaker and zips it up to his neck. He looks down at his waist to make sure that his shirt doesn’t hang out from the bottom. Pulling his blue Nike cap over his eye, he turns back to me. “All right,” he says and fades into the crowd of arrivals.

On the ground in Belfast, passengers keep com-

plaining to cruise oªcials about our group’s behavior.

But the promised security entourage never arrives to deal with us. In the scheme of Old Firm o¤enses, these infractions are too minor to bother with. Waiting for a conveyor belt to spit out checked luggage, Jimmy sits in a corner arguing with his wife on the cell phone. He wants me to cancel my hotel reservation and crash on his couch. His wife wants to nag him for staying away all weekend. Before we go to his home, he insists that we stop for a drink with Ralphie the lorry driver at the Carrickfergus Glasgow Rangers Club. In Belfast, asking a cabbie to take you to a Rangers club can be a tricky business. For that trip, you wouldn’t want to gamble with a Celtic supporter or IRA sympathizer behind the wheel, especially if you’re drunk and intent on flexing your beer muscles. Jimmy repeatedly tells the driver that we’re headed to the Glasgow Rangers Club and carefully evaluates each reaction. When the driver’s blank stare remains blank, Jimmy starts singing and throws his duºe bag into the big black cab.

Settling down, Jimmy calls a girl from Edinburgh that Ralphie had met at a bar after the game. Ralphie, small, mustachioed, barely comprehensible with his thick Ulster accent, the platonic ideal of a sidekick, has a crush on her. Jimmy hands him the phone, and Ralphie stammers. We laugh at his clumsy flirting. “She’s up for it,” Jimmy whispers to him. But as the driver turns out from the ferry station and down a dark street, Ralphie abruptly tells the girl that he’ll call her later. A look of panic overtakes his face. “Shit man, Jimmy.

Fuckin’ Falls Road.” The Falls Road is a notorious center of IRA activity, a place where a Rangers supporter would be instantaneously mauled. Jimmy grabs the cell phone out of Ralphie’s hand and begins to dial friends at the Carrickfergus Rangers Club. They would be our reinforcements — at least they would know where to gather our bruised bodies. “Just tell them you’re an American. Nobody would touch you,” he counsels. By the time he has dialed the number, a sign for the motorway emerges. Three days of debauchery has deprived them of any sense of geography. Jimmy bangs on the Plexiglas separating the driver from us and gives him the thumbs up. Jimmy and Ralphie break into song, “We’re the top of the league, we’re the top of the league and you know.” As he sings, Jimmy lifts his arms above his head in triumph. t

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

t h e J e w i s h Q u e s t i o n

“Do you want something to read?”

“Yes, do you have something really light?”

“How about this short leaflet: Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”

—The movie Airplane!, 1980

I.

I had grown up thinking that great Jewish athletes come around about once in a decade, if the gene pool gets lucky. There was the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax in the sixties; the swimmer Mark Spitz in the seventies; and then many fallow years. At home, my father and I would imagine that various athletes were quietly Jewish, like the Marrano survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. My father was especially adamant that Sid Bream, a lanky, energetic first baseman with the Atlanta Braves, was a person of the book. And, to be fair, the name, both first and last, made him a plausible member. But in retrospect, there were biographical details that probably should have negated our analysis.

Sid Bream liked to talk about his love of hunting, and he drove a pickup truck. Yes, he wore a Mark Spitz moustache, but that was twenty years after its vogue within our community. The simple truth was that we were too apprehensive to go looking for Bream’s real ethnicity.

Before Bream captured the imagination of our

household, I had stumbled across the soccer club Hakoah of Vienna, winners of the 1925 Austrian championship. Hakoah’s great