How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (12 page)

On a smaller scale, the English hooligan has

become like the gangsta rapper or the Mafioso, a glam-orized, commodified criminal. When the BBC finds itself in need of a ratings boost, it airs one of its many hooligan documentaries. Every month, it seems, one of
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

the British men’s magazines rolls out a piece documenting some new wrinkle of domestic hooliganism or its foreign o¤spring. The full breadth of this phenomenon hadn’t struck me until I went to see Chelsea in person. Walking down Fulham Road, I came across a vendor laying out tables with a collection of hats and pins bearing the skull-and-bones symbol of the infamous Headhunters gang. In the stands, I saw one teen with spiky hair wearing a blue Headhunters T-shirt.

Stadium security must have felt comfortable letting him through the gates, knowing that no true hooligan would be dumb enough to flash them such an advertisement.

This hooligan industry only started in the late nineties, when the gentrification of the English game was already in full swing, at a point when hooliganism had ceased to flourish in its traditional form. Of course, hooligans still fought, just not inside the stadium. As Alan explained the mechanics of fighting to me, “You call up the leader of the other firm and say, ‘Right, meet you at Trafalgar Square at two.’ And then you hope that the police don’t get there before it goes o¤. Sometimes it goes o¤. Sometimes you see the coppers and walk away.” For Alan, this new mode of appointment hooliganism trampled the pleasure of pure art. It was far more exhilarating when fights took place in narrow cor-ridors of stadiums or in the stands. And with all the prearrangement, “fighting has lost it spontaneity.” He poses the existential question of the modern soccer hooligan: “If football violence doesn’t take place in the stadium, is it even football violence?” Even though it pains him to admit it, he believes that hooliganism has
been domesticated, or domesticated enough to become an object of fascination and adoration.

You can understand why the market might have an appetite for the hooligan. On the most basic level, he’s a romantic rebel, willing to risk bodily harm and battle police. He’s not just a nihilist. He fights for the colors of the club, the same colors that the average peace-abiding fan loves. Because the hooligan is so similar, he is so fascinating. Why would some fans—guys who are part of liberal, peaceful England—take full leave of conventional morality and become thugs?

The hooligan literature doesn’t try to answer this question analytically. The mode is confessional and it aims to shock. (To quote at random from Alan’s work,

“The body fall[s] face downward on the platform, blood gushing from a deep cut in the back of the skull.”) Nevertheless, the authors feel the need to justify their violent behavior. They may have left conventional morality, but they still live near it. The hooligans typically describe themselves as practicing a virtuous violence: They never assault innocent bystanders, and they never use weapons. Too often, the desire to self-exculpate combines with the narrative imperative to shock to produce comic book writing, all bams and splats.

Garrison, like all the rest, sanitizes the story, omit-ting some of the most interesting biographical details.

That’s too bad, because it’s quite a story. From his early days as a Chelsea hooligan, he had become a self-admitted addict of the violence and the adrenaline that precedes it. “Fear is a drug,” he says, “There’s a very thin line between being hero and coward. It’s better than sex. It lasts longer as well.” He decided that he
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

wanted a career that would deliver the rush in regular doses. After school, with London in full swinging sixties mode, he bucked the emerging hippie zeitgeist and enlisted in the army. More specifically, he volunteered for a unit in the elite special services that would give him the most opportunities to practice his beloved craft of violence.

Alan began living a strange double life. During the week, and for long stretches of the year, he would serve his country. At times, this would involve taking part in secret missions to fight and train armies whose identity he’s reluctant to divulge. On weekends, he returned to his teenage football fighting. He reckons that the army knew about his double life—how could they not, with such a long sheet of crimes?— but didn’t much care about any weekend havoc so long as he performed his weekday duties. As part of this double life, he began acquiring the trappings of conventionality. He married and had a daughter. Although his wife would plead with him to cut out the violence, she had no leverage to push her case. By the time they first met, “she’d heard about me from a friend who’d worked with her. We met at an oªce Christmas party. I introduced myself to her and she said, ‘I don’t want to know you. You’re a fucking hooligan.’ ” She could never accuse Alan of selling her a false bill of goods.

His two lives fed o¤ one another. “I was trained to fight and I couldn’t turn it o¤,” he says. His other comrades didn’t want to turn it o¤ either. Garrison says eight fellow soldiers joined him in the hooligan ranks.

They brought a measure of professionalism to the fight.

On a trip to the States, Garrison smuggled back CB
radios, then illegal in Britain, and used them to coordi-nate assaults. The hooligan soldiers would carefully map out stadiums and their surroundings. Alan would stand back from the fray and track proceedings using binoculars and radio reports. “We were the fire brigade.

When someone got into trouble, needed some help, we would come in and sort things out.”

But there was tension between his existences, and in 1977, they ceased to be compatible. Chelsea traveled to the southwest of the country for a match at Ply-mouth. As the game ended, Garrison and his friends began bullying their way into the section holding Ply-mouth fans. Garrison had settled into combat with an opponent when, without his ever seeing it coming, an iron pipe made solid, shattering contact with the back of his skull. The furtive attacker struck him on the hand, too. Unfortunately for the attacker, he failed to knock the consciousness out of Garrison, who rose to his feet, seized the pipe, and began extracting vengeance. A blow to the face knocked his adversary’s eye from the socket. “It was hanging by a string,” he admits. It was Garrison’s ill fortune that a police oªcer entered the scene at this moment, with the eye and pipe weighing heavily against Alan’s protestations of innocence.

When he came to trial, Garrison supplied the court with x-rays of his broken hand and fractured skull to prove that he had acted in self-defense. This evidence, however, couldn’t overcome the eyewitness account of a cop. A judge sent Garrison away for attempted murder.

He left his family to spend nearly five years in Dart-moor prison.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

IV.

On my next trip to London, Garrison met me at the Finchley Road tube stop near his home. We walked down the street for a drink at Weatherspoon’s Pub.

When I took out my wallet to buy drinks, he pushed it away.

“I’m Jewish, but not that Jewish. You bought last time.”

Alan wore a T-shirt with air-brushed scorpions that he had purchased at a market near San Francisco a few years ago. He told me, “Bought it for seventy-five dollars o¤ the artist. I later found out that was quite a good deal.”

Conversations with Garrison invariably lead back to the Bay Area. In the eighties, after his release from prison, he fell into a career as a graphics designer, with a specialty in video games. When one of his friends landed in Silicon Valley, just in time for the dot-com boom of the nineties, Alan followed him to California.

Miraculously, the Immigration and Naturalization Service overlooked his convictions and granted Alan a work visa. He bought himself a house in the San Francisco suburbs.

“So what was the dot-com boom like?” I asked.

He paused uncharacteristically to think it over and then responded with a non sequitur. “Jesus Christ, but the women out there are sharks. Sitting at a bar, they’re around you like flies to shit. One day I was chatting with one bird and she says, ‘Are you coming back to my place?’ Then she got into her purse and pulled out this thing. ‘This is my AIDS certificate. I’ve been tested.’
And I’m like what? She says, ‘I’ve been tested.’ I said,

‘When was that?’ She said, ‘Three weeks ago.’ And I said, ‘How many blokes have you been with since then?

Fuck o¤.’ ” He waved his hand, laughing at his story.

“Women out there are like sharks, especially around English accents.”

In his book, he constantly flashes to scenes from his life in California and juxtaposes them with life in England. It makes for quite a contrast. But Alan also credits himself with bridging cultural gaps. The first time we met, he wore an Oakland Raiders jacket. It was an entirely appropriate outfit. Of all American football clubs, the Raiders have a reputation for surly, working-class fans that most closely approximate English soccer hooligans. During his years as an American, Garrison supported the Raiders as fervently as he could support any organization that wasn’t Chelsea. “We tried to teach them how to behave like proper hooligans,” told me. At a game in San Diego, he organized Raiders fans to make “a run” through the parking lot, throwing punches and asserting dominance over the home crowd that stood turning hot dogs on their portable grills. “They didn’t know what hit them.”

Liberal northern California is hardly a place fit for a Chelsea hooligan. More than any club, Chelsea has been associated with the neo-Nazi right. I had just seen a BBC documentary that showed how many of the

Chelsea hooligans—people that Alan knows—travel to concentration camps on tourist trips so that they can admire Hitler’s accomplishments. They deliver
sieg heil
salutes to the tourists and confiscate artifacts for their
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

personal collections of concentration camp parapherna-lia. Back in London, they’ve provided protection for Holocaust denier David Irving.

This history of English hooliganism can best be told as a distorted version of mainstream youth culture. At first, in Alan’s heyday, hooliganism imitated the early “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Beatles’ nonpolitical rebellion. It was all a good laugh, just for fun. Then, in the seventies, hooliganism began to dabble in radical politics. Only, as practitioners of hate and violence, they couldn’t credibly join with the peace-love-dope crowd.

They went in the opposite direction, becoming the vanguard of the proto-fascist British nationalist movement.

And just as the youth movement veered toward mindlessness, nihilism, and punk, the Chelsea movement became even more mindless, nihilist, and punk. During Alan’s imprisonment, admiration for the Nazis became a virtue.

As their numbers grew, Chelsea hooligans began subdividing into groups called “firms.” The most famous of the groups called themselves the Chelsea Headhunters. After their assaults, they would leave a calling card with their skull-and-bones logo that read,

“You have been nominated and dealt with by the Chelsea Headhunters.” In addition to linking up with the far right, the Headhunters joined with criminal ele-ments. They began peddling drugs and used other criminal rackets to become quite rich. Like the Bloods and Crips of L.A. street gang fame, they spent their money on fancy cars and designer clothes.

Another group formed a coalition of hooligans

across teams called Combat 18. It derived its moniker
from a numerological breakdown of Adolf Hitler’s

name, with the A yielding the 1 and H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Originally, the group began as a security force for the racialist British National Party, which had some horrifying luck exploiting xenophobia for electoral gain. But in the early nineties Combat 18

grew disillusioned with the softness of the BNP, even though the party unabashedly admired the Nazis.

Combat 18 had no patience with the BNP’s reformist embrace of electoral politics. They wanted White Revolution and they exploded nail bombs in immigrant neighborhoods, instigated race riots in Oldham, and plotted to kidnap the left-wing actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Although Alan identified himself as a right winger, he also presented his own politics as reasonably mainstream. Most of his judgments could have been issued by any conservative pundit on a TV chat show. But he also obviously hailed from the Combat 18 milieu. Many of the hard core from the terrorist right shared his demographic profile precisely. A slew of these thugs had even served in the special services, like Alan, before the police caught up with them. So I asked,

“What about Combat 18?”

Occasionally, on these sensitive subjects, Alan would tell me to turn o¤ my tape recorder and put down my pen. But, this time, he didn’t. He shifted his glass of Coke to the side. “First, this whole racist thing is bullshit. They’re nationalists. There are blacks in Combat 18. . . . That’s what I mean about this whole racist thing: It’s bullshit. If someone comes here [to England] like Kojak,” a black Chelsea hooligan, “he con-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

siders himself English. He talks with an English accent.

He says, ‘I’m brought up here. I’m English. I don’t give a toss if my parents came from the West Indies.’ He’ll fight for anything English. And he’s in Combat 18, which is right wing. It’s not racist right wing. It’s nationalist right wing.” He was adamant about this point.

“And what about the Jews? What about the Yids at Tottenham? Does that bother you?”

“Nobody bothers me. They make jokes, but I joke about being Jewish myself.”

While he spoke, I thought of the documentary I had seen the night before: the image of Chelsea hooligans sending postcards from Auschwitz to an anti-fascist activist back in England: “Wish you were here so that you could see me pissing on your mother’s bones.”

V.

The new economy may not have survived the nineties, but it left behind a new profession: the consultant.

Every industry has them. Why should hooliganism be any di¤erent? While Alan doesn’t fight regularly, he and the other semiretired Chelsea hooligans advise and mentor a group of teens that calls itself the Youth Firm.