Gooner Book Club: The First Fifty Pages of Fever Pitch

Arsenal winning the FA Cup in 1971, the first year they won the Double. Well, there's always next year...

At long last, we’re taking a look at the first fifty pages of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s 1992 book about his life as an Arsenal fan. We’ve chosen a few of the most thought-provoking moments in the text to share with you; feel free to let us know your thoughts.

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

Before and since Fever Pitch, I can’t imagine a writer more accurately describing the blessing and the curse of an obsession, let alone the particularly masochistic bent of the love of Arsenal. The first fifty pages of Fever Pitch takes us through the birth and youth of Hornby’s Arsenal obsession, beginning with an Arsenal match at Highbury with his divorced father; as specific as Hornby’s memories are, though, even those of us who fell in love with Arsenal at the relatively old age of the early twenties can connect with the way young Hornby felt about the team. The life-or-death, why-doesn’t-anybody-understand sensation of wins and losses -- How can the world keep spinning? Why are people acting like it’s just a game? -- is one perhaps common to both the young and young-in-obsession.

Maybe now that wouldn’t happen; maybe a nine-year-old girl in the nineties would feel that she had just as much right to go to a game as we did. But in 1969 in our town, this was not an idea that had much currency, and my sister had to stay at home with her mum and her dolls.

Fever Pitch isn’t just a history of a team and a particular kind of love; it’s also a record of twentieth-century Britain, a world which none of us are personally acquainted. It’s a world where girls like me would never have been seen at a football stadium, the atmosphere permeated with “overwhelming maleness, cigar and pipe smoke, foul language,” a world in which matches cost only 25p and away and home supporters brawled regularly. Looked at from that angle, modern-day football, in the post-Hillsborough world, seems as sanitized as the Disneyfied Times Square. Should I be glad that I live in a world where I can attend matches without standing out or the fear of violence? Of course…but there’s always that sense of loss of authenticity, helped along by the elegiac tone of some passages.

Keep reading along with us…we’ll tackle some points from the next fifty pages next week, as well as share some of our favorite passages and moments sporadically throughout the week.