Tournament of Hearts
Of England hate, England joy
“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
J.G. Ballard, responsible for the quotation above, was partly raised in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai during World War II. Anyone who has read or watched the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun will know how difficult, to say the least, that experience was for him. In the fictionalised version of the camp, what the young boy Jim previously knew as civilization loses almost all its established norms. Money is no longer money. Cigarettes are the currency and when they run out, condoms take their place.
The book’s author, once middle-aged and ensconced in a comfortable suburb outside London, was finally able to retrieve his horrific memories of the camp’s squalor and violence. Speaking about the book, it was clear he was convinced that the peace of 1945 was largely an artificial construction that would hold together only temporarily.
In his last novel, Kingdom Come, Ballard wrote: “The suburbs dream of violence. In their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” Ballad knew whereof he spoke, for in 1960 he moved with his wife and three children to Shepperton, a commuter town about 15 miles out of London. (After the death of his wife in 1964, Ballard raised his children alone, by all reports doing a wonderful job.) The darkness of his vision was in no way visible from the surface appearance of his quite ordinary suburban life.
Last summer, after watching the film Oppenheimer, I asked two of my friends if they kept baseball bats underneath their beds. Both of them gave answers approximately in the affirmative. One had fashioned himself a weapon of a different sort out of wood. Same idea. We all had a good chuckle.
Since moving back to the suburbs, I’ve found my thoughts turning in violent directions. There is something about the near-total silence of the neighbhourhood, typically punctuated only by annoying sounds—lawnmowers, police sirens, the chirping of expiring smoke alarm batteries, the harsh fart of the modded car engine, the lunatic at the local intersection who is shouting his fury at the impassive stream of passing traffic—all these put my nerves more on edge.
Suburbia is an obstinate rebuttal to the concept of negative liberty—the idea that you can do anything you like provided it isn’t prohibited by the law. Suburbia seems to only allow behaviors that have been prescribed by the logic of its physical structure. If you want to shop, go to the mall. If you want recreation, go to the recreation centre. If you’re a kid, go to the playground. If you’re a teenager, get moody and stay in your room. Don’t forget to mow the lawn.
Sometimes, in the night, when I hear a sound that seems off, I get up, search the house, and find myself fearing a potential home invasion and yet also hoping I will rise to the challenge. An Edmonton friend of mine from years back once had to deal with such an intruder. A crazed youth had smashed his front window and entered the premises, whereupon he started throwing shards of glass at my friend, who thankfully survived the encounter by grappling with the intruder and finally throwing him out the back window. Kudos.
Naturally enough, this puts me in the mind to think of sport. In sport, the line between civilization and its opposite is particularly fragile. “Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture,” is another of Ballard's zingers from Kingdom Come.
So look, I already put my cards on the table when I wrote about the Edmonton Oilers’ drive to Game Seven of the Stanley Cup final. I like sports. I feel I have to embrace sports as part and parcel of the society I live in—the good and the bad. To not embrace sports, I would be madder and sadder than I already am. I understand the point of view of those who want no part of it, or who find it boring. That’s OK. To each their own.
On Sunday, I will be watching England versus Spain. I will be watching from a pub in my suburb.
England provides a fitting platform to speak of the thin line between civilization and its opposite—of the slumbering suburbs and the eruption of violence that often mar the national sport. England introduced modern football to the world; it also introduced the modern suburb. There is a remarkable old BBC documentary from the 1960s about Londoners cleared from old, ramshackle buildings and transplanted to new purpose-built suburbs. Every man, woman and teenager interviewed by the BBC says more or less the same thing: “There’s nothing here. Nothing to do.” The nothingness is at first glaring; then people adapt. Now it has become the norm. You can see why some people go out of their minds.
On one of my first visits to London as a free-range adult in 1993, I entered a Tube station at the very moment that a horde of Crystal Palace fans were departing from a game, drunk on victory and drunk on liquor drinks. For a few seconds, I was terrified. They were, every one of them, male. They were roaring at the volume of a dragon roused from slumber. They numbered in their hundreds and I was walking against their incoming surge. I had a large backpack on, marking me out as a tourist. But they had no interest in me. The surge engulfed me, moved around me, moved on.
That was my first taste of the power of a large, inebriated crowd, fuelled with its own power and sense of potential. It was easy then to understand hooliganism. What if the crowd had encountered the fans of an opposing team rather than an ex-pat returning to the mother country? Then it could well have been pitched battle.
Such scenes played out countless times in England of the 1980s; sometimes the violence was exported overseas. Nowadays, you would be more likely to witness such hooliganism in France.
The English game was gentrified. The biggest clubs priced their games out of reach of the working poor. The element of off-pitch thuggery that bedevilled the English sport subsided considerably. The thuggery of the players also subsided. It’s instructive to look back and remember how things once were. The legendary Manchester United team of the 1990s had notorious hazing rituals for new players, who would have balls kicked at their face by every other member of the team, or would be dressed in multiple tracksuits and barricaded into the sauna, or locked into the tumble dryer for a spin. One boy, as reported by The Guardian, was "tied up, gagged and put in a kitbag to be taken to Old Trafford [the stadium] on the bus." This was considered the best way to maintain the natural hierarchy of the club.
Nowadays, it’s more likely the team will hire a psychologist and a throw-in coach and a nutritionist. The sport’s development mirrors larger society. We’re fully post-industrial now. We are no longer brawny, brawling societies. Our advancement, so we are told, depends on understanding algorithms, science, probabilities. We don’t break down men to make them; we try to build them up. I can’t tell you if any of this is working on a society-wide scale. But I do see it working in the English teams I cheer on: namely, the national team and Liverpool FC.
The English team that takes to the pitch on Sunday will attract naysayers. But I defy anyone to find a more likeable group of individuals than this—at least in England’s sporting history. They have withstood disdain, bordering on hate, from many of their own fans, and they have come out the other side. They keep finding near-miraculous ways of winning. Unlike the hard-man England teams of old, who spectacularly missed penalties at clinch moments, this team scored every single penalty against Switzerland with poise and confidence. Maybe something is working. Maybe the team has even become civilised. Maybe, after the humiliations of most of the 21st century, a humbled England is ready to take its place as a country among equals, without the sense of superiority or entitlement of decades ago.
The sheer organizational and financial might that Euro 2024 requires proves that western civilization is still just about wheezing along, surviving, whether deservingly or not. England's manager, Gareth Southgate, will hopefully avoid being pelted by plastic cups. I hope the host city of Berlin will be spared any serious crowd violence. On Monday, the debris will be cleaned up, the English fans will wake up, hungover and happy or hungover and sad, and then a good number of them will start making their way back to their Ballardian suburbs—back to the illusion of civilization.
NOTES
I stole the title of this post from Canadian rock bank, the Constantines. It was the title of their third album. Subsequently, “Tournament of Hearts,” has become the name of a women’s curling championship (full name: The Scotties Tournament of Hearts, sponsoured by Kruger Products, who manufacture Scotties’ tissues and other paper products.)
"The benign catastrophist," interview with J.G. Ballard, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/06/fiction.jgballard
“Daytriping Ballardland,” by Sault Franks https://www.jgballard.ca/deep_ends/daytripping_ballardland.html
“Gareth Southgate claims England fans are creating ‘unusual environment,’” The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jun/26/gareth-southgate-england-fans-slovenia-euro-2024-football
“Manchester United’s old rites of passage built some characters but broke others,” The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2018/dec/30/manchester-uniteds-old-rites-of-passage-built-some-characters-but-broke-others
Interesting take on modern suburban life, Laurence.