Among the Thugs

By Bill Buford

Norton 1990, First American Edition 1992: 313 Pages

What principle governed the British sporting event? It appeared that, in exchange for a few pounds, you received one hour and forty-five minutes characterized by the greatest possible exposure to the worst possible weather, the greatest number of people in the smallest possible space, and the greatest number of obstacles - unreliable transportation, no parking, an intensely dangerous crush at the only exit, a repellent polio pond to pee into, last minute changes of the starting time - to keep you from ever attending a match again. -Among the Thugs, p. 19 

Somewhere between 6 and 7 a.m. on a beautiful October day in 1997, my roommates and I woke up and began drinking heavily, because in a few short hours, Oklahoma State would play Texas. Kickoff was at 11 a.m. OSU, its only football legacy being producing first Thurman Thomas, and then Barry Sanders in successive years, was a bastard child of football in the newly-minted Big 12. We weren't as bad as Baylor, but we had none of the tradition, pomp and circumstance that did OU, Texas, Texas A&M, Nebraska, et al. We were the southern version of Iowa State, a northern version of Texas Tech. We were, in suma, just another team for OU and Texas and Nebraska to beat up on each year.

And then, funny thing, we beat Texas.

As the seconds wore down, there were Security People lining the inside of the stadium, especially on the student side. Yet as the clock wore down, we knew what was going to happen. They told us not to (me and my roommates and friends were on the front row, right there in the line of fire, so to speak), but at about five seconds we swarmed over the eight-foot drop and the field was enveloped in moments. One goal post came down, and then perhaps another. I recall that the mob of students tried to carry one of the goalposts out of the west end of the stadium, before law and order was finally, technically restored.What I do remember was that I'd been sunburned and naked from the waist up on the Spiritron all afternoon drunk out of my mind while berating various Texas student athletes, and I was excited.

***

Another story. That same season, Colorado came to town for a November night game. It was televised on Fox Sports, and I'd taken a job as a parabolic mic holder, meaning I was one of the guys who held the satellite looking thingies, capturing the on-the-ground sounds of games that you probably don't even realize you year. I was pelted with this and that all evening long, and the crowd was drunk, and when a guest of one of my friends hit me in the back of my head with a handful of ice, I'd finally had enough, turned around, and told him to fuck off. We won that game as well - a mild upset - and the crowd hit the field again. This time, it wasn't out of glory, it was out of a sense that it should be done. Texas, for me, was fun, because I was One of Them. Colorado was not. 

That season, the issue of rushing the field Became An Issue all over the country. Over the next decade, schools would buy collapsible goal posts to stem the tide of people tearing them down after any meaningless victory. People still rush the field, but prosecution awaits them on the other side.

****

There is a sense that prosecuting college students who rush the field is fascist to some degree, but after reading Among the Thugs, I understand why administrators go after such people, most of whom are simply partaking in a tradition that has been lionized in every major sporting event ever played.

Lionized? My first memory of sports is this: Joe Montana just hit Dwight Clark in the back of the endzone, the Niners beat the Cowboys, and the crowd sort of rushed the field. The memory is of a man scooping up a hunk of Candlestick Park, which by now has no doubt blossomed into a yard of memories for the guy. When I was a basketball fan in the 1980s, NBA championships - almost always in Boston Garden or the LA Forum - were celebrated by the crowd rushing the court. One of the most famous scenes caught on tape in sports history is John Havelecek stealing the goddamn ball, and the drunken Micks of Boston swarming him. In the film Hoosiers, Jimmy Chitwood's championship-sealing 20-foot jumpshot would not have been the same had not the parquet immediately been enveloped by the swarming fans of Hickory living the dream. Christian Laetner hit the shot that stopped college basketball dead cold against Kentucky, and was swarmed. I need say nothing more than "The band is out on the field," and the bulk of you know exactly what I'm talking about. When Hank Aaron hit the ball that broke Ruth's record, the most famous filmed recording is of Aaron circling the bases with two zealous fans congratulating him.

***

I bring up all this because Among the Thugs is bizarre, but it's not that far removed from experiences all of us have shared. Bill Buford, an American expatriate, spent (wasted?) several years of his life going about with English futbol thugs as they drank, brawled, rioted and killed their ways across Europe. In the 1980s, the only thing most Americans knew of English futbol was that about every two years, scores of the fans were crushed to death because someone wouldn't open a gate, the most iconographical picture being found in Sports Illustrated, a girl's head crushed agains the bars of a cast-iron gate. The picture, incidentally, was taken at Hillsborough Stadium during an FA Cup semifinal in 1989, and that specific picture was a blip on the radar screen in America, though it represented the fact that ninety-five people died that day at a futbol match. Consider that the Oklahoma City bombing took 168 lives, and it was a terrorist attack. Ninety-five people died. Imagine that hardly after the game had started, 95 people died during the Colts-Steelers AFC Championship Game last year, and you'll get an idea of the scope of the tragedy.

Buford's book is the most startling display of masculinity gone awry I've ever read, rivaled only by Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels. Both books - so similar it hurts - has a writer who is not part of the tribe about which he writes, diving head-first into a subculture most of us aren't aware exists, or for that matter, the potential for such a subculture exists. Binge drinking, rioting, looting, stabbing, terrorizing the various towns holding futbol matches, all would be the work of fantasy had we not known it was true. And all of this, mind you, over futbol. The arena is different from Thompson's - Hell's Angels was about, well, Hell's Angels - but the same applies: masculine degradation and tribalism of the highest order, hell-bent on destruction and depravity few will ever witness outside of warfare.

He follows the hooligans of Manchester United, but he goes elsewhere as well. The National Front - sort of the English, Nazified version of the KKK - hosts a "birthday party," and he's there. He sees the thugs of Manny-U sack Turin, best known for its shroud. He narrowly misses the first of the 1980s futbol tragedies, where more than 30 people were crushed to death in a Liverpool match (Liverpool was also playing in the aforementioned FA Cup semifinals). The book closes with the 1990 World Cup played in Italy, where England was banished to the island of Sardinia. There, English futbol fans were relegated to a campsite, alcohol was banned on the island, and still yet a futbol riot broke out, the author himself - like Thompson at the end of Hell's Angels - gets beaten down, though the paralell was not perfect, as it was the police, not other thugs, who did the beating.

Consider the following passage, just a typical description of a typical English futbol hooligan:

"With the blow, the policeman must have lost consciousness if oly because he seemed to offer so little resistance to what Harry did next: he grabbed the policeman by his ears, lifted his head up to his own face and sucked on one of the policeman's eyes, lifting it out of the socket until he felt it pop behind his teeth. Then he bit it off."

I'm not making this up.

Or consider the violence in Sardinia, when battle broke out between the Italian police and the English supporters during the 1990 World Cup. One of the more salient passages comes when the author begins speaking with a Finnish journalist, aghast at the violence:

"Everything, he said. It disgusts me. And the press, I continued, realizing that he really had taken in the whole thing. You mean the waste and the injuries and the pain - I was excited by having discovered an ally. The nationalism and the machismo. You really mean, everything that this stupid thing should never have happened. I have never, he said, seen something so stupid in my life. I looked at him and like him very much. No, I said. Nor have I."

What is there to say about Among the Thugs? Like Thompson's work, it's hard to ignore the power of Buford's observations without also cringing at the brutality about which he reports. Like Thompson in Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it becomes patently obvious that Buford is no longer writing about what he is supposed to be writing about, he has become what he is writing about. His beating at the hands of the cops is the epiphany of the book, not because the cops are beating on a writer, but because the writer, wittingly, has joined the thuggery that deserves to be beaten. And he knows it.

Among the Thugs, which I found bargain-basement and is now 16-years-old, immediately finds its place right there with Hell's Angels, Fight Club, and The Deer Hunter. It is not an expression that necessarily should be admired, but it is an expression of masculinity that should be experienced. It is a powerful work.