Page 215 - Sport Culture and the Media

196 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

up with his (unknown to him, now pregnant) girlfriend after taking her onto the
rowdy, male-dominated terraces of Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium. On the same
day in 1989, in Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium, ninety-five football fans were
crushed to death (when police allowed too many people into too small an area
from which no escape was possible because of security fencing). Paul’s response
to these horrific events is matter of fact: football fans all over Britain will go
back to unsafe grounds because they are compelled by their passion to do so, a
fatalistic attitude that his girlfriend finds unfathomable, especially when it
applies to a pursuit as ‘trivial’ as watching a football team. In reflecting on his
life through the bottom of a vodka glass, Paul weighs the competing claims of
the sports world in a lengthy soliloquy, confused about ‘whether life’s shit
because Arsenal are shit, or the other way round’; considering the time and
money spent and the relationships neglected in his pursuit of sports fandom;
relishing moments of fans’ absorption when ‘everything else [has] gone out of
their heads’ and they feel at ‘the centre of the whole world’; savouring the
predictable structure of a life organized around the yearly soccer season; and
then finally acknowledging that ‘some stuff’, like having a partner and becom-
ing a father, is more important than supporting Arsenal and going to football
matches.
Here the familiar filmic preoccupation with the relationship between the
sports and wider worlds is evident, albeit in a much more knowing and self-
critical manner than an heroic, nostalgic baseball film like Field of Dreams (no
doubt also reflecting a cultural difference between a modest British film with
no superstars and a shambling schoolteacher ‘hero’ who wears Arsenal boxer
shorts, and a Hollywood ‘blockbuster’ with a mega-star male lead who has
injected a stylish, late-1980s element into the rural struggle memorably depicted
in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath). Fever Pitch is, ultimately, a rite of
passage film, with the male protagonist negotiating the transition from a life
dominated by football fandom to a richer, more varied and responsible
existence. The cathartic moment of a dramatic and unexpected Arsenal victory
that provides the film’s climax is also the instant of liberation from obsessive
football fandom, when sport’s place in the world comes into perspective. The
allegorical quality of Fever Pitch is apparent, even if its tone is reflective and
quizzical. Sport’s screen of dreams perennially returns to the place where the
magical world of sport is compared with the prosaic existence beyond – with
the latter usually found wanting. This time, it is sport – and Arsenal Football
Club – that loses out.
Sport continues to be a major subject for film and an opportunity for film-
makers to explore both the sports world and the sport–society relationship.
Oliver Stone’s American football fable, Any Given Sunday (1999), uses a
troubled franchise as a site for an exploration of the ways in which the nobler