This Week in Fandom: Sticking to the Plan
Image courtesy of @winstontjia
Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the New York Knicks, Yankees, Giants, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.
There’s a little joke I like to tell myself about my funeral. You rise up to give the eulogy or whatever, and naturally you touch on my lifelong love of far too many team sports. You start to break something down about my affection for this franchise or that, and then several people in the audience chime, “Wait, what? I thought he was a (X) fan …” The whole thing’s a bloody mess.
I meant to write this to you maybe two weeks ago, right after another nauseating loss in the league for Tottenham Hotspur. They have been unanimously unwatchable under Ange Postecoglou this season, and yet (but days later) I was online purchasing a retro shirt – just as Spurs travelled to Norway to put the dagger in Bodø/Glimt. I’m an embarrassing emblem for Pavlov’s bell; even after I’ve consulted all the necessary medical expertise, re-aligned my literary intentions, and even reconsidered my retirement plans, all it takes is 15 seconds of a banging grime beat and I’m roped helplessly back in.
“London” is a trigger noun for me, every bit the trigger noun “New York” is, and wherever there are patient ears I have peddled the Tottenham gospel: the last independent of the British football aristocracy, a club that has clawed and grabbed and scratched to even be remotely worthy of top billing in another FIFA ad that makes us buffoons go, “Got to cop it, mate, they changed the jerseys.”
I am confronted in Europe, not hostilely of course, with indirect curiosity as to who, what, how and why I am; much in the way I was in Zambia, when I nurtured an interest in indie rock, subversive cinema, abstract American sports, and a football club that never wins things. I continue to betray spiritual kinship with blackness in New York, in the American South, in London, and something doesn’t quite add up: am I a product of my desires and delusions, and are any concerned parties (really) even allowed to ask out loud? Am I a complete sellout – in part for having ceded myself almost whole to the gaming of markets – or is there something in my history to account for this citizenship of everywhere, besides a childhood full of screens, playlists, choose-your-own-adventure novels, and the occasional jaunt abroad?
I don’t know what you tell yourself about these things, to what extent the terms ‘black’ or ‘African’ are tags specifically assigned to provinces whose ancestry narrowly evaded disruption by white invaders. My country and I … have always felt like circumstantial cousins. Our parents lump us together for play-dates. We piss each other off here and there but at the end of the day we’re family. The things I choose to love in this world, anywhere there just so happens to be blackness, are inconveniently attached to where and when I choose to be a material being; and when it comes to sports, the romance is attached to versions of cities, of New York and London, that are in danger of no longer existing. Or, of not being accessible enough for me to confirm my deepest suspicions: that we are all trying to find each other again in a world that tore us apart.
I have played the dangerous game of conflating this, my identity as a black man, with my status as a sports fan. But it’s too late to turn back now.
I’ve expressed sincere doubts to you about whether New York is still the city I grew up believing might have a place for me in this world. Where I might be ‘myself’, and make an honest living of stringing words together. Everything I hear about London – from affable Brits who’ll let me regale them with accents, all refined from years of the World Service, some ITV here and there, and growing up amongst subconscious Anglophiles – is that it costs an arm and a leg to secure a pot to piss in now. And yet here are the athletics: the culminations at last of blind faith, countless arguments with people who were able to focus on the sports themselves, who didn’t wonder as to the history of their clubs, who couldn’t care less what the cities (Manchester and Dallas and Liverpool and Los Angeles) actually meant.
The Knicks are on the verge of a first Eastern Conference title in decades, with who else but the exasperating Indiana Pacers standing in their way. Spursy Tottenham Hotspur, connoisseurs of the bottle-job, are on the brink of actual silverware despite a likely and unacceptable 17th place finish in the league. Which New York are those streets full of brown people buoyant for? Which London, which North is it that Tottenham shall finally vindicate in Bilbao? I tell myself I’m ‘New York’ because no city in the world called to me and my pen as loudly as this one once did; that I’m ‘London’ because I fell in love with a culture I was betrothed to as a child – before I could even grasp its cultural components.
How to articulate the words, Chaps, for a thing you only really truly know in your bones when the music’s finally playing?
