On the night when several thousand lusty Bulls fans celebrated their second straight NBA championship by smashing windows, overturning cars, looting stores, and setting fires around town–just as fans had the year before–one of the rioters promised a reporter from the Tribune they’d be back. “Next year this time,” he said, “we’ll be doing it again. It’s a Chicago tradition from now on.”
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When you arrive you are met by a cordon of bobbies with nightsticks, mounted police, and dog handlers who conduct you to the gate, keeping you away from the families and out of range of the other team’s supporters. (The clubs themselves often have evil-sounding names like Millwall, Tottenham Hotspurs, and Arsenal; their stadiums are found in places like Cold Blow Lane.) You may have a ticket or you may not, but either way the police will put you inside: their job is to contain the violence. So after being frisked, in you go, herded into the “terraces”–the cheap section, something like our bleachers except that there are no seats, just sloping concrete steps surrounded by wire. The most notorious terraces have nicknames–the Chelsea Shed, the Millwall Den–but all are known generically as the “cage” or “pen”: it’s where you put the animals. You’re packed so tight in there that you lose control over how your body moves. When the crowd surges, you surge with it; its emotions become yours. When someone above you tosses down unopened cans of beer or spark plugs or pisses onto your head, there’s nothing you can do. You couldn’t leave if you wanted to.
After the match you sneak through the police lines and look for your mates, who’ve all done the same. Now the real fun starts. You cruise briskly around the stadium picking up momentum and bodies as you go. The crowd is taking shape. One of the more seasoned thugs, your “general,” steps to the front; around him are a half dozen “lieutenants,” spotty-faced teens who act as lookouts and pass on his instructions. The tension builds. Suddenly you see what you’ve been waiting for, a band of enemy fans. Are they chasing you, or are you chasing them? “It’s going to go off,” you hear, and you pass it on: “It’s going to go off.” Everyone’s excited. The general maneuvers you into position, a chant rises up, a roar follows, and then the explosion comes. You feel release. You watch out for knives and find a straggler, one of the younger ones, and with four or five of your brothers you kick him bloody and senseless. The police arrive to break up the melee, but you can’t stop. The crowd’s enthusiasms, and its furies, are now yours. You sprint down the street with the mob, stopping traffic, flattening anyone in your way with a forearm or a stick (“fuckin’ cunt!”), smashing windshields and storefronts–the very sound of glass shattering is intoxicating–until, all spent, you swarm into another pub to guzzle more beer, lick your wounds, and think about next week. It’s been a great day.
Sex has a funny role in this book: it’s nowhere yet everywhere at the same time. Buford never mentions sex directly–football thuggery is such a man’s world, after all–but it is implied in almost everything he writes, from his own subtitle to the way the lads describe the thrills of crowd violence. They talk about “a chemical thing,” a “hormonal spray,” and “having to have it”; after a riot they exult, “We did it, we took the city”; and their most important phrase, repeated like a mantra during the moments of greatest tension just before violence explodes, is “It’s going to go off.” (“Go off” is British slang for reaching orgasm, a fact the author, for reasons of his own, fails to mention.) There’s an unmistakable coyness in the way Buford describes the stages of the crowd’s growing excitement and how they affect him: the first teasing encounters with other fans and police before the rabble takes shape as a crowd; the building tension as the herd mentality emerges; the exhilaration and sense of inevitability when everyone realizes it’s going to “go off”; the “heat of the feeling” when it finally does, bringing with it “pure elemental pleasure” and “joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy.” When it’s over he actually asks himself “What was it like for me?” and answers, sensitively: “An experience of absolute completeness.”
The next year, however, England was matched against Holland in the World Cup and Buford made a last-minute decision to go. Dutch fans are as notorious as the English, and he had a feeling that “something was going to happen, and I didn’t want to miss it.” The story of what did happen in Sardinia makes up the last and best chapter in the book. His account of how a purposeful crowd comes together out of a disparate rabble–there were no organized “firms,” or gangs, in this case–is riveting: we see how it draws in its troops, provides them with officers (“a crowd creates the leaders who create the crowd”), tests its boundaries until the time is right, and then smashes them in a frenzy.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Peter Hannan.
