There should probably be a word for this kind of book: the telling of a life, from childhood to adulthood, intertwined with a sport, and how the former is informed by the latter. A non-sportsperson’s sporting memoir, maybe, though that’s a touch clunky. Fever Pitch was originally subtitled “A Fan’s Life,” so that might do; so, too, might Fever Pitch-a-likes. Or perhaps, with apologies to any German speakers, a Balldungsroman.
Book review: ‘The Soccer Diaries,’ by Michael J. Agovino
The last 30 years of soccer in America, and how one New York obsessive watched it all unfold.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
One paragraph in and we've mentioned it twice, so we might as well begin there: Comparisons with Nick Hornby's much-feted story of his self and his Arsenal are natural and inevitable, and fair enough. For a start, even if you're not a committed Hornby-ite, it's impossible to deny the seismic impact that his book had on football writing and football publishing. And for an end, Agovino's book even follows the same loose format, his life divvied up not just by month or (non-footballing) season, but also by game after game.
However, while this book probably isn’t going to make the same splash as Fever Pitch, it does have one notable distinction (and perhaps advantage) over its English predecessor. Hornby found himself dropped into a club and a wider culture that had existed for years; Agovino, whose football consciousness awakens in New York, 1982, has no such current to jump into. Fever Pitch is about the quotidian and what one man can learn about himself by participating in the national obsession; The Soccer Diaries starts with a child in search of something thoroughly other, a citizen cheating on his own country’s sporting culture.
The first third of the book is devoted to the twin processes of growing up and of tracking down football wherever it might rear its tentative, alien head. It's a carnival of bastardized games in school gym lessons and the World Cup on Spanish language television, of UNICEF all-star games and samizdat VHS tapes, of trips to a half-full Giants stadium to see the post-Pele Cosmos. This stuff — at least from a European, football-on-tap perspective — is perhaps the most fascinating part of the book, a sketch of the bush telegraph that stitched together the footballing underground of 1980's New York. Here is an Italian barber, advising on the showtimes of the Serie A highlights; here is a friend's uncle, over from Jamaica, happy to spend his summer playing keepy-uppy in a car park. And here is a kid from the Bronx, eyes wide, drinking it all in.
Time being the insistent force that it is, Agovino grows and so does the sport; by the end of the book, as he reprints in full the 34 games from around the world due to be shown over one weekend in 2009, he seems almost overwhelmed by the monster that football in America has become. It’s a shame, then, that of the book’s three sections, it’s the middle one — “The Renaissance,” covering 1994 to 2003 and sandwiched between “The Dark Ages” and “The Enlightenment” — that feels a touch unfocused. Partly this is circumstantial: Agovino is spending more and more of his time either working or in Europe, and as such the focus on the game in the US naturally drifts. He is not one of the MLS early adopters — the “evangelicals” — and notes that attending MetroStars games “felt more like homework than anything else”.
But if he wasn’t watching MLS, then he certainly was watching the advance of football into New York publishing and on into New York society. Halfway through the Renaissance he looks up to the skies and sees Leonardo trying out his helicopter: he discovers that a publishing house is to bring the game to “Manhattan’s movers and shakers” by distributing copies of of Joe McGinniss’ The Miracle of Castel di Sangro on the bus service running to the Hamptons, the weekend destination for New York’s moneyed elite:
And now, someone — a publishing executive, a marketing genius, an ambitious intern, who knows — decided that soccer, this sport for so long ridiculed, belittled, ignored, could now be sold, even if copies were being given away for free to an affluent clientele. These new readers, it was hoped, would tell their friends and carry it under their arms, bring it to the beach, to brunch, bring it up at dinner parties.
It’s at this point that the spread of football starts to shift in character, from a more-or-less unalloyed good to something more complicated. As we move into the Enlightenment (that’s 2004 onward) Agovino’s discovery of the Curva Nord sportshop — “the dream hang out” — sits alongside some pleasingly tart observations on the “smarter than thou, precious, show-offy” nature of some American football writing and his belief that “so many American fans, when it came to the international game, were frankly star fuckers.” This might strike a sour note with some, though one could equally suggest that this — one fan thinking the rest are just doing it wrong — is all the evidence you need to know that when it comes to football, the USA is finally just like everywhere else.
Of course, the latter parts of the book aren’t just exercises in assessing the state of the nation; like football, there’s as much pleasure to be drawn from the incidental details as the overarching themes. Agovino finds himself a fish out of water at a conference of the International Football Arena; he is given a grandiose favor by an alarmingly well-connected Sicilian; he spends a week trailing FC Basel around their Spanish pre-season training camp, much to everybody’s general confusion. Films and the intricacies of the New York media also make their presence felt: Agovino adores the former and seems alternately exercised and exasperated by the latter.
Perhaps the journey from childhood to adulthood is a journey from simplicity to complexity. As Agovino grows up and his sport shifts around him, he moves from a kid eagerly looking up World Cup host cities in an atlas — “When we went to Spain, how come we didn’t go to Vigo?” — to an adult who has been to many of the places the kid could only dream of, seen footballers that the kid couldn’t believe and has nevertheless arrived at a place where, perhaps, “there is almost too much soccer”:
What used to be something you had to search for in foreign languages, on video-cassette, in hard-to-find European magazines, through penpals ... was now something everyone of a certain educational level was expected to be at least conversant in. What used to be something subversive, a secret international brotherhood, a band of outsiders, who for the occasional ninety-minute spell, were insiders, was now mainstream and trendy and ubiquitous.
It is an article of faith for every football obsessive that the game should be for everybody, and it’s important to stress that while Agovino doesn’t always enjoy every aspect of football’s explosion — and while some might bridle at the occasional “well, I prefer their first album” moment — overall his warmth for the sport never falters. And that would be enough to make this an always-readable, always-engaging journey through the life of a football-mad New Yorker, and also a potted and personal history of the growth of football within the USA.
But this isn’t just a book about its time, it’s also fundamentally of its time. This isn’t a story that any kid could hope to live now, and that’s what makes it truly fascinating. Agovino first expertly conjures, then provides an elegy for, the lost world of the lonely American football obsessive, in love with a sport for which his country has little time. That world certainly sounds inconvenient, and in many ways inferior, but by this telling it had a rich and deeply rewarding character. A character that has, perhaps, now gone for good.
The Soccer Diaries is published by Nebraska Press and is available on Amazon.
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