“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.
“And yet, here they all were, having their Saturday.”
"Among the Thugs" progressed from a little hilarious to sort of scary to a lot sad, and Bill Buford's experience with football "supporters" in England seemed to mirror those stages.
“This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.”
“This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.”
Buford struggles to articulate the disenfranchisement that propels and informs the mob mentality required to lose control in so many different fashions.
“What social mutation had resulted in these bored ugly boys of the Union Jack believing they are entitled to inflict this pain, this fright?”
Evocative of Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism," the author finds himself in the middle of the action and part of the story as he's involved in attacks, melees, brawls, and crimes. Though Buford occasionally gets perhaps a little too existential, the story was utterly captivating.
“In the vernacular of the supporters, it had now ‘gone off.’ With that first violent exchange, some kind of threshold had been crossed, some notional boundary: on one side of that boundary had been a sense of limits, an ordinary understanding – even among this lot – of what you didn’t do; we were now someplace where there would be few limits, where the sense that there were things you didn’t do had ceased to exist. It became very violent.”
By the end of the book, he is frustrated, angry, and more than a little bored with the "little shits" he encounters as part of the hooligan lad culture. Attacked by Sardinian police as part of a match march, Buford finally comes to terms with his addiction to the mob mentality and is able to end his eight-year obsession with it as this stunning -- and brave -- book ends.
“It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.”
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