Word: liverpool
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...little after 5 a.m. in my home in Hong Kong when Jerzy Dudek, the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool Football Club, saved a penalty from Andriy Shevchenko, a Ukrainian playing for AC Milan. The save ended the most exciting sporting event you will ever see, secured for Liverpool the top European soccer championship for the first time in 21 years, and allowed me to breathe. Within seconds, my wife had called from London, and the e-mails started to flood in?the first from TIME's Baghdad bureau, others from Sydney, London, Washington and New York. In my fumbled excitement...
...Apart from the big, obvious things?love, death, children?most of the really walloping emotional highs and lows of my life have involved watching Liverpool. There was the ecstasy of being in the crowd when the club won the European championship in 1978, and the horror of settling down in my office for a 1985 European championship game?only to watch Juventus fans get crushed to death when some Liverpool supporters rioted. Through long experience, my family has come to know that their chances of having a vaguely pleasant husband and father on any given Sunday depend largely...
...team that's based miles from where you have ever lived, but I suspect my fandom's origins are more common. I didn't have much choice in the matter. Both my parents were born in tiny row-houses a stone's throw from Liverpool's stadium. My father took me to my first game as a small child, and from the first moment I saw what was behind the familiar brick walls - All those people! That wall of noise! The forbidden, dangerous smells of cigarettes and beer! - I was hooked...
...following one soccer team has been connective tissue of my life. I left Liverpool to go to college and have never had the slightest desire to live there again, but wandering round the world, living in six different cities in three continents, my passion was the thing that gave me a sense of what "home" meant. (My father helped; 30 years ago, when I lived in Chicago, he sent me the Saturday evening edition of the Liverpool Echo every week.) Being a fan became a fixed point, wherever I lived; it was - it is - one of the two or three...
...fandom can do more than defeat distance and geography. It acts as a time machine. There is only one thing that I have done consistently for nearly 50 years, and that is support Liverpool. Fandom is a blessing; it connects you, as nothing else can, to childhood, and to everything and everyone that marked your life between your time as a child and the present. So when I sat in Hong Kong at dawn last week watching the game on TV, I didn't have to try to manufacture the tiny, inconsequential strands that make up a life. They were...