Word: liverpools
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...down. Look at Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. We treat celebrities like gods, then complain when they start to believe they can fly. Jonathan Lowe Tucson, Arizona, U.S. A Fan's Devotion Michael Elliott's essay "Hopelessly Devoted" [June 6], on being an obsessive fan of the Liverpool Football Club, reminded me of how it felt to be blindly devoted to a boy band. I had the group's posters hung all over the walls of my room when I was little and played their tapes over and over again. I never understood what they were singing about (the pain...
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 far from where you have ever lived, but I suspect the origins of my obsession 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 moment I saw what was behind the familiar exterior--All those people! That wall of noise! The forbidden, dangerous smells of cigarettes and beer!--I was hooked...
...World Series in 1955, but they aren't ever coming back from Los Angeles. Loss of faith can set in. That, however, is when you appreciate the deeper benefits of being a fan. For me, following one soccer team has been the 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 around the world, living in seven different cities on three continents, my passion was the thing that gave me a sense of what home meant. Being a fan became a fixed point, wherever...
...fandom does more than defeat distance and geography. It acts as a time machine. There is only one thing I have done consistently for nearly 50 years, and that is support Liverpool. To be a fan is a blessing, for 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 watching the championship game on TV, I didn't have to try to manufacture the tiny, inconsequential strands that make up a life. They...