Fever Pitch (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain..." (more)
Key Phrases: diving header, football authorities, midfield player, North Bank, First Division, Manchester United (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.

Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."

Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger

From Publishers Weekly

Brought to print to take advantage of America's presumed fascination with the '94 World Cup (the first ever held here), Fever Pitch is a 24-year obsessional diary of English club football (soccer, to us Americans) games Hornby has witnessed and the way these games have become inextricable from his personal life. Hornby is the kind of fanatic who merely shrugs about the "tyranny" the sport exerts over his life--the mumbled excuses he must give at every missed christening or birthday party as a result of a schedule conflict. "Sometimes hurting someone," he writes, "is unavoidable." These occasions tend to bring out "disappointment and tired impatience" in his friends and family, but it is when he is exposed as a "worthless, shallow worm" that the similarly stricken reader can relate to the high costs of caring deeply about a game that means nothing to one's more well-adjusted friends. These moments are fleeting, however. The book has not been tailored for American audiences, so readers lacking a knowledge of English club football's rules, traditions, history and players will be left completely in the dark by Hornby's obscure references. Unfortunately, he has neither Roger Angell's ability to take us inside the game nor the pathos of Frederick Exley's brilliantly disturbed autobiographical trilogy. Though Hornby does show flashes of real humor, Fever Pitch features mainly pedestrian insights on life and sport, and then it's on to the next game--the equivalent, for an American reader, of a nil-nil tie. Author appearances.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; 1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed edition (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573226882
• ISBN-13: 978-1573226882
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #28,918 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for sports fans, not just soccer (footy) fans, August 19, 1999

By A Customer

This is without a doubt the best book on football (soccer) that I have ever read. It is also the best book dealing with sports that I have ever read. It describes like no other book I have read what it means to be a fan.

Although this book follows the life of an Arsenal supporter, anyone can read it, because Hornby's experiences are no different than those of any committed, "obsessed" football fan. I am a Leeds supporter, and much of what Hornby said described what I feel, so perfectly. I especially liked the part when he went on about wanting to switch allegiances if he could, but found out that he couldn't because he was too emotionally tied to Arsenal. No matter how poorly they played, or how frustrated they made him feel, he still supported the club. I've felt the same way about Leeds on many an occasion.

A great book about life, not just about football.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware What This Book Might Do To You, August 9, 2002

By	oh_pete (Cambridge. MA USA) - See all my reviews

I've been meaning to write a review of this book for a long time, but since Nick Hornby reawakened in me many of my childhood sports fan obsessions when I read it for the first time in 1999, I've been too busy. Not only did "Fever Pitch" remind me how irrationally and how much I loved my own hometown team (the heartbreaking Boston Red Sox) but he turned me into a fan of English football and his own Arsenal Gunners to the point where I follow them daily on ESPN's soccernet, LISTEN (!?) to them on internet radio broadcasts and have even gone to two games in London over the past two years. It's sick really, and I suppose it's not the kind of thing Hornby would have wanted when he wrote this quintessential memoir of growing up a soccer fan in England, but I've enjoyed it

"Fever Pitch" is an obsessive's tale as much as it is a fan's story, and so should appeal to the same wide audience that enjoys his excellent novels (It was my love for "High Fidelity" that sent me straight to this book). It is a memoir of surprising depth considering how it is organized only by the dates of soccer matches between 1968 and 1991, and it makes perfect sense that Hornby, or any true fan, should see the rest of his life (parents' divorce, his own education, romantic and career trouble) primarily as it relates to the team he spends so much time, money and psychic energy on.

The irony, for me, was finding out after I read "Fever Pitch" for the first time that Arsenal was one of the top teams of the last decade in England, so Hornby at least gets to feel the joy that we Red Sox fans are still waiting for. Sure, we're ecstatic the Pats won the Super Bowl, but our lives will change forever when Boston brings home the World Series. But after "Fever Pitch," I'll remember to laugh like the rest of the world laughs when American sports leagues crown their title-holders "world" champions.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The inspiration behind 'High Fidelity' and 'About a Boy', March 19, 2000

By	Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

With 'High Fidelity' opening in theatres soon (supposedly at the end of March 2000), the buzz from Nick Hornby's work will reach a fever pitch. Want to know where Hornby finds the inspiration and raw material to craft the exquisitely detailed and accurate pictures of male angst such as Rob Fleming ('High Fidelity') or Will Freeman ('About a Boy')? Look no further than the life of Hornby himself.

On the surface, 'Fever Pitch' follows Hornby's life-long obession with Arsenal, the English Premier league team he dutifully follows through good times and bad. But this is more than a story about football (or soccer, if you will). It's also the story of a complex person struggling to make things right with his family, the various woman that pass through his life, and his career.

Make no mistake: the brilliant writer that created Rob Fleming did not appear overnight. Like Rob, Hornby struggled with his passions for years before achieving his breakthrough with 'Fever Pitch.' A previous reviewer notes that this is a biography that does not work because of the author's lack of an 'interesting life.' I disagree - the reason Rob Fleming connects with so many readers (see the 'High Fidelity' customer review section for the raptorous comments from men and women alike) is because of his normalcy and our shock at seeing so many of our own thoughts crystallized so perfectly on the page.

The same holds true for 'Fever Pitch,' but with the caveat that a lot of what you read here is distilled through the experience of English football.

My recommendation: if you're a football/soccer fanatic, this is a book you simply must read and keep in your collection, regardless of whether you've read either of Hornby's other works. If don't know *anything* about the game and are not too keen to learn, read this book only after you've read 'High Fidelity' and 'About a Boy.' Then sit back and marvel at the connections between the trilogy of characters that are Hornby, Fleming, and Freeman.