by Martin Amis
I don’t mean the “Henman” bit, which presumably denotes an interest in poultry among his earliest forebears. Although “Henman” isn’t particularly appealing or mellifluous, it doesn’t amount to a congenital handicap. But “Tim” does. And this is what gives Henman his true paramountcy. He is the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all.
Already, as I type, I can hear people clucking away at this slur. Special outrage is to be expected from the Tims themselves—to whose troubles I am seeming to add. The Tims don’t need the extra aggravation; and I understand. But look at it the other way: with Henman at the helm, this is a time of hope for the Tims. Maybe the Tims are starting to turn it around. There’s one thing I’m already prepared for: the somewhat boorish suggestion that the Martins aren’t that great either. Not so. A minute’s thought gives me Luther, Heidegger, Ryle, Scorsese, and Luther King. Who can the Tims bounce back with? Tim Calvin? Tim Schopenhauer? Tim Hubble? Tim Ford Coppola? Tim X?
“Tim,” I fear, just doesn’t have that ring to it. The name lacks all gravity. It’s easy enough to see how it happened: the Tims of this world had all their ambitions crushed, all their aspirations dashed, by being called “Timmy” during childhood. The association with timid and timorous (from the Latin timere: “to fear”) was obviously much too strong. “Hello, Timmy!”—imagine what that does to you, after the first few thousand times. The real puzzle is that the Tims do as well as they do, many of them leading reasonably active lives, holding down jobs, getting to meet girls, and going on to have children of their own.
Do I expect them to be taking this lying down, over at Tim HQ? I do not. In the Seventies, in London, there was a brief craze for Rock Concerts Against Ginger-Haired People. The occasional carload of ginger-haired people used to patrol these events, taking vengeance when and where they could (“I’d just left the hall and these four ginger-haired geezers were all over me”). Still, going proactive, with vigilante gangs of Tims on the prowl, doesn’t sound like the Tims’ style. As I browsed through the dictionary, looking for more dirt on Tims, I came across the word timocracy. It doesn’t mean “rule by Tims” or “rule by Tim.” It means rule by people “motivated by love of honor.” This is surely the gentler, more Tim-like course, and the clear way forward for the Tims.
In my own sphere, that of writing, I have already noticed a solidification of Tim talent. There are four British Tims who make a living from their pens: Messrs. Binding, Jeal, Garton Ash, and Mo. This is a start. The next step would be to internationalize the upswing and extend it to the United States, where Tim O’Brien is rather desperately holding the fort. One difficulty here is that American writers tend to have formidably bold and percussive surnames; the Tims would certainly wilt in such an unequal clinch. Tim Mailer? Tim Updike? Tim Heller? Tim Bellow? There is a Tim Roth, but he’s an actor (and an unusually diminutive one even for a movie star). I think I can see a way out of this. It’s a solution suggested to me by the example of Thomas Pynchon.
For the time being, at any rate, the Tims should all change their first names to Tom. Are you listening, Mr. Henman? And while we’re at it let’s change the name of tennis, too. Tennis (“appar. from OFr. tenez, ‘take, receive’ [called by server to his opponent], imper. of tenir, ‘take’ ”) sounds hopelessly fey and effete. I no longer want to play or watch a game called “tennis.” I demand a name that sounds more macho and up-to-date. The game of volleyball has preempted volleyball; powerball is promising; and what about crackball, which, moreover to recommend it, sounds like a drug likely to enhance performance? I’d ask the Tims to send in some suggestions, but I don’t think this is the sort of thing they’d be any good at.
Henman must act fast, because Wimbledon is almost upon us. He needs to jump in a cab and get down to Somerset House and start filling in all those forms.
And after that I’ll say, “So how about it, Tom? Anyone for smackball?”
Evening Standard and The New Yorker 1997
Postscript. I have gone on idly brooding about the place of the Tims in literature—the Tims as opposed to the Toms. Who would have suspected that a lone vowel could make so much difference? Consider the essential unlikelihood of Tim Sawyer, Uncle Tim’s Cabin, Tim Brown’s School Days, and that seminal prose epic of 1749, Henry Fielding’s Tim Jones. Tim Paine, Tim Wolfe, Tim McGuane, Tim Clancy, Sir Tim Stoppard? And it would be tasteless, quite frankly, to go on at any length about all the Thomases—Moore, Wyatt, Gray, Hobbes, Hardy, Mann, Thomas Stearns Eliot…No, in this sphere the Tims have a lot of ground to make up. But elsewhere they’re suddenly rampant. In show business Tim Roth can now grandly mingle with the likes of Tim Burton, Tim Spall, and Tim Robbins; the Tims have a boxer (Witherspoon), a historian (Snyder), and even a vice presidential pick, if you please, in Tim Kaine….But doubts persist. I sometimes think (perhaps I’m very old-fashioned) that everyone was more relaxed—more content, more reconciled—in the old days, when the Tims knew their proper place.
The Champions League Final, 1999
We are all aware of the massed ferocity of the football crowd, and much has been written about its causes. What is it that makes the bescarved, bobble-hatted multitudes steam on by, trampling all in their wake—alienation, tribalism, lost empire? I have a simpler explanation. The roots of football hooliganism lie in football matches, and in what it’s like to attend them.
Yes, I Was There—for the fairy tale, for glory night on the magic field of impossible dreams. And apart from a few halfhearted punch-ups over the forged tickets, it was a volatile but unviolent occasion (because we won), and the tabloids got their shots of sombreroed lads cavorting on Las Ramblas. For me, though, the evening amounted to ninety seconds of incredulous euphoria sandwiched by thirty hours of torment. A few more experiences of that order and I, too, would be down on the high street stoving in the shopfronts, throwing bricks at enemy supporters, attacking my darker-skinned compatriots, and sieving the Internet (the horde’s new rumpus room) for lots more about the National Front and Combat 18.
To feint sideways for a moment: the reason people who hate Man U hate Man U is that Man U are the footballing future, and they have been the future for quite a while. It used to be said that their players were just a troupe of itinerant mercenaries, with little grasp of the local identity and the local traditions (slow to develop the right kind of contempt for Manchester City and the right kind of loathing for Liverpool). But that general description now holds for all the other clubs in the top half of the Premiership—while Man U have moved on.
The Reds keep finding new ways of being ahead of their time. They are a brand—computerized, digitalized, corporatized. They can afford to buy the big stars (Cantona, Ince, Mark Hughes), but their wealth has allowed them to circle back in the other direction: they grow their own, with that naggingly productive youth-development machine (Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, David Beckham). On the one hand, the car park at the training ground is infested with Ferraris; on the other, the twelve-year-old bootboys will soon have their own penthouses, racehorses, and supermodels.
That’s the team. What about the fans? Themselves widely traveled and cosmopolitan (hailing from South Africa, from Japan, from Ecuador), are they similarly evolved? As I made my way to the airport last Wednesday morning, I expected, or half-expected, to hobnob with a new elite, a strolling fraternity of football connoisseurs who had long transcended the lumpen peer pressures of the herd.
Manchester United vs. Bayern Munich was, in addition, England vs. Germany. There were wounds to heal and scores to settle (Euro ’96, Italia ’90, World Wars II and I). But here also, surely, was a chance for burnished technique and the sober delectation of the beautiful game.
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*
Whereas the snow leopards and mountain lions of the United team had processed south from Heathrow by Concorde, a dawn start saw me in the departure lounge at Stansted with the other clients of Sports Mondial’s “private charter” to Spain. I did notice the odd fan
who might have looked at home in the twenty-first century: gym-fit, spruced, tanned, thirtyish, with cupped mobile, gleaming shell suit, twinkly white sneakers, and one of those wallet-belts round the waist like a detachable beer gut. But that was it. Everyone else seemed either (a) dowdily and comfortably middle-aged or (b) anonymously liveried from head to foot in club merchandise. Many a red jersey featured, across the shoulder blades, the name of a famous favorite: in the bar (at ten in the morning) a SHERINGHAM sat slumped over a pensive pint of lager; in the McDonald’s a KEANE enjoyed successive Big Macs.
To begin with, the preboarding atmosphere was reminiscent of any jaunt to the Costa Brava: mildly raucous with excited anticipation. Then came the series of “delays”—owned up to by a Sports Mondial representative—which mysteriously blossomed into a six-hour wait. The brochure had said (untruthfully) that the flight would be teetotal, but now there was plenty of time to down the “few” with which the Britisher typically girds himself for foreign travel. Some of the more impatient travelers found it a bit much when the Caribbean steel band (what was that doing there?) started playing “Viva España.” “Are they taking the fucking piss or fucking what?” inquired the worst man in our party of his bro or cuz, who was the next-worst man in our party. “They lucky there’s not a fucking winduh unbroken in this fucking place. ‘Viva España.’ What the fuck?” The worst man and the second-worst man repaid close study: gracelessly aging skinheads, tubby but muscular, and taut with uncontainable energy.
By 2:30 we were on the buses to the plane. Formerly dispersed in the lounge, the fans were now coalescing into a pack. “Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, coming down the wing” (to the tune of “Robin Hood”). “We shall not, we shall not be moved….We are going to win the fucking Cup.” Or, alternatively, “the fucking lot”—for United were on the brink of a unique treble (having already won the FA Cup and the league title). “We shall not be moved! Re-Darmy, Re-Darmy, Re-Darmy…” Singing, or chanting, or bawling, is supposed to be one of the folklorish charms of the game; but an immoderate hatred of musicality, of tone and rhythm, seems to be part of the fiber of the terraces. While we were stalled on the runway there was a ragged attempt at a slow handclap; it sounded like scattered applause.
Once we were airborne, of course, herd spirit was doubled, or squared. There was much hollered one-lining (typically a TV-tie-in sound bite with a “fucking” added to guarantee a laugh). And now the buoyant clamor intensified when it was announced that we would land not in Gerona, as advertised, but in Barcelona itself, to make up time; why, the coaches that were meant to meet us were even now speeding to the airport, with our tickets safely on board. But then negative rumors started reeling drunkenly through the plane. The low point was a chorus of “Tickets at Stansted” sung to the tune of “There’s Only One Keane-oh” (or, more remotely, of “Guantanamera”). On disembarkation we were told that our coaches were late, or lost, so we journeyed to the rendezvous near the town center in approximately thirty taxicabs.
Outside the Hotel Juan Carlos there was an altercation between an embattled rep and the next-worst man. The next-worst man, who had always looked as though he would soon have his shirt off, had his shirt off. (What is it about bare-chestedness at football matches? More me? More this?) “I know,” began the representative, “that you’re all fucked off but…” “Fucking right we’re fucked off! Where’s the fucking tickets?” “Things are fucked up because…” “The fucking tickets. Get the fuckers down line. The fucking tickets, for fuck’s sake.”
It was now an hour before kickoff. The forecourt jostling had quickly produced a police presence, and the police did some jostling of their own. I went and sat on the grass; then the police told me to get off the grass; then the police told everyone to get on the grass and then to get off the grass…At last the tickets arrived, and it was proposed that they be dispensed in alphabetical order. “Amis!” Feeling sorry for the fans, if any, called Zygmunt, I hurried off, arriving sweat-soaked at the stadium in time for ten minutes of the duster-twirling cheerleaders, a diva in a golf cart, and Freddie Mercury on the twin screens like a phantom of the opera, his voice a distant croon among the raw throats of 92,000 souls.
* * *
*
Every time it strikes me, with all the freshness of revelation: going to watch a football match is the worst possible way to watch a football match. Never mind the business of getting there (and getting back again), never mind the lost two days and the vast expense, never mind being crushed and cordoned with all the civility generally accorded to a riot-prone rabble of thugs and sociopaths. When you find your seat, up on the cliff of the bleachers, you attend to your nosebleed and your hypothermia, and you peer down on a flea circus in a misty abyss; and whenever anything happens, everyone jumps to their feet, so you’re obliged to rubberneck through a shifting collage of hair frizz and earring. Yes, TV, as well as being close by and free of charge, is hugely superior—in every respect but one. You don’t get the crowd.
And the crowd is the engine of this experience. It is asking something of you: namely the surrender of your identity. And it will not be opposed—it cannot be opposed. The crowd is a wraparound millipede, and it is thrillingly combustible. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, you lose yourself in the body heat of innumerable torched armpits, in the ear-hurting roars and that incensed whistling like a billion babies joined in one desperate scream. All we lacked was the prospect of victory. And now the sands of time were running out.
In the eighty-fifth minute a fat red shirt waddled past making the “tosser” gesture and, for clarification, yelling: “Fucking wankers!” No one followed him. And how unforgettable it was, in those last moments, to be caught up in the fabulous lurch of emotion, when hatred and despair became their opposites. Stranger turned to stranger with love and triumph. All were subsumed in the great red sea.
* * *
*
On my way into the Nou Camp I asked a Sports Mondial rep where I would find the coach when the game was over. I was assured that it would be “waiting outside” the stadium. (Imagine: after the Carnival the coach will be “waiting outside” Notting Hill.) After a long and fruitless trek I recognized two fellow passengers, a red-shirted father and his red-shirted son. “Let’s have a wander down here,” said the dad chirpily, as we began an eighty-minute trudge through a fuming bus park. Three hours later, we spotted the frazzled rep, and numbly climbed aboard.
Sports Mondial then subjected us to two relatively trivial vagaries: a leisurely tour of Barcelona before we chanced upon the Girona road, and a controversial M-way rest stop to ease the boiling bladders of a YORKE and a STAM. Then they delivered us to the general disaster of cynicism and scorn (and Spanish paranoia) of the airport. Here, perhaps two thousand fans were being forced to spend the rest of the night in the parking lot, sleeping in heaps. One old man, contemplating a shivering child, repeatedly intoned, with deliberation and justice, “They’re treating ooz…like foogging shite.” And they were, too. Flight load by flight load we crossed the police line—and slept in heaps in the departure lounge (one man slept downward-slanted on the little slide in the kiddie playroom). At last the call came: “RN240. Destinationuh Esstansteduh.” The plane landed six hours late.
When you talk to a member of the crowd he immediately becomes an individual. This didn’t work with the worst man and the next-worst man, who would not disclose themselves and remained thin-lipped and hard-eyed; they were fizzers, part of that “tiny minority” you keep hearing about; and they would have had warm work to do if United hadn’t won. Everybody else in my party submitted to the herding with resignation and dour humor. “What if we’d lost?” I asked a fan, as we surveyed the human desolation of the car park. “Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about,” he said, “does it?”
All cheerfully agreed that it had been “a crap match,” apart from injury time and its immortal drama. “Crap match. Great result.” As expected, United missed their chain of steel in midfield, Keane and S
choles; possession was fitful, and the passing game never flowed. But this team really believes that it can do it on will. The crowd believed it; and Bayern (after the substitution of Matthaüs) felt that concentrated unanimity still coming at them, and were unhinged by it.
The supporters cannot join with the team in dexterity or athleticism, but they can be part of its will. I have felt the atavistic lusts of the football fan, the turgid passions of religion and war. Nationalism by itself doesn’t quite explain it, though I derived harsh pleasure from seeing those Germans with their faces in the mud (after the second goal the ref had to help some of them to their feet; they were gone, dead). And the powerless man, by giving his identity to the Saturn of the crowd, has helped administer this slaughter. Soon he must return to the confines of his mere individuality. But for ninety minutes—ninety seconds—he has known prepotence.
The Observer 1999
Postscript. The “I” of this piece should really be a “we”: I went to Barcelona with my two sons, aged fourteen and twelve (and kept quiet about it because they both bunked off school). Their tribal loyalties and mine lay elsewhere—with Newcastle, with Liverpool, with Tottenham Hotspur—but I admired Man U’s style and personnel (Yorke, Sheringham, Scholes, Schmeichel), and I wanted them to win. That rather abstract preference became a matter of dire urgency as the game progressed. Indeed, by the end of normal time I was feeling a hormonal preparedness for violence, for a great sprawling, swearing ugliness with my boys in the middle of it. As we now know, the night passed without that core component of mayhem, which is English defeat….Our plane, having taken off six hours late, returned six hours late, maintaining symmetry, and leaving me less than a day to write two thousand words. My sons cataloged the Barcelona experience as a fitfully intriguing ordeal. I have to admit, though, that I felt a strangely durable exaltation. George Best, a Man U hall-of-famer so totemic that he has a major airport named after him (in Belfast), left the stadium five minutes early and, to his lasting grief, missed that utterly implausible comeback. In essence, the hardened traveler-fan is engaging in an act of self-sacrifice; those who stayed till the end earned the pride of the martyr (which means “witness”) and the enduring honor of grim perseverance—of Being There, all the way, with the madding crowd.
