Football and Literature #2: 'The Fight' by Norman Mailer

The first installment of Football and Literature featured Joe Stretch’s Wildlife, a book that contained direct references to football. For this article, we will move away from a direct to connection to football, we will however remain in the realm of sport, and still, footy.

Norman Mailer’s The Fight is a New Journalistic account of the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Ali versus Foreman, 1974, in Zaire, Africa. The book, as with all New Journalistic writing, doesn’t simply report, it conveys a substance beyond the facts. Mailer sets the personality clash of the two fighters against the simultaneously inviting and rejecting location of Zaire. The book perfectly communicates the role of personality beyond skill in such individual sporting clashes. As much as this fight was a contest between differing boxing styles, it was a match between the different attitudes that represented these styles. The root of Mailer’s effort is in the fascinating character of his dual subjects: Ali and Foreman.

Football, of course, is an eleven-a-side affair. But, the style/personality clashes that Mailer so ably conveys appear in two ways within football.

Firstly, each team carries a philosophy. In some cases, this approach is young and new, the passing style you may expect Martinez to introduce at Wigan for example. For some teams, a team wide philosophy is built over many years, i.e. Arsene Wenger’s belief in youth and the importance of selling players soon after the reach their peak. It is clear that the heavyweights of football are the managers, if Mailer were to write a book on the Premier League; maybe Ferguson would be his Ali, with Wenger riding the ropes as Foreman. Each manager has a selection of punches to throw, Giggs has long being Ferguson’s left hook, and last season, Delap was Tony Pulis’ long arm jab. Beyond the manager though, every team has a personality, and this persona is organic. This is most clear when you see a manager struggling; his input is outweighed by the mutating attitude of the team. There are other factors, such as club ownership, but teams like Newcastle for example, tend to have a negative attitude that outlives multiple managers. There needs to be balance between the manager’s input and the team’s, manager’s personality might be Ali’s right, whilst the team’s collective attitude could act as his left. In combination, the rights and lefts of each team square off against each other in every game, and they represent the battle of personality.

Secondly, Mailer’s effort links to the public thirst/interest for individual battles within the eleven-a-side game. A strong example of this is the conflict between Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira, an ongoing contest that was summed up by the cult-hit video of their spat in the tunnel in 2004. This was the pinnacle of clash in ideology, but similarly, it was a case of two players with a similarly overpowering will. Further, how often does the media seek to boil down a game to an individual battle? Each match is built from a series of individual battles, which build into a team battle. No goal is a result of one single battle; there is a build up of play that leads to a one-on-one with the keeper or a winger embarrassing a fullback. But, we like to see a match hinging on a fight between two players. We remember Thierry Henry’s consistent embarrassment of Jamie Carragher, or the amusing clip of Phillip Lahm battling Jan Koller in a Haye/Valuev style of encounter. We think about Seaman’s elbow versus McAllister in Euro 96 and Vinnie Jones grabbing Gazza’s balls.

The Fight teaches us as much about team sport as it does about individual sport. All sport is a battle between two entities, and where we can, whether we want to boil it down to its smallest element: two ideologies going at it until one succumbs, or the pair walk away in mutual admiration. With the Premier League starting on Saturday, give it a go, try tand focus on the individual battles and consider their role in making football so successful. Modern sport isn’t just about wins, draws and losses, it’s about personalities and philosophies that are widely known and widely established. These elements cannot exist without the individual fights that we love to watch and talk about, no matter how insignificant or ancillary they are to the final result. Vieira and Keane’s scuffle didn’t even take place on the pitch, but it remains iconic – simply, we just can’t resist the stuff.