Soccernomics (32 page)

For many people this was a traumatic change. Their fathers had been factory workers, and now they were managers/professionals, with the different set of experiences and attitudes that entails. They lost touch with their roots. Naturally, many of them began to worry about their authenticity deficits.

In the 1990s, British soccer went upscale. The price of tickets jumped. In the food stands outside the stadiums, the proverbial middle-class quiches replaced the proverbial working-class pies. All these changes prompted endless laments for a lost cloth-capped proletarian culture from people who themselves somewhere along the way had ceased to be cloth-capped proletarians. They yearned to be authentic.

All this makes the true Fan a particularly appealing character to Britons. He is the British version of a blood-and-soil myth. The Fan has roots. Generations may pass, and blue collars turn to white, but he still supports his “local” team in what is supposed to be the “working-man’s game.” Many Britons who aren’t Hornbyesque Fans would like to be. The Fan is more than just a compelling character. He is a British national fantasy.

11

A FAN’S SUICIDE NOTES

Do People Jump Off Buildings

When Their Teams Lose?

It is one of the eternal stories that are told about soccer: when Brazil gets knocked out of a World Cup, Brazilians jump off blocks of apartments.

It can even happen when Brazil wins. One writer at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 claims to have seen a Brazilian fan kill himself out of

“sheer joy” after his team’s victory in the final. Janet Lever tells that story in
Soccer Madness
, her eye-opening study of Brazilian soccer culture published way back in 1983, when nobody (and certainly not female American social scientists) wrote books about soccer. Lever continues: Of course, Brazilians are not the only fans to kill themselves for their teams. In the 1966 World Cup a West German fatally shot himself when his television set broke down during the final game between his country and England. Nor have Americans escaped some bizarre ends. An often cited case is the Denver man who wrote a suicide note—“I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized and I can’t stand their fumbling anymore”—then shot himself.

221

222

Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an eighteen-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras–El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapu=scivski, Bolaños

“got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.” Her funeral was televised. El Salvador’s president, ministers, and the country’s soccer team walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Within a month, Bolaños’s death would help prompt the “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras.

Then there was the Bangladeshi woman who reportedly hanged herself after Cameroon lost to England in the World Cup of 1990.

“The elimination of Cameroon also means the end of my life,” said her suicide note. In fact, if
The Hindu
newspaper in India is right, Bangladeshis have a terrible proclivity for soccer suicides. After Diego Maradona was thrown out of the World Cup of 1994 for using ephedrine, “about a hundred fans in Bangladesh committed suicide,”

said an article in the newspaper in 2006. (It would be fascinating to know
The Hindu
’s source.)

By now the notion that soccer prompts suicide has become a truism.

It is often cited to show the grip of the game over its devotees, and as one reason (along with heart attacks on sofas during televised matches) the average World Cup causes more deaths than goals.

We found that there is indeed an intimate connection between suicide and soccer. However, the connection is the opposite of what is commonly believed. It’s not the case that fans jump off buildings when their teams lose. Working with a crack team of Greek epidemiologists, we have found evidence that rather than prompting suicide, soccer stops thousands of people from killing themselves. The game seems to be a lifesaver.

| |

Each year about a million people worldwide commit suicide, estimates the World Health Organization. That is nearly twice the number that die of breast cancer, and five times as many as died in war in 2002. To use Germany as an example: in 2005, 10,260 Germans officially died by suicide, A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

223

more than died in traffic accidents, illegal drugs, HIV, and murder and other violence put together. For Germans aged under forty, suicide was the second-most-common cause of death. And the reported figures for suicides are understatements, says the University Hamburg-Eppendorf, which runs a therapy center for people at risk of suicide: “There may be a significant share of unrecognized suicides among the death types labeled

‘traffic accidents,’ ‘drugs’ and ‘causes of death unknown.’”

The suicide risk varies depending on who in the world you are. If you are an elderly, alcoholic, clinically depressed, divorced Lithuanian man, be very afraid, but suicide rates are relatively low in Latin America, leaving aside for the moment the issue of World Cups. Globally, women attempt suicide more often than men do, but most “successful” suicides are males. In the US, for instance, 80 percent of the 30,000 people who manage to kill themselves each year are male. For reasons that nobody quite understands, suicide peaks in spring when daylight hours are longest. In the Northern Hemisphere, that means May and June.

The question of why people commit suicide has preoccupied sociologists since sociology began. In 1897 Émile Durkheim, descendant of a long line of French rabbis, published his study
Suicide
. It wasn’t just the first serious sociological study of suicide. It was one of the first serious sociological studies of almost anything. Drawing on copious statistics, Durkheim showed that when people lost their connection to wider society because of a sudden change—divorce, the death of a partner, a financial crisis—they sometimes killed themselves. He concluded that this particular form of suicide “results from man’s activities lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings.”

A few decades later, sociologists began to wonder whether man’s sufferings might possibly include the results of sports matches. The numbers of suicides this caused might be significant: after all, most suicides are men, and sports give meaning to many men’s lives. Frank Trovato, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, was among the first to investigate the suicide-sports nexus. He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 224

1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at Central Missouri State University, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990, and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks.

Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sport and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957

when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly, none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team.

Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear.

Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No
More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or
wanted. Boring . . .

A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

225

Thompson, an occasional sportswriter, loved football. One night during the presidential campaign of 1968, he took a limousine journey through New Hampshire with his least-favorite person, the Republican candidate Richard Nixon, and they talked football nonstop in the back-seat. “It was a very weird trip,” Thompson wrote later, “probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it.” The reminiscence, in
Fear and Loathing on the
Campaign Trail ’72
, segues into an ominous musing on suicide, as a Nixon aide snatches away the cigarette Thompson is smoking over the fuel tank of the candidate’s plane. Thompson tells the aide, “You people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.”

“Not you,” the aide replies. “Egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.

You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?”

“You’re probably right,” says Thompson. As it later turned out, he was wrong. His ashes were fired from a cannon in Aspen, Colorado.

So much for suicides and North American sports. We know much less about the connection between suicides and European soccer. In one of the very few European studies done so far, Mark Steels, a psychiatrist at the University Hospital in Nottingham, asked whether Nottingham Forest’s worst defeats prompted local suicides. He looked at admissions for deliberate self-poisoning to his hospital’s accident and emergency department on two bad days for Forest: after the team’s defeats in the FA Cup final of 1991 and the FA Cup quarter-final of 1992. He found that both games were followed by an increase in self-poisonings. After the cup final, the rise was statistically significant, meaning that it was unlikely to have happened by chance. Steels concluded that “a sudden disappointment experienced through an entire community may prove one stress too many for some vulnerable members of this community.”

| |

All this is fascinating but inconclusive. For starters, the sample sizes of all these studies are pretty small. How many people are admitted to a Nottingham hospital for self-poisoning after a soccer match? (Answer: 226

ten in the twelve hours after the 1991 cup final, nine after the 1992

quarter-final.) How many people kill themselves in Cleveland in any given month? The other problem is that almost all these researchers pursued what you might call the Brazilian apartment-building hypothesis: that when people suffer a sporting disappointment, they kill themselves. Mostly, these are studies of the dogs that barked: people who did commit suicide.

But what if the relationship between suicide and sports is deeper than that? If sports give meaning to fans’ lives, if sports make them feel part of a larger family of fans of their team, if fans really do eat and sleep soccer like in a Coca-Cola ad, then perhaps sports might stop some of these fans from killing themselves. We wanted to find out if there were dogs that didn’t bark: people who didn’t commit suicide because sports kept them going.

It so happens that we have a case study. Frederick Exley was a fan of the New York Giants football team, whose life alternated between in-carcerations in mental hospitals and equally unhappy periods spent in the bosom of his family. In 1968 Exley published what he called “a fictional memoir,”
A Fan’s Notes
, one of the best books ever written about sports. Nick Hornby gave
Fever Pitch
the subtitle “A Fan’s Life” in part as a tribute to Exley.

The Exley depicted in
A Fan’s Notes
is a classic suicide risk. He is an alcoholic loner separated from his wife. He has disastrous relationships with women, alienates his friends, and spends months at a time lying in bed or on a sofa at his mother’s or aunt’s house. For a while his only friend is his dog, Christie III, whom he dresses in a mini blue sweatshirt like his own and teaches to stand up like a man. “Like most Americans,” Exley writes, “I had led a numbingly chaste and uncommitted existence in which one forms neither sympathies nor antipathies of any enduring consequence.”

Only one thing in life provides him with any community: the New York Giants. While living in New York City he stands on the terrace every home game with a group of Brooklyn men: “an Italian bread-truck driver, an Irish patrolman, a fat garage mechanic, two or three A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

227

burly longshoremen, and some others whose occupations I forget . . .

And they liked me.”

When the Giants are not playing, Exley spends much of his time drinking alone. But when a game is on, he watches—depending on the stage of his life—with his Brooklyn group, or with other people in bars, or with his stepfather at home. Exley is the stepfather’s eternal house-guest from hell, but “things were never better between us than on autumn Sunday afternoons”: “After a time, hardly noticeable at first, he caught something of my enthusiasm for the beauty and permanent character of staying with someone through victory and defeat and came round to the Giants.” Fittingly, the stepfather dies just before a Giants game: “Seated on the edge of the davenport watching the starting line-ups being introduced, he closed his eyes, slid silently to the floor, and died painlessly of a coronary occlusion.”