Quote of the Day | December 22, 2007: Fever Pitch

From Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, 1992:

But then, obsessives have no choice; they have to lie on occasions like this. If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relationships with anyone from the real world. We would be left to rot with our Arsenal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or our King Charles spaniels, and our two-minute daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and we would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorize by heart the whole of the commentary, including David Pleat's expert analysis, for the night of the 26th of May 1989. (You think I had to look up that date? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

I would not wish to suggest that the contemplation of football is in itself an improper use of the imagination . . . The difference between Lacey and me is that I rarely think. I remember, I fantasize, I try to visualize every one of Alan Smith's goals, I tick off the number of First Division grounds I have visited. . . .

None of this is thought, in the proper sense of the word. There is no analysis, or self-awareness, or mental rigor going on at all, because obsessives are denied any kind of perspective on their own passion. This, in a sense, is what defines an obsessive.

. . .

Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession. Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred?

Finally, Fever Pitch is about being a fan. I have read books written by people who obviously love football, but that's a different thing entirely; and I have read books written, for want of a better word, by hooligans, but at least 95 percent of the millions who watch games every year have never hit anyone in their lives. So this is for the rest of us, and for anyone who has wondered what it might be like to be this way. While the details here are unique to me, I hope they will strike a chord with anyone who has ever found themselves drifting off, in the middle of a working day or a film or a conversation, towards a left-foot volley into a top right-hand corner ten or fifteen or twenty-five years ago.