Word: buford
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AUTHOR: BILL BUFORD...
...title of Bill Buford's first book is disturbingly apt. The ancient Hindu practitioners of thuggee strangled their victims amid much ritual and in so doing attained a state of religious ecstasy. Surprisingly little direct killing occurs at the hands of Buford's modern-day thugs -- the soccer hooligans of Britain who consecrate their Saturdays to violence. But their battles are ritualistic in their choreographed precision, and the effects on the participants are mind bending as the adrenaline pumps, the fists fly and the boots drive into the sides and skulls of the fallen. "They talk about the crack...
...strange epiphany for an American who went to Britain as a scholar at Cambridge and stayed on to revive and edit the successful literary magazine Granta. Buford's sojourn among the thugs began on an ordinary Saturday in 1982 after returning home in the company of berserk soccer fans bent on tearing $ apart their train. To find out "why young males in England were rioting every Saturday," he joined the drunken legions of Daft Donalds, Barmy Bernies and Steamin' Sammys as they rampaged around Europe like latter-day Storm Troopers, trashing cities and forcing hooligan into the vocabulary of much...
...times Buford's mesmerizing account borders on the Dave Barry-esque. "Looking around me," he recalls as the lads of Manchester United's feared Red Brigade run riot in the unsuspecting Italian city of Turin, "I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants in a frenzy." But even black humor bows out as Buford's tale of unrelenting, mindless violence and moronic patriotism unfolds, and the "lad culture" with its bloated code of maleness centered on the Saturday rite of soccer is revealed...
Most crowd psychologists practice from a position of safety beyond the barricades. Buford clambers over them to become one with the crowd -- one of the lads. He experiences perverse satisfaction on one occasion when he is included in the Red Brigade's order of battle. In the crowd riots at the World Cup in 1990 he is mistaken by the Italian police for a ringleader and beaten senseless. It is a punishing climax to an eight-year quest...