Wimbledon and Euros end, but not this summer of sport
Wimbledon and Euros 2024 draw to a close and the Paris Summer Olympics are soon to kick off. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books offer crucial context, joining the news with three great reads on sport and the cult of fandom. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and four-minute podcast the day it drops
The Big Story:
A high summer of sport crammed with global action — football, cricket, tennis, cycling, golf and the Olympics.
The Euro 2024 tournament in Germany is the first proper, non-pandemic European football championship since France 2016The Paris Olympics will hand off to the nearly 100-year-old Vuelta a España bicycle race.
This Week, Those Books:
Sports fandom is like nationalism…no, really.
An American football fan’s fake ‘fiction’ on life as an addict.
Believe it or not, cricket is part of New York’s DNA.
Sports Mania: Essays on Fandom and the Media in the 21st Century
Edited by Lawrence W. Hugenberg, Paul M. Haridakis, and Adam C. Earnheardt
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Year: 2008
My rating: Insightful
What turns a casual spectator into sports fan and fanatic? Is sports fandom, which is “one of the most salient cultural products of the 21st century”, really similar to nationalism? Are sports an inspiration or an opiate? And can sports really serve a therapeutic function?
Three academics, with expertise in communications, sports and a deeply felt personal enthusiasm for sports, set out to find some answers. The result is 16 fascinating essays from multiple contributors…
A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir
By: Frederick Exley
Publisher: Harper & Row
Year: 1968
My rating: Deserves to be read more widely
Supposedly “a fictional memoir”, this mordant, zippy book closely follows the life of its author, who died in 1992. The story is about an alcoholic “youngish-old” English school teacher in upstate New York, whose other addiction is football…
The book, which received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, is sometimes said to be the literary successor — generationally and in perception — to The Great Gatsby…
Netherland
By: Joseph O’Neill
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 2008
My rating: Beautiful
A novel about family — a conventional father-mother-child equation and the solace of men who share a love of cricket in New York city.
The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst assigned from London to New York just before 9/11… He is one of the few white men in the mainly West Indian and South Asian teams that bring scruffy public parks alive in summer…
The Backstory:
Euro 2024 ends after 51 games in 31 days, with eight of the top-10-ranked teams in the world. The tournament emerged from the push for post-war European stability and its first edition in 1960…
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Ready for another read? Women’s football: Girl power summer
Originally published at This Week, Those Books
