Bloody Confused! by Chuck Culpepper

Author:Chuck Culpepper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780767930192
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

19

CHEERING FOR A TOILET-SEAT THIEF

On a globally warmed Al Gore January Saturday, the twentieth, under blue skies with cotton-ball clouds, on the 1:00 PM train eighty-eight miles from London Waterloo station south to Fratton, as men out the train window struck golf balls in shaggy fields, I dug into my usual pile of English newspapers and soon felt gloomy.

In my daily study of a league I’d just discovered, I’d somehow missed that the vile Ben Thatcher, the one who tried to maul our Pedro Mendes back in August at Manchester City, had transferred from Manchester City to Charlton. Seeing as how Charlton would visit Portsmouth that very day, I would have the honor of watching Ben Thatcher play soccer when actually nobody should have to watch Ben Thatcher play soccer anymore in 2006–2007, or for that matter 2007–2008, or maybe even 2008–2009. As a balm for this indignity, I would get to stand among my people as they gave Thatcher “stick,” which is English for “taunting,” “derision,” “profanity,” or “bad vibes.”

Here, Ben Thatcher had relocated to Charlton when I’d hoped for his relocation to Vladivostok. Thus, I had boarded the train at Waterloo unaware I’d be paying to see somebody who shouldn’t have been in the league for at least another year after battering Pedro Mendes. How depressing. What a chore, being a fan. You’re just trying to get away and have a good day, and you have to pay money to see somebody who did something depressingly creepy. Many times you have to cheer him, as would Charlton fans that day.

Ah, yes, here came the old cheering-the-indefensible routine. I’d witnessed it in volumes. My thoughts turned to University of Nebraska fans, from the heartland, anointed the American breadbasket of law and order and decency. The awesome 1995 Nebraska team, possibly the best ever, won all twelve of its games and annihilated previously unbeaten Florida 62–24 for the national championship.

That team also saw six of its one-hundred-odd players receive special attention from the police, most prominently a gifted running back who got mad at his girlfriend and dragged her down a stairwell by her hair. It remains the textbook case of fan bewilderment because of its tough-on-crime conservative fans who yet believe deeply in the liberal rehabilitation potential of misguided young men so long as these men can gain one hundred yards on a Saturday and help us beat those bastards from Oklahoma or Colorado or Missouri.

So when the university first dismissed the player, Lawrence Phillips, then reinstated him in the subsequent month, many Nebraska fans felt uncomfortable, but the overall misgivings decreased as the victory total increased. The applause reached din level at the championship game, in which the player excelled. Nebraska’s God-fearing, conservative, revered coach, Tom Osborne, handled things abominably, then got elected to Congress in a landslide. There’s a chance they elected him because they noticed his impropriety and deemed Congress the best place for him, but that chance is probably remote.

As I rode toward Fratton Park

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