134. LIVING WITH GHOSTS - Haunted by Football
I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I am living with one.
Philosophically my worldview leaves no room for spirits. I’m not even sure it leaves room for a non-physical mind. Certainly not a dualist, I believe consciousness is either exclusively physical or an entangled epiphenomena of the physical brain. I believe when we die, we die. Meat. Bone. Nothingness. No heaven, no hell (it’s easy if you try). Certainly no God. The body is a machine - mysterious, yes, but not mystical - and when the electric stops, we cease to be.
Yet this afternoon my father, who died twelve years ago, will sit with me again, as he has been sitting with me increasingly of late. He was with me last night, dozing off on the couch between my wife and myself as we flicked over to Match of the Day after enjoying a pre-Halloween watch of Silence of the Lambs. He came with us to Walsall the weekend before, as we watched the Aston Villa womens team lose to Everton at home and he was with us when we went to Villa Park to watch them win against Manchester City. He will sit with us at two o’clock today when we watch Villa try to break their current losing streak against top-team, Chelsea, and he will no doubt be sitting with us next week against Liverpool too.
Dad always had a comfortable chair in which to sit and, when he wasn’t at work or working at home at his desk, he would be sat in it, reading. He’d either be there, or on the sofa in the lounge watching football. And for most of my childhood, he wanted to be watching the football with me. Bury FC were his team, and he bought me a junior season ticket year after year so that, every other Saturday, rain or shine, we could drive up the M6 from Birmingham together to visit my gran and granddad and then make the post-lunch pilgrimage to Gigg Lane where, usually, we would watch Bury lose or, if we were lucky, draw. Sometimes they would win though. In 1995 he took the whole family to London so we could see the culmination of their most successful season reach the starry heights of possible promotion before seeing a crushing 2-0 defeat to Chesterfield at Wembley. Dad knew his beloved team weren’t amazing, and didn’t want to limit me to Division 3 mediocrity. The first match he ever took me to was the local team, Solihull Moors, and whenever the opportunity arose in FA Cup fixtures for us to see Bury play top flight teams such as Manchester United, we would go. Living in the Midlands, equidistant from both Aston Villa and Coventry, dad frequently got us tickets to go see both the Villans and the Sky Blues. When football (almost) came home for Euro ‘96, he got us tickets to every game but the final. I was at Wembley once again to witness a crushing defeat as Gareth Southgate missed his infamous penalty against Germany and England crashed out of the tournament in the semi-final.
The problem was, despite all this, I just didn’t like football.
My prevailing memory of the England/Germany game was of the Mars Bar I ate and the ridiculousness of the crowd still clinging on to old wounds from World War II. My memory of the play-offs the year before was the Chinese meal we went to after and starting Stephen King’s Dark Tower series of books in the hotel before the match. I remember eating chips at Walsall’s stadium when we watched them face Bury and I remember endless miserable mornings driving up North to Gigg Lane when I wanted to stay at home and see my friends instead. I remember seeing friends at school who loved Aston Villa or Coventry and wondering how they could have that much passion about something that was so obviously a choice? How could they commit to a team so fully and yet so arbitrarily? It was like religion - my mother’s Jewish background and my father’s Methodist one just made me see religion as an equally arbitrary team sport where any option of faith had more to do with your cultural background, geography, and parental lineage than anything to do with divine revelation. You prayed in the Synagogue instead of the Church because of who your parents were and where you were born, and you visited Villa Park instead of Highfield Road for the very same reasons. My dad came from Bury so he supported Bury. If he’d been raised in another town, his loyalties would have lain elsewhere. I also, even at that early age, took umbrage with the fidelity he showed to his favourite football team, through good times and bad, while he cheated on his wife, my mother, so frequently, and had already left the family home to live with someone else more than once. Why couldn’t he commit to his family with the same unconditional loyalty with which he committed to his team?
A big thing that prevented me from enjoying football was that I didn’t really understand it, and no one seemed willing to explain it to me. Dad just assumed that, like him, I would already know what was going on because I’d be playing it at school. But I wasn’t playing it at school because all the kids there seemed to possess knowledge of the game that I didn’t have. They’d talk about wings and formations, marking players and attack and defence and I didn’t know what these terms meant. I couldn’t even dribble a ball. My lack of confidence meant I just said no to offers to play. I sat on the sidelines or did something else. I felt alienated from the entire football culture and thus, in many ways, from British culture itself. Part of the second generation immigrant experience - my American mother didn’t know enough to explain and my British father was absent too often to do his job as cultural ambassador. When he attempted his role as father and took me to the football it was on the mistaken assumption that I would already love it as he did, and he neglected his responsibility to induct me into the game and show me all the reasons why I should.
Eventually I told him to save his money and not bother buying me a Bury season ticket that year. I’d rather do something else with my weekends. Anything else.
I didn’t miss it. When friends played football at break time at school, I’d sit elsewhere with a good book. When we played it in PE, I would goal-hang in defence and chat to my friend, the keeper. I probably owned the cleanest, most under-used, pair of football boots in my school.
The narrative that I don’t like football is one I have clung to for most of my life. And when my father died, I still believed it. We hadn’t been to a match together in over a decade. We didn’t discuss football at all, other than if we were in the same room together at gran’s house and she raised the issue. The year he died, 2010, was a World Cup year. We had one brief chat about vuvuzelas and he seemed happy to hear I had watched the odd match as I began my teacher training and found myself in schools full of children excited about watching their country’s progress. He probably remembered where all this had started with him and me: Italia ‘90. The World Cup where a cool logo, marketed expertly to me by an affiliation with my favourite drink at the time, Cocoa Cola, and my enjoyment of Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ coinciding with the rare opportunity to sit with my dad on repeated summer’s afternoons while delicious family barbecues marked the half-time whistle, got mistaken for a fledging love of football. It was the closest my family had been for a long time that June and July, and the image of a sweaty Pavarotti wearing a towel around his neck became a family joke on our rainy holiday to the Lake District later that summer as whoever dried off with a towel around their neck became that walk’s ‘Pavarotti’. We all got together to watch the football, but really we were getting together because we had the football as an excuse - permission - to do so. And when dad asked me if I wanted to go to some matches afterwards, I said yes at first because I equated the football with the feeling of that summer and wanted more of it. But matches in cold and windy grounds lacked the togetherness of our lounge at home, and the spectacle and easy comprehension of a World Cup tournament. I was bored and confused, but didn’t have the heart to tell my dad until I was a surly teenager no longer looking for his approval. Without football to bond us, however, and with his desire to be part of our family so tenuous, it took many years before my dad and I were able to forge a real relationship. And by the time that we did, there were too few years of it before his unexpected early death. When he died, I regretted that I hadn’t been able to love football in the way that he had hoped. That he had been denied the only sort of father/son relationship he understood and felt capable of providing: one which was built on weekly foundations of ninety-minute rollercoasters that provided the stimulus for larger conversations. Instead I had seen each match as a grudging chore I neither enjoyed nor really understood. My favourite moments were sleeping in the car afterwards, warm at last after sitting in the freezing Lancashire cold for so long. Again that narrative: I don’t like football.
But we philosophers note distinctions. And are aware of entanglements and conflations. Of meanings behind the ordinary use of language. Did I really not like football, or did I not like the status of my relationship with my father? Did I not like football or did I not like the alienation I felt as a child of an immigrant to a country whose culture I didn’t feel connected to? A culture of which football was a significant part?
Growing up I was not a fan of football, but became obsessed with WWE wrestling - that oh-so American spectacle of sports entertainment. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see in my love of this pseudo-sport, frequently headlined by a flag-waving Hulk Hogan and his accompanying chants of ‘USA! USA!’, its ideological contrast to the real sport I was rejecting so frequently headlined by its own jingoistic chants of ‘Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land!’ In fact, while I declined to take an interest in football, in cricket, in rugby, I found myself enamoured by all things Americana. Unable to watch most American sports on UK TV, I jumped at the opportunity to play NBA Jam on my Super Nintendo and bounce a basketball in PE at school. When we visited American family members in the summer, I would sit and watch NFL and MLB games with them and want to know more instead of ignoring them and picking up a book. When my uncle explained the rules of baseball to me, I was hooked. It was easy to say, as a football hating asthmatic, that I didn’t like sports, but my favourite pastime was professional wrestling and its illusion of sport, and when I was in America there wasn’t a baseball or basketball game I wouldn’t watch if given the opportunity.
Did I really not like football? Cricket? Rugby? Or was I conflicted with my own identity as an American growing up in the UK? Or as a British citizen with an American passport too?
My dad’s death coincided with the start of my career as a teacher. Teaching in a British boys school, it became pretty hard to ignore those sports. Even as I had little to do with them in a professional capacity, my students played them all, spoke of them often, and when I did my weekly playground duties I would watch as they played football and bowled cricket balls. The football, especially, was occasionally compelling enough to draw me in enough to find myself watching it as an actual game and rooting for one side over another. Sometimes, for charity, there would be students vs teachers matches and I would surprise myself by enjoying the entire game.
Did I really not like football, or did I just have a complicated relationship with my father and with my country that made the emotional baggage of football too huge for a child to deal with?
By the World Cup of 2018, I found myself swept up with my students’ excitement and as we watched more and more of the tournament I realised that I was actually enjoying and finally understanding the game. I started watching the odd episode of Match of the Day and occasional Champions League match. Whatever was on for free on BBC or ITV. Likewise with Euro 2020, when it finally took place in 2021. I had somehow made peace with my past and realised I could not only watch a match, but actively wanted to. I enjoyed football.
And I felt guilty for doing so. Guilty that I had finally reached this point long after my dad was around to share it with me.
I wanted a team to support but hated the way matches weren’t all televised the way baseball was. With baseball, I could watch every Red Sox game I wanted to, but with football, unless I invested in expensive streaming packages or season tickets, I would be left waiting for highlights and not get to properly follow a team in the way I wanted to. There was always Bury, I thought, but in 2019 they had collapsed financially and the club had closed down. Another thing I wished I could talk to my dad about (though this was one I was glad he wasn’t around to see as it probably would have broken his heart).
Enter the Lionesses and this year’s Women’s Euro tournament. Hooked once again, as discussion arose in the aftermath of the tournament about supporting the Women’s Superleague and the regular season, this time following a team became affordable. Our local womens team - Aston Villa - offered a reasonably priced season ticket and matches were streamed for free in many cases on the FA Player app. My wife and I decided to go all in and buy season tickets. Since September’s opener we have been to every home game and watched all the away games we could online. We’ve also started watching the Women’s Football Show on BBC and listening to a WSL podcast. We’re becoming WSL superfans. And this is extending our enjoyment of the game to the men too - watching Match of the Day most weeks and keeping abreast of what the Villa men’s team are doing too through our membership with the club.
And through it all, my dad is there. A ghost. I hear him in my head at the grounds, shouting ‘corner ball’ or ‘offside’ like he used to do at Gigg Lane and wishing he could see me finally actively choosing to spend my own free time enjoying the game that he loved but which he never got to see me enjoy. I can see him, sat next to us on the sofa as we watch football instead of all the other things we could be watching instead, satisfied and proud that I finally see what he could see in this beautiful game, and I can see him shaking his head in bemusement as I put on a Villa shirt that I bought with my own money. But I know that this is a ghost that exists only in my head. I can see him but he can’t see me. Because although ghosts are real, they are not what the scary movies at Halloween tell us that they are. The dead don’t linger on as spirits in their own right because there are no spirits. But we do remain haunted by the dead. By our memories of them that do not die. And in those memories of the dead we can sometimes manifest a memory so strong it becomes an active presence in our lives. Not malicious, not autonomous. My dad won’t go bump in the night or throw around the furniture. But when I find myself walking through the same stiles at Villa Park I once walked through with him, he will be next to me. When I, at last, feel the same frustrations he felt about watching a team with so much potential struggle to get a ball in a net with consistency, I feel him shaking his head alongside me. When I plan my day around the match, I see my dad doing the same and realise that you cannot run from the impact of a lifetime of someone’s influence. My dad haunts me as all fathers, and mothers, haunt us - with the unshakable influence they have had on our lives. An influence that, sometimes, doesn’t make itself known until long after they have gone. A seed they planted which needed more time than they had alive in which to grow, but which will grow in us nevertheless. It is a pleasant haunting. A friendly ghost I am lucky to have in lieu of the real thing.
I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I am living with one. And I am all the better for it.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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