The fan is a necessary but ambiguous figure in sport. A vital part of the spectacle as well as a source of financial support, he (and it’s most often a he) can be a dutiful follower, fierce critic, passive spectator, possessive adulator, worshipful and entitled, and not infrequently all at the same time.
This tribal dependency, with all its pain, disappointment and fleeting moments of triumph, has made for some powerful memoirs, such as Frederick Exley’s (loosely fictionalised) A Fan’s Notes and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. But in the age of fans’ podcasts, when scenes of young men having meltdowns are commonplace on social media, what more is there to say about the experience of being a fan that hasn’t already been memorably explored?
In A Fan for All Seasons Jon Harvey, a comedy writer and performer, sets out to do something slightly different. Rather than sport being the cause of grief, he seeks to use it as a means of dealing with it. When his older brother, Daniel, dies at the age of 43 from diabetes, he decides to honour Dan’s love of all sport by going to see as many sporting events as he can over the course of a year.
It’s not a bad idea but it suffers from its comprehensiveness – what links darts to 100 metre sprinting, for example, or horse racing and handball? – and an uncertainty about who the book is aimed at, as Harvey veers from sporting in-jokes to explaining the significance of Roger Federer.
Perhaps more of an issue, though, is the role of grief in motivating his odyssey. Although he continually reiterates his sense of loss, Harvey is unable to bring his dead brother to life in a way that enables the reader to appreciate the weight of his absence.
We learn that he was morbidly obese, and had difficulty walking, and also that he was a “completist”, someone who never missed a Crystal Palace home game, and would happily watch any sport at all on television. But it’s not as if the sports that Harvey watches serve to bring the reader any closer to understanding Dan or their relationship.
We do, however, get to glimpse revealing aspects of Harvey’s own story along the way. He, like his brother, is the son of an alcoholic, a man who was also a sports lover and charming company when sober, but who was capable of monstrous insensitivity and selfishness when drunk.
Harvey speculates that his father’s alcoholism may have adversely affected his brother (whose own tipple was Coca-Cola), and been the cause of his occasional bad temper. What seems clearer is that the instability and uncertainty that Harvey experienced at the hands of his father has led him to seek people-pleasing refuge in being funny.
And he can be funny. He begins the book by looking at the origins of sport in the ancient Olympics, in particular the pankration, a no-holds-barred form of mortal combat. “Just as birds are descended from the dinosaurs,” he writes, “so it turns out that snooker is descended from an ancient Greek wrestler ripping out another bloke’s duodenum.”
His instinct to look for the punchline is rather too developed, even in the comical world of sport, becoming more laboured with each chapter. Halfway through, in reference to Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, he notes that “nothing so vast should be able to get away with being so intimate, as King Kong found out to his cost with Mae West”.
Even if he’d got the actor right – Fay Wray – the joke does little to illustrate his point. Ultimately, however, the real problem with the book is that the events he witnesses are studies in anticlimax. Not because they fail as sporting occasions, but because they fail as experiences that take us anywhere beyond the familiar tropes of elite sportspeople putting in elite performances.
While there’s no doubting Harvey’s bottomless enthusiasm for any kind of competition, as he declares himself “swept up in the euphoria” of the World Rubik’s Cube Championship, it’s hard to say what it all adds up to. Is sport in all its varied forms just a welcome distraction from the difficulties and hardships that beset us all, or does it offer up some kind of transcendence, moments that rise above life and death, joy and grief, to become meaningful in their own right?
For all his appetite for attendance, Harvey never quite attends to the questions that his bereavement raises.
A Fan for All Seasons: A Journey Through Life and Sport by Jon Harvey is published by Yellow Jersey Press (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
