Idiots Write About Sports

One of my favorite books is Fever Pitch, which I first read a few years back at the suggestion of Jason. It’s written by Nick Hornby — you may remember him from such other books as High Fidelity and About A Boy — and it chronicles his lifelong obsession with the (at-the-time) maddeningly inconsistent Arsenal football club. (Arsenal is the defending Premiership champion and, as of this writing, has gone 44 consecutive league games without a loss. But back when Hornsby wrote Fever Pitch they were notso hotso.)

The themes in Fever Pitch — what it means to be a fan, why otherwise intelligent adults with full and complete lives get so worked up over sports, and so forth — are universal, whether you follow the English Premiere League or not. If you haven’t already given it a read, you really should.

Especially since Hollywood is about to destroy it.

Reading up on the baseball scores yesterday, I came across this photo taken at the Red Sox-Rangers game. Says the caption:

Actors Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon watch the Red Sox and the Texas Rangers at Boston’s Fenway Park Saturday Sept. 4, 2004 while filming scenes for an upcoming movie partially set at the park.

A movie partially set at Fenway Park, huh? Wonder what that movie could be. Well, let’s just nip over to IMDB and do a little search and…

It’s Fever Pitch.

OK, so the book is being turned into a movie and air-lifted over to this side of Atlantic. They did the same thing with High Fidelity, and that turned out OK. Of course, that movie had a good screenplay and some great direction from Stephen Frears. Let’s just see who’s handling those tasks for Fever Pitch.

The screenplay is by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell. The listed director is Nancy Juvonen, helming her first picture after a spate of producer credits as a partner in Drew Barrymore’s production company. I wonder how she got the gig.

So, to summarize: one of my favorite books is being turned into a movie, directed by the woman who co-produced 50 First Dates. The part of Arsenal will be played by the Boston Red Sox and the interesting lead character will be played by the infinitely uninteresting Jimmy Fallon. And the script is coming from the writers of such treacly pap as Parenthood, Mr. Saturday Night, A League of Their Own and the City Slickers franchsie.

There’s about five or six awful things included in that last paragraph, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out which is the most horrible.

[Also: This isn’t the first time Fever Pitch has made it to the big screen. A 1997 movie was made over in England and runs fairly frequently on cable over here. Colin Firth plays the obsessed Aresnal fan — yes, it’s still Arsenal in this version. Ruth Gemmell is his love interest. The movie itself is OK — faithful enough to the book, but lacking some of its punch. And certainly not as good a translation to film as High Fidelity was.

There are two memorable moments, however. The first is taken directly from the book, and it’s a flashback scene between the younger version of the Colin Firth character and his father. The father started taking his son to Arsenal games as a way to bond after his divorce. Now that the kid’s older, he suggests spending their weekends together doing something other than watching football. “I thought we’d be beyond that stage by now,” the dad says.

“We’ll never be beyond that stage,” the son replies.

The other great piece of dialogue is a throwaway conversation between a group of Arsenal fans (Warning to sensitive readers: avert your eyes).

Fan 1: What about last season?
Fan 2: What about it?
Fan 1: They were rubbish. They were fucking rubbish.
Fan 2: They weren’t that bad.
Fan 1: They were fucking rubbish last year. And they were fucking rubbish the year before. And I don’t care if they are top of the League, they’ll be fucking rubbish this year, too. And next year. And the year after that. I’m not joking.
Fan 2: I don’t know why you come, Frank. Honest I don’t.
Fan 1: Well, you live in hope, don’t you?

You live in hope. You certainly do.]

Interestingly enough, the thing that got me wasn't even on your list: They're turning a soccer movie into a baseball movie. I sense a Running Man-type book destruction here. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Read Running Man, the book. Then watch Running Man, the movie. Then compare.)

I'm not too worried about the transition from football to baseball. One of the things that struck me while reading Fever Pitch was how many of the things Hornsby wrote about Arsenal that I had muttered at one point or another about the A's (though Hornsby says them much better than I could ever hope to). Fandom is universal, I think.

And to be fair the 1997 movie was true to the book only in that it had an obsessed Arsenal fan at the center of its narrative. Other than that, it's basically a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, albeit one with a talented actor in the lead role instead of an SNL has-been.

No, the problem they're going to have is with the denouement of this latest version of Fever Pitch. If memory serves, the book's ending centers around Arsenal ending its 18-year drought of league championships; this is also the ending of the 1997 movie. What are they going to do in this version -- have the Sox win the World Series?

I mean I'm all for willing suspension of disbelief, but there's only so much that my imagination can allow.

I refuse to live in a world in which Colin Firth is not playing the lead in "Fever Pitch."

And I'm a Red Sox fan.

Hack Alert. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=caple_jim&id=1878585 counts an I Hate The Yankees or two, a David Wells Is fat!, and an Athletics' Lack Of Fundamentals for good measure.

As of this day of leaving this comment, Arsenal are still unbeaten in the Premiership. C'mon you GUNNERS!!!!!

BTW, Chelsea play negative football and are now the most boring club in the world, um not to be critical.

Boy, you got that right, Cabel. Me, I blame Mourinho for cranking up the dullness. That, and my main man, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, is now with Middlesbrough. What's a bandwagon-jumping American to do?

Still, two points back of Arsenal is nothing to sneeze at, boring style of play or not.

Well Phil, whether it is a crappy movie or not, you've got to give them credit for arranging the Red Sox World Series victory to stay true to the storyline from the book!

(No, the problem they're going to have is with the denouement of this latest version of Fever Pitch. If memory serves, the book's ending centers around Arsenal ending its 18-year drought of league championships; this is also the ending of the 1997 movie. What are they going to do in this version -- have the Sox win the World Series?

I mean I'm all for willing suspension of disbelief, but there's only so much that my imagination can allow.

Posted by: Phil at September 5, 2004 08:37 PM)

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