Where have you gone, Bill Shankly?

Bill Shankly

A few decades ago, one of the U.S. television networks began offering what it called "Up Close and Personal" looks at athletes.   Now no newspaper, large or small, is without its inspirational feature stories about athletes who battled long odds to get this far.

A few years later, ex-athletes began to go into television in big numbers, at first those who had had only marginal success as players or coaches, but increasingly, in recent years, former stars. Schooled in the power of TV and public relations, they maintained eye contact with their interviewers or interviewees and addressed them by their first names, voices carefully modulated to suggest empathy.  That the empathy more closely resembled the kind deployed by a human resources director, a real estate agent, or a mutual funds salesman than that of a friend with whom you'd schmooze over a drink or a meal or a cup of coffee didn't matter. Sincerity, and its close relative, personality,  were commodities, packaged for quick sale in a crowded market.

As transparently calculated as those trends were, they made perfect sense. As increasing salaries moved athletes in the major sports stratospheres out of their fans' social and economic orbits, teams, networks, and newspapers had to fabricate substitutes for the social bonds that no longer existed. Broadcasters began referring to players by their first names. Fans who could no longer afford to come to games would be given The NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL Experience. Reporters were only too happy to overpraise as great human beings any athlete in the top American sports leagues who had never been in prison, to laud as a family man any male athlete who did not beat, mistreat, or cheat on his wife or girlfriend, or whose agent managed to keep the misdeeds out of the papers. (Read the great Onion parody "Pro Athlete Lauded for Being Decent Human Being" for all you need to know about this trend.)

And that's why Red or Dead, David Peace's novel about the former Liverpool FC soccer manager Bill Shankly, is so moving an experience. It is a reminder that things were not always this way, that a celebrated coach once existed for whom dedication to the job, love for team and its fans, and devotion to his family were more than slogans or easy hooks. It is a vindication of generosity, hard work, loyalty, and all those concepts cheapened by noxious waves of political and commercial hucksterism.

Peace deploys any number of techniques to create his version of Shankly, some of them stylistic and technical quirks that he admits might drive some readers nuts. (The novel's first three words, "Repetition. Repetition. Repetition," are an apt summation of both Shankly's technique and Peace's.) Others are more subtle, such as his relegation of notable historical events and milestones in Shankly's life to allusion rather than direct mention, the better to focus attention on Shankly's single-mindedness. Sure, commentary on Peace tends to focus on his technical tricks, but in Red or Dead, the man — Bill Shankly — is the thing.

Lest you think that Red or Dead wallows in nostalgia, that other great salable commodity in popular culture, know that if Shankly, who died in 1981 and who deplored what had begun to happen to sports in his last years, were to look over my shoulder at this post, he would not despair. Rather, I think, he would slap me on the back, give me an inspirational lecture, and tell me to buck up and get back to the task at hand. And I would listen and believe him.

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I'm too tired to start discussing politics, but it's worthwhile to note that, while the virtues David Peace's Shankly displays — the hard work, the determination, the devotion to family and colleagues, the love of community — are those we consider conservative today, Shankly considered himself a socialist, though with disdain for or lack of interest in theoretical socialism.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

David Peace, cliché killer

OK, so David Peace's novel Red or Dead is stylistically bold (perhaps infuriating to some), with its jump cuts and its repetition—uncompromising "to near pathological levels," according to one UK review. But he uses all the tricks to highly traditional end: a convincing, realistic, moving portrayal of one man, Liverpool soccer manager Bill Shankly.

And that's why I tear up at the mutual tenderness of Shankly and his wife, Ness, and I tremble slightly at his sudden eruptions of anger at players who question his judgment.

I was going to mention how impressed I was that Peace makes so fresh a story that, in summary, sounds like a string of clichés: the hard-working coach, the obsessive, the family man, and so on, but Peace says it better, in this illuminating interview.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What I read for the NFL championship game

The National Football League' played its championship game yesterday, but I spent a good chunk of the day reading a book about another kind of football — Red or Dead, David Peace's stylistically single-minded, idiosyncratic novel about a soccer manager named Bill Shankly and his revival of the Liverpool Football Club from the early 1960s on.

I will likely have more to say later, especially about Peace's prose style, notably his repetition of words, names, and phrases. And I'll compare those repeated words, names, and phrases to themes in a piece of symphonic music, because no immediate literary parallels to Peace come to mind.

A few thoughts on Red or Dead:

1) I commented last week that:

"The only thing that turned me off a bit in the early pages was that repetition of `In the winter-time. In the night-time.' It was not clear to me why Peace did that. Perhaps it will become so later."

It has.

2) Is Red or Dead historical fiction? It does as convincing a job of capturing the spirit of a place and of a time before that author's own, yet it is in no sense the story of Bill Shankly set against the cultural upheaval soon to burst forth from Liverpool and shake the world.  The only reference through the novel's first 280 or so pages to that other Liverpudlian cultural phenomenon of the early 1960s is indirect, and all the funnier for that.

3) The repeated phrases, one of which I mentioned above, are like themes in a symphony, or like leitmotifs in an opera by Wagner. Each accompanies a repeated action on Shankly's part, coming to stand for that action. Peace so ingrains the leitmotifs in the reader's mind (or at least in mine) that the slightest variation has great effect, opens my eyes wide, lets me know that something big is happening.

4) Red or Dead is no crime novel (though Peace is the author of the four novels collectively called The Red Riding Quartet). But the one death so far in the book is infinitely more affecting than a thousand crime-novel prologues that shove the victim's agony or innocence down the reader's throat.  That Peace deals with the death so sparingly and that Shankly resumes his work routine so soon afterward makes the death all the move effective, and all the more revealing of Shankly's character.

5) Shankly was known as an obsessive coach, and the novel is full of scenes of Shankly working late, Shankly planning strategy, Shankly thinking ahead.  Yet Shankly, or Peace's version of him, is miles removed from the cliché of the American football coach so dedicated to his job that he sometimes sleeps in his office (but not so dedicated that he does not quit after just a few years to work for ESPN).  The book reads as if Peace had deliberately taken on the challenge of making something compelling and original of a figure who, in the deadening, simplifying hand of American sports journalism, would be the sum of clichés (obsessive worker, man of the people who thanks the fans, family man).

6) The humor, as in Shankly's reply to a fan who begged for tickets to an important match with the argument "But I was born in Liverpool."

"Then you should have stayed here!" replies Shankly. "You should never have moved to Birmingham."

7) The soccer. Peace gradually works discussions of soccer strategy into the book, so telling and so sparing that they held my attention, and worked as part of the novel's action, even though I'm no particular soccer fan.

OK, it's early days. I have 400 pages yet to read. But if Red or Dead were a soccer team and my reading of it a game, it would be ahead, 4-0, with four minutes still to play in the first half.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014