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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fever Pitch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession vs. Fandom
Sports, Identity, and Community
Escapism
Sports and Masculinity
Summary
Analysis
Nick befriends another teenager, Hislam, whom he often runs into on trains. Hislam impresses Nick with his stories about being a hooligan who is regularly arrested. Nick eventually finds out that Hislam’s stories are all lies. Football, Nick considers, attracts many people who aren’t completely tethered to reality—like Hislam—because its culture is so broad. Anyone can tell a story about fighting a fan of another team, and it would be believable and unverifiable.
Nick and Hislam are not so different—Nick also invents a fake identity around being from North London. Earlier, he lied to a family at a Reading game about his own made-up hooligan lifestyle. It seems that Nick’s experience of creating an identity out of his football team is fairly common.
Themes
Nick and Hislam go to a game together. Before the game, Nick sees the Arsenal player Bob Mcnab at the box office, and he jumps at the opportunity to speak to him. He asks Mcnab if he’s playing that day, to which Mcnab responds, “Yeah.” In the stands, Nick tells some of the other fans that Bob Mcnab told Nick himself that he was playing. Meanwhile, Hislam brags to another group of fans that he snuck into the game without a ticket, which is a lie. Nick considers that, out of the two of them, he is the one whose story is unbelievable.
It's ironic that Nick’s story is the one that seems like a lie. What Nick says is true, and Hislam has no reason to lie about sneaking into the game. This experience illustrates the ways that football fans like Nick and Hislam create their own respective identities through storytelling (or lying), and how this process is woven into the football team and its fanbase.
Themes
In the present, now that Nick is in this 30s, he no longer has any real desire to talk to professional footballers, even though he sometimes fantasizes about it. Football players are like celebrities, and Nick doesn’t want to embarrass himself with desperate attempts to get close to them. He thinks that football clubs mean more to fans than they do to players.
When Nick speaks to Bob Mcnab at the game with Hislam, he is a young teenager. At that point he is so obsessed with Arsenal and desperate to fit into the fan community that speaking to a player feels like a big deal. When Nick is in his 30s, he finally begins to understand the difference between fandom and obsession, and he tries to maintain a healthier relationship to Arsenal.
Themes
