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Chapter 32
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
Liam Brady is the public focus of Arsenal for five years, and Nick is constantly anxious about rumors that Brady will be traded to another team. Nick likes Brady because he seems articulate and smart. Since graduating from Cambridge, Nick is always trying to mentally bridge the gap between football culture and academia. Arsenal’s game against Nottingham Forest is Brady’s last game with the team before he transfers to Italy. Nick feels somewhat heartbroken, and he hopes that Brady will return to Arsenal.
Nick’s struggle to reconcile football culture and academia is inherently tied to masculinity. He grows up believing that football is masculinity, and that being a football fan necessitates embracing heavy drinking and violence while rejecting higher education and the arts. Nick identifies with both cultures, and he’s beginning to suspect that it’s possible for them to coexist.
Themes
Around the same time, Nick’s girlfriend leaves him for another man, and Nick is depressed for a while. In retrospect, he sees that he was conflating losing his girlfriend with losing Liam Brady. He also realizes that his depression wasn’t really due to losing either of them. Instead, he was mourning the loss of a period of his life that was happier, and which happened to include them both. Nick has more girlfriends that are never the same as his first one, and Arsenal has more players that never “replace” Brady. Now, Nick realizes that one can never replace a person, but one must forge new and different relationships after losing someone.
Nick equates losing his first real girlfriend to losing Liam Brady, a celebrity athlete who Nick never knew personally. This comparison shows how deeply Arsenal seems to affect Nick, though he does acknowledge that losing Brady does not actually lead to his depression. Liam Brady leaving at the same time as Nick’s girlfriend is an example of how Arsenal—in Nick’s view—always coincidentally mirrors Nick’s personal life. In this situation, Arsenal seems to help Nick learn a valuable lesson about relationships and moving on.
Themes
