Power Plays

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The football stadium is the only place in Burma where five thousand rabble-rousers can jeer, "Fool, fool, fool!" at a member of the government without being hauled off to the stockade. In his happily meandering travelogue The Trouser People (Penguin Viking; 296 pages), Andrew Marshall takes us right into these very stands among the ordinary—and extraordinary—people of contemporary Burma, as he retraces the steps of George Scott, the Englishman who brought the sport to the now soccer-obsessed country more than a century ago.

Marshall uses the tale of Scott's travels and football's rise as the architecture for a witty account of life in today's diverse and suppressed Burma. As a journalist based in Bangkok, Marshall spent five years sifting through Scott's diaries, reconstructing the story of this roguish colonialist who came to Burma in 1875 as a war correspondent and earned the moniker of Burma's Father of Football by organizing the first match between a ragtag group of locals and foreigners at a Rangoon university. Even then, the game that Burmese love because it "is so much like fighting" was a safe way to throw an elbow into the guts of their oppressors.

Scott's tracks lead Marshall from the violent streets of Rangoon to the dilapidated pomp of imperial Mandalay. The book's best episodes are those in which Marshall seems to forget for a few pages all about Scott as he journeys into parts of Burma that remain as untamed by the current iron-fisted military as they were by the ruthless rule of the British. He visits regions outside the junta's reach: fiefdoms of local druglords, the "Wild Wa" in northeast Burma—notorious headhunters and fierce warriors who even today are not controlled so much as contained by Burma's military.

Casually weaving relevant political and cultural history into his wry note taking on what he sees in this largely inaccessible country, Marshall gives us a rare glimpse into the jukes and jibes—both on the field and off—of Burma's mysterious balance of power.