Hopelessly Devoted

It

was a little after 5 a.m. in my home in Hong Kong when Jerzy Dudek, the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool Football Club, saved a penalty from Andriy Shevchenko, a Ukrainian playing for AC Milan. The save ended the most exciting sporting event you will ever see, secured for Liverpool the top European soccer championship for the first time in 21 years, and allowed me to breathe. Within seconds, my wife had called from London, and the e-mails started to flood in—the first from TIME's Baghdad bureau, others from Sydney, London, Washington and New York. In my fumbled excitement, I misdialed my brother's phone number three times. Then Steven Gerrard, Liverpool's captain, lifted the trophy, and behind the Cantonese chatter of the TV commentators I could just make out 40,000 Liverpudlian voices singing their club's anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone. And that's when I started to cry.

Apart from the big, obvious things—love, death, children—most of the really walloping emotional highs and lows of my life have involved watching Liverpool. There was the ecstasy of being in the crowd when the club won the European championship in 1978, and the horror of settling down in my office for a 1985 European championship game—only to watch Juventus fans get crushed to death when some Liverpool supporters rioted. Through long experience, my family has come to know that their chances of having a vaguely pleasant husband and father on any given Sunday depend largely on how Liverpool fared the previous day. But what on earth makes this—let's admit it—pretty unsophisticated devotion to the fortunes of men I've never met and don't really want to so powerful?

Fandom—the obsessional identification with a sports team—is universal. The greatest book ever on the psychology of being a fan, Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, was written about a London soccer team but easily translated into a film about the Boston Red Sox. Particularly in the U.S., it seems possible to be a fan of a team that's based far from where you have ever lived, but I suspect the origins of my obsession are more common. I didn't have much choice in the matter. Both my parents were born in tiny row houses a stone's throw from Liverpool's stadium. My father took me to my first game as a small child, and from the moment I saw what was behind the familiar brick walls—All those people! That wall of noise! The forbidden, dangerous smells of cigarettes and beer!—I was hooked.

We fans like to describe our passion in religious terms, as if the places our heroes play are secular cathedrals. It's easy to see why. When you truly, deeply love a sports team, you give yourself up to something bigger than yourself, not just because your individuality is rendered insignificant in the mass of the crowd, but because being a fan involves faith. No matter what its current form may be, your team is worthy of blind devotion—or will soon redeem itself. Belief is all. As Brooklyn Dodgers fans said in the 1950s: Wait 'til next year.

But as you get older, it becomes harder to believe. Yes, the Dodgers won the World Series in 1955; but they aren't ever coming back from Los Angeles. Loss of faith can set in. That, however, is when you appreciate the deeper benefits of being a fan. For me, following one soccer team has been the connective tissue of my life. I left Liverpool to go to college and have never had the slightest desire to live there again, but wandering around the world, living in seven different cities in three continents, my passion was the thing that gave me a sense of what "home" meant. Being a fan became a fixed point, wherever I lived; it was—it is—one of the two or three things that I think of as making me, well, me.

But fandom does more than defeat distance and geography. It acts as a time machine. There is only one thing that I have done consistently for nearly 50 years, and that is support Liverpool. To be a fan is a blessing, for it connects you as nothing else can to childhood, and to everything and everyone that marked your life between your time as a child and the present. So when I sat in Hong Kong at dawn last week watching the game on TV, I didn't have to try to manufacture the tiny, inconsequential strands that make up a life. They were there all around me. Tea at my Grandma's after a game; a favorite uncle who died too young; bemused girlfriends who didn't get it (I married the one who did); the 21st birthday cake that my mother iced in Liverpool's colors; my tiny daughters in their first club shirts; the best friends with whom I've long lost touch. What does being a fan mean? It means you'll never walk alone.