Hillsborough

“I was still on the road when the match began, and after two minutes the radio commentator said that something was wrong. There was trouble on the terraces behind the Liverpool goal. There was a sad, not-this-again feeling in his voice, a quality of resignation, that the supporters, especially those from Liverpool, were sacrificing a game of football to pursue their own violent entertainment: again.. The play continued, but you could tell that the commentator was not watching it, that he was trying to figure out what was happening on the terraces. He couldn’t definitely say that it was crowd trouble, but it was something serious, and the police were gathering near the spot. And then, in an instant, that was it: the game was over. The referee had been told by the police to stop play. That was about the time I arrived home. The stadium was about to become the most famous in the world.” -- Bill Buford’s description in his 1990 book Among the Thugs of hearing about the Hillsborough stadium disaster, twenty years ago last Wednesday, in which 96 fans were killed.

There were lots of opportunities to think about what sports means last week. Wednesday marked the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death as an FA Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest got underway. There are many layers to what happened, particularly about tragedy and memory, but also about sports' changing place in society. There are many interesting things about how the 96 victims are remembered. In many ways it fits in with how other major public tragedies are remembered -- particularly the emphasis on ritually reading aloud the names of the victims, which you see in memorials to Sept. 11, and the Vietnam war. There is also an active and vibrant set of conspiracy theories that abound, and the belief that justice has not yet been served. And the the tragedy's legacy includes many unique quirks, such as the way that the Sun newspaper remains hated in much of Liverpool to this day due to its lurid and unfounded allegations of Liverpool hooliganism at the tragedy. But at the same time, the entire event seems tinged with a bit of self-pity -- 1989 was the absolute low ebb of English football. It was serving out a ban from European competition at the time as punishment for the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, in which Liverpool fans played an unfortunate role. But unlike too many tragedies, this one’s long-term legacy is positive: the investigation into what happened, the Taylor Report, produced a list of recommendations that essentially gave football a chance to start over. They recommended such things that seem so obvious -– like having seats in stadiums, instead of just pushing people into terraces which, as Buford notes, police actually referred to with the same language as moving herds of cattle: “pens,” “cages,” etc. It marked the start of the modern game: a big-money generating, largely respectable, family-friendly form of entertainment. It is a little ironic that the anniversary –- widely noted in Europe but ignored here in the States -– came just as the New York Yankees inaugurated their current fortress of capitalist bounty: its new $1.5 billion, taxpayer-supported stadium whose most expensive seats are $2,500 and have teak armrests. All this points out the strange paradoxes of sports, that is at the same time nothing more than and much much more than watching grown men play childrens' games. What it all means, and who cares about it, is always subject to change and cycles. English football changed dramatically one afternoon in 1989 – but even so, a 2007 poll found an overwhelming majority of fans want standing terraces to return. And here already, the new Yankee stadium is a monument to another era -– of leveraged capital projects, unchecked greed, and blissfully entertaining unreality. Yet another of the fascinating things about this economic crisis is to see what role sports will play in society at the other end.