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A well-known scholar and lifelong soccer fan tells what the game has meant for him
Long Distance Love
A Passion for Football
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Grant Farred
"That Farred writes well about football is beyond debate. He brings a distinctive passion to the topic along with a wealth of analytic insights that will please readers versed in the rich lore of the sport and alert to its growing status as an exemplary vehicle of globalization."
—Andrew Ross, New York University, author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade
Grant Farred is a lifelong soccer fan. He has been rooting for one team-Liverpool (England) Football Club-since he was a child. Long Distance Love explains how "football" opened up the world to a young boy growing up disenfranchised in apartheid South Africa. For Farred, being a soccer fan enabled him to establish connections with events and people throughout history and from around the globe: from the Spanish Civil War to the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s; from the experience of racism under apartheid to the experience of watching his beloved Liverpool team play on English soil.
Farred shows that issues like race, politics, and war are critical to understanding a sport, especially soccer. And he writes beautifully, with candor and lyricism. Long Distance Love does for football what C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary did for cricket: it provides poetry and politics in equal measure, along with insights on every page.
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Reviews
"[R]emarkable...In delightfully exuberant prose, Farred recounts a passion that, for him, borders on religion.... Long Distance Love is a playful — yet no less brilliant — work of political theory; its contribution to political thought comes from making such hopeful statements without compromising the immoderate passions that sports fandom indulge."
—Centre Daily Times
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Talk, Drinks, and Dinner with God
1. Long Distance Love: Growing Up a Liverpool Football Club Fan
2. Los Desaparecidos y la Copa Mundial
3. Som més que un club, perň menys que una nació: More than a Club but Less than a Nation
4. Careless Whispers: The Doubleness of Spanish Love
5. At Home, Out of Place
6. God's Team: The Painful Pleasure of the Miracle on the Bosphorus
7. The Gerrard Final
Notes
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University and the author, most recently, of What's My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals. He is a life-long fan of Liverpool Football Club, the greatest and most successful club in the history of English football. |
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In the series
Sporting, edited by Amy Bass.
As an international cultural activity for athleticism, spectatorship, and global cultural exchange, sport is unmatched by any other force on earth. And yet it remains a consistently understudied dimension of history and cultural studies. Sporting, edited by Amy Bass, aims to contribute to the study of sport by publishing works by people across a range of disciplines, by professional sportswriters, and by athletes to add substance to our still emerging notion of globalization.