An Ancient Kickaround (Updated)

As the climax of World Cup competition approached, it seemed that the momentous events strained conventional reporting techniques of factual description and analysis. What was required instead was the imaginative reach of a fiction writer. TIME asked British Novelist Anthony Burgess, from whose eclectic mind have sprung such novels as A Clockwork Orange and Enderby, to comment on the Cup. Burgess watched some of the early action in Germany. Here are some of his thoughts:

In West Berlin, the restaurant of the Kempinski Hotel was serving a World Cup Cocktail--equal parts of curacao, vodka and orange juice--at 5 1/2 Deutsche Mark a throw, or kick. On the Kudamm you could buy a record of the West German eleven trolling "Football is our life . . . King Football rules the world." Democratic Germany, as opposed to the German Democratic Republic, was taking the footballworld-mastership to her uncorseted and friendly bust. The spirit of internationalism was stretched so far that even selected chain gangs from the workers' paradise over the Wall were clanked into the corruptive world of blue films and blue jeans, then--on the final whistle of the match they witnessed--knouted off again. Frankfurt airport, with team supporters looking for planes to Dortmund, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf and Hannover, was a Brechtian fantasy of chauvinistic headgear and rosettes. Among the major nations unrepresented in the jostle there seemed to be only the Americans, who have never taken to the game, and the English, who invented it, but whose team lost out in elimination matches.

To any Englishman who happened to be caught up in the crowd and whizzed off to one of the stadia, there was the bittersweet sensation of seeming to hear, sung by millions, a song he had composed himself and for which he was getting no royalties. Not that England ever forced football on anyone except savages who had to be weaned from bloodier sports: the game has sold itself to civilized countries as effectively as whisky or Coca-Cola. Indeed football is the only international language, apart from sex.

Rudyard Kipling, England's national, not to say nationalistic, poet, dismissed England's two national games very scornfully: "The flannelled fools at the wicket, the muddied oafs at the goals." There was a flavor of sour grapes there. Though most will admit the gentlemanly folly of cricket, the imputation of oafishness to football was, even in Kipling's own day, a bit anachronistic. Kipling seems to have had in mind the ancient bloody kickaround of the village green with a dead dog or severed head for ball, not the modern game that started to shape itself in 1863.

Few history books acknowledge the importance of that year. Before 1863, all the public schools of England--public, of course, meaning private--had had a ball game of some kind, but rules, when they existed at all, were strictly local. The desire of old Harrovians and Etonians to go on playing the game in adult life drew them to a conference at Cambridge, where an attempt was made to hammer out rules. The big question was: Should the ball be primarily handled or primarily kicked? Some said handled, and so evolved rugby football. Rugby has become the main game for other public schools. There the sons of gentlemen, who will never have to soil their hands in mine or factory, knock hell out of each other passing the ball backward. Americans, in their own padded and armored version of the game, pass the ball forward. This has always been taken by the British as typical American perverseness, like icing drinks and signing a Declaration of Independence.

The other kind of football, association or soccer, is mainly for the lower orders. The ball can be thrown into play, but play itself is a matter of booting. Most nations cling to the original English name--futbol or fussball or, for the Scots, fu'bo'. But the Italians logically call it il calcio (or if they're Roman, er carcio), meaning "the kick." It is perhaps the only human game theoretically playable by birds.

Soccer is traditionally crude, and it attracts roughs, drunks and roarers. It cannot be discussed in pubs without passion and obscenity. It is certainly not a gentleman's game. Even its subtlety and skill have failed to recommend it.

For those of us who are not gentlemen, the paradox of football delights and intrigues. Albert Camus played goal. Sir Frederick Ayer, the philosopher, is a fan, and there is a sense in which soccer is a fair subject for a logical positivist. It is, after all, a precise and yet various system of semeiotics.

And yet the game suffers more than it ever did from its bloodied-oaf aficionados--the rough, vulgar, vandalistic, stupid, even murderous. British supporters have become notorious for their train ripping, window smashing, bovver booting, bottle fights. Recent British fan conduct in Holland led to Times editorials and high-level apologies on behalf of the whole British nation. Volatile Latins, though less ebullient than the stolid Anglo-Saxons, have been known to bite ears off referees.

Here is an account of the news in Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul: "A retired general had died in Cordoba at the age of eighty; a few bombs had exploded in Bogota, and of course the Argentine football team was continuing its violent progress through Europe." Of course. The old innocent view that the game itself could be, to its supporters and players alike, a purge of violent emotions has long been exploded. Soccer is not the poor man's Sophocles.

It is all but over now for another four years, and the winners will not noticeably earn for their country increased political prestige or an unwonted influx of tourists. Soccer remains a closed language, an alternative to politics, and perhaps after all a harmless substitute for war. For the aficionados of the working and middle classes, it is art, poetry, music, the sole palliation of the boredom of the office and workbench.

More than anything, it is a temporary way out of news that is always bad. The World Cup this summer has made it easier to stomach inflation and the defections of the politicians. Whether it is right in terms of the potential!ties of the human soul for people to think more of the kicking around of a chunk of leather than of Hamlet and Bach's B Minor Mass is a question best not argued. The Fussballweltmeisterschaft has brought nations together in unlethal rivalry, and that cannot well be shrugged off as a lot of fussball about nothing.

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