Fan Culture and the Spaces of Sport

six Fan Culture and the Spaces of Sport In the summer of 1935, the American artist Ben Shahn received a commission from the photography department of the Resettlement Administration (ra), a federal agency set up as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. His brief was to document the lives of the suffering community at Scotts Run, a small mining community in Star City, West Virginia.1 During the Great Depression, the name Scotts Run had become virtually synonymous with poverty and unemployment, one writer for the Atlantic Monthly famously describing the region as ‘the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America’. 2 Among Shahn’s photographs is one representing two men peering through cracks in a wooden fence (illus. 86). As the image is taken from behind, the viewer can see neither the faces of the men, nor what is happening beyond. However, their upright stance and forward lean, with hands thrust deep into pockets, suggest that whatever they are watching from this unprepossessing scrubland is of great interest and that they intend to remain at their posts for some duration, despite the fact that their view is no more than partial. The photograph, held in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, dc, is simply captioned Untitled, thus giving the viewer no immediate clue as to what precisely is happening. However, other photographs, taken at the same spot on the same day, and more helpfully titled Watching a Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, reveal the mystery of what is taking place beyond this impenetrable barrier. Shahn’s photograph can thus be conceived as operating within a genre that had come into being virtually as soon as cameras were first brought to sporting events; namely the imaging of the sports spectator. 133 Shahn’s image, it should be said, hardly conforms to conventional expectations for the representation of sports fans, or indeed the type of spaces they typically inhabit. First, these spectators are not part of, but rather excluded from, the very spectacle upon which they gaze. Second, their spectatorship is surreptitious, even transgressive, as they illicitly gain free visual access to a sight that would normally demand an admission charge. This notion is further foregrounded in another of Shahn’s photographs produced that same day, in which one of the spectators turns back towards the photographer, his expression indicating resentment at Shahn’s own visual intrusion (illus. 87). Here the illicit gaze of the photographer echoes that of the sports spectators themselves. Shahn’s striking image of Depression-era sports spectators sneaking a free view of a football match foregrounds a sense of isolation and alienation, and the exclusion of male, working-class sports spectators from the conventionally conceived leisure pursuits of their cultural context.3 In this way it offers a visual metaphor for the broader issue of male identity and the economic disenfranchisement of so many in 1930s America. The impact of Shahn’s image relies largely upon its resistance to a set of earlier established visual conventions for the photographic representation of sport spectators. Generated largely by photojournalists for illustrated 87 Ben Shahn, Watching a Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, 134 1935, photograph. 88 Anon., Sheffield Wednesday publications, these tended to be celebratory, emphasizing community Fans Watching a Game from the and togetherness, the notion that the shared witnessing of an event Terraces, c. 1940. united a crowd of disparate individuals (illus. 88). In this way, they broadly followed conceptualizations of the positive and unifying power of social gatherings, a concept described as ‘collective effervescence’ by Émile Durkheim in 1912.4 However, Durkheim’s views, principally concerned with religious community practices, notably ran counter to earlier fin de siècle anxieties regarding crowd psychology, not least a focus on the potentially malevolent, atavistic or regressive behaviour of crowds as articulated in the writings of Georg Simmel and Gustave Le Bon.5 It is noteworthy here that, at this time, the vast majority of photographers who pointed their lenses away from the sporting action and towards spectators predominantly adopted Durkheim’s view, rarely foregrounding the notion that such gatherings might, in fact, pose a threat to the social order. Doubtless sport’s overt association with leisure, rather than political protest, would have shaped this thinking. 135 But it should be noted that crowd transgressions at sporting events, though far from common, were neither unknown, nor unreported, even at this early stage. During the mid- to late nineteenth century, for example, press reports on sports that drew large crowds regularly documented incidents of antisocial behaviour, violence and even rioting. As Stephen Riess has reported, in the United States in 1882 alone, ten incidents of attacks on baseball umpires were recorded, resulting in one Boston team separating supporters from the field of play with barbed wire.6 Three years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as Allen Guttmann has recounted, a football match between Preston North End and Aston Villa ended in crowd violence, with spectators using fists, feet, sticks, umbrellas and stones as weapons.7 In some instances, goalposts were uprooted and even set alight.8 Whatever the sport, press reports were usually unambiguous in concluding, though frequently on the basis of little evidence, that this unruly behaviour was caused exclusively by the ‘lower-class’ spectators. Yet while anxieties concerning the darker side of sports spectatorship were frequently voiced in the press, they were rarely articulated in visual form. Clearly difficulties, both in terms of being in the right place at the right time and the relative technical limitations of the photographic medium at the time, diminished the likelihood of capturing such moments of ill behaviour. But this does not explain the predominance of an opposite emphasis, namely the establishment of a set of conventions that typically visualized the sports fan as a member of an idealized ‘imagined community’ (to deploy the concept developed by Benedict Anderson) in which spectators were joyous, well behaved and united in support of the team or individual being watched, the sport itself and, by extension, wider society.9 Countless examples of happy, and socially unthreatening, crowds permeated the pages of the general and sports press during the early twentieth century. Some focused on the orderly nature of crowds either gathered tightly together within the stadium space, or awaiting admittance to a game (illus. 88). Here, despite the claustrophobic proximity generated by frequently overcrowded conditions, or poor organization, an emphasis on contentment and compliance dominated any sense of dissatisfaction or unrest. During the 1930s, British press photographers introduced a new 136 convention for the visual representation of the sports fan, though this did little to alter the emphasis on sports spectatorship as unproblematic and socially unthreatening. Now, the individual, eccentric football supporter, usually colourfully costumed and represented at a moment of exuberant behaviour, made frequent appearances in journals such as Picture Post. Typically, this fan was represented in a public space, yet distanced from the stadium context in which spectatorship usually occurred. For example, a photograph from the Hulton Archive shows a victorious Everton fan celebrating in London’s Trafalgar Square following his team’s 3-0 victory over Manchester City in the 1933 fa Cup final (illus. 90). The jubilant supporter is dressed in a suit, purpose-made for the occasion, and although the photograph is monochrome it is clear that this is divided into blue and white quarters, the colours of his team. His costume is further decorated with rosettes, a top hat and a scarf, and he stands on top of a concrete bollard waving an umbrella decorated with a cardboard cut-out of the trophy his team has just won. In his other hand he rings a bell while he sings loudly enough to draw the attention of both photographer and passers-by. This, by most measures, would of course constitute inappropriate comportment in a public space, yet the smiles of the surrounding men, only one of whom can be identified specifically as a football fan from the rosette he is wearing, 89 Anon., No Known Restrictions – Baseball Fans at 7 a.m. outside Polo Grounds, c. 1908–25. 137 90 Anon., An Enthusiastic Everton Fan Celebrates his Team’s Victory Against Manchester City in the fa Cup final by Waving a Customised Umbrella in London’s Trafalgar Square, 1933. indicate that this exuberance is regarded as entirely acceptable in the context of the occasion, his team’s victory in the nation’s pre-eminent football competition. By the 1930s, fa Cup final day had virtually become an English national holiday. Up to this point, the final had mostly been staged in London, initially 138 at the Oval cricket ground and, from 1895, in the shadow of the famous Crystal Palace at the Victorian pleasure gardens at Sydenham.10 In 1923 the role of hosting the competition’s grand finale shifted to Wembley Stadium, purpose-built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5. Since the 1890s the match had attracted attendances of over 100,000 spectators, many travelling to London from the Midlands and the North, the homes of the clubs that had come to dominate professional football. A consequence of this was that Cup Final day typically witnessed vast numbers of supporters from outside London ‘occupying’ the capital for the day. For many, the carnivalesque atmosphere of a trip to London had become what Jeff Hill has evocatively called a ‘rite of spring’.11 Read within this context, this photograph of an Everton supporter in London clearly foregrounds a sense of northern otherness articulated through its emphasis on costume and behaviour.

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