Excerpt of the Week

From A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley, a great American novel about sports, fiction and mental illness:

Cheering is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. ... All this I did amidst an uneasing, pedantic commentary I issued on the character of the game, a commentary issued with the patronizing air of one who assumed those other patrons incapable of assessing what was taking place before their eyes. Never did I stop moving or talking. Certainly I drove a good many customers away. Most of those who remained had seen the show before and had come back for more, bringing with them the morbid fascination which compels one to stare at a madman.
...
Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdeman and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remember, elusive as integrity -- perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.

Excise references to the Giants, and you get the idea.