Audio By Carbonatix
Based on Friend of Unfair Park PeterK’s morning e-mail, I tracked down a copy of Dave Zirin’s Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love. Peter hadn’t seen the book but wondered whether Tom Hicks makes a cameo. It’s much more than that: Chapter 15 is titled “‘What’s a Scouser?’ Tom Hicks Goes European” and offers a terrific history of Hicks’s rocky ownership of Liverpool FC.
It begins with a familiar tale that still sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: Tom Hicks Jr. walks into a Liverpool bar … At which point Tommy, believing he would be greeted with hugs and huzzahs following the team’s victory over Middlesbrough, was instead showered with beer and spittle. “This wasn’t a Liverpudlian male bonding ritual,” writes Zirin. “It happened because Junior forgot, in the words of one Liverpool FC-loving blogger, ‘that his father is the most hated man in Liverpool.'” Zirin then spends the rest of chapter explaining why, offering a detailed history of the team — its previous ownership, its working-class roots — and occasionally quoting from Unfair Park’s coverage of Hicks’s soccer-team ownership debacle (ah, so that’s what pride feels like).
A brief excerpt that sums up Scousers’ sentiments:
As one longtime fan said to me, “I don’t think that Hicks got that Liverpool has never been about making money. Liverpool’s a modest club in a poor city. You have to act with a certain kind of modesty, and, most important, humor, and you also have to be able to muster the same amount, if not a great amount, of passion. And Hicks has never, at any moment, given himself over to that team. This is the thing about Texans, right? It’s a place big on everything except self-deprecation. I mean, have you heard Texans laugh at themselves? If you wear cowboys boots and a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers that are three sizes too small and crotch-hugging, how can you not laugh at yourself?”
