Shortly after arriving in London in the winter of 1961, Salman Rushdie's father asked his son if he wanted to go see a football match for the first time.
The boy, 13, who in Bombay had only seen cricket and field hockey, shrugged.
Why not?
That game was a friendly between Arsenal and Real Madrid.
The story is very tender and Rushdie tells it in one volume,
Go over the line
, published by Plaza&Janés in 2003, about one of the great revelations of his life, football, and the origin of his passion for the club of his life, Tottenham.
In that friendly, Madrid (“I didn't know that the visitors were the best team ever seen”) beat Arsenal 0-3 until they withdrew their starting eleven, including Gento, Di Stéfano and Puskas, to make way for the reserves ;
Arsenal kept eleven to tie at three.
Returning to the hotel where they were installed, Salman Rushdie's father asked his son what he thought of his first match.
“The English team didn't seem like much to me, but I liked the Spanish team.
Can you find out if there is any English team that plays like Real Madrid?
His father responded with this wonderful phrase: "I'll ask at reception."
Rushdie, years later, would regret the naivety of his question, "as if in Michael Jordan's aerial heyday, he had asked, 'Can you find out if there's a team that plays like the Bulls?' question at reception had an effect: the boy was sent to see Tottenham.
And Rushdie fell in love.
Of the game, of the chants of the fans, of the rivalry with Arsenal (“
Poor old Arsenal lies a-mouldering in the grave / while the Spurs go marching on!
on!
on!
”).
More information
Salman Rushdie and the decision to live without fear
In those autobiographical pages, Rushdie tells how he took Vargas Llosa to soccer one day (at White Hart Lane, the Spurs stadium) and the Nobel Prize winner was amazed because the “
One team in Europe!
There's only one team in Europe!
” was sung to the rhythm of Guantanamera, in a match precisely in which a right-back named Gary Stevens played for Everton, and a right-back named Gary Stevens for Tottenham, and the two alternated the right-back of the England team , so the fans, also to the rhythm of Guantanamera, sang: “
Two Gary Stevens!
There's only two Gary Stevens!”
Cross the line
is a book with a sensitive sense of humor (several Rushdie speeches are included), and those football pages are also singularly delicate, made with the nerve fiber of passion.
For example, the profile he makes of David Ginola, the Spurs' 90th star, is exceptional, as well as several chronicles he writes about the games.
In one of the speeches he gives in the United States, Salman Rushdie reveals that, when visiting the country with his new book, an aide to President Bush announced that no member of the government would receive him because, after all, he was just an author on promotional tour.
"An author on book tour!" He exclaimed, "The only thing he ever wanted to be."
The death threat that has been on the verge of becoming a reality in New York has already weighed on him for many years.
This Spurs fanatic, who knew how to find in football the way to channel his passions, has been crossed for half his life by Islamist fanaticism that has, for further punishment, adhered to the most shameful condemnations (“all fanaticism, all religions ”) and the most humiliating silences.
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