Football In Short Fiction
by Sonja Wild, extracted with permission from her MA thesis ‘The Depiction and Function of Football In Contemporary British Literature’. Translation by Ian Plenderleith.
(you can read the entire thesis, in German, at www.ballundbuch.de)
The following chapter deals with two football short stories, each of which focus on a particular theme from the football world. Short stories must necessarily focus on just one point of view, and are therefore especially well-suited for examining the literary presentation of a single aspect of the game. Ian Plenderleith’s volume of short stories, ‘For Whom The Ball Rolls’, looks at individual characters from the football scene and takes a psychological approach to the question of how their fascination with the sport affects them, and why football can have such a massive influence on peoples’ daily lives.
From this volume, ‘The Man In The Mascot’ will be analysed, a story about an often neglected figure from English football – the mascot. The focus of the story is the dubious symbol that is supposed to represent the club and motivate the players, but which ultimately serves as an outlet for the aggression of the fans and the humiliation suffered by the person on the inside of the costume.
The Protagonist
‘For Whom The Ball Rolls: Football Stories And More’ consists of 22 short stories, twelve of them football stories. Their common theme, as mentioned in the introduction, is a concern with how football affects the lives of people connected with the game for a wide variety of reasons. The story ‘The Man In The Mascot’ is about a man who earns his money by appearing at his local club’s home games in the costume of the club mascot Topsy The Toucan.
Plot Overview
enderleith’s story, which sheds some light on the dark sides of life inside a mascot…is about a young, unemployed drama school graduate who has taken the job of Topsy to top up his unemployment benefit rather than to show his passion for the club. Already burdened with a classic biography of failure, it’s only with some reluctance that he relates to the large bird in which he’s supposed to motivate and entertain the fans, week in and week out.
The story begins by recounting the evening he meets a girl called Sabina in the pub and, in response to her question about what he does for a living, gives her an ambiguous answer implying that he’s a player at the football club where he in fact works as the mascot. His fear of rejection causes him to hold back the truth, and indeed the two start an affair. Meanwhile the narrator, Jacob, describes his job with a mixture of cynicism and pragmatic irony, constantly calling it into question:
“I often wondered which promotional genius had determined that a trussed-up, failed drama graduate would be capable of causing seven thousand people to start getting excited about a football match by jumping up and down, flapping his wings and pressing a button which made a distorted cackling noise.“
And indeed the bird, tasked with motivating the fans to get behind their team, counters nothing but ignorance and aggression. Every week he puts up with vulgar curses, fans pelt him with leftovers, and the only people he can take revenge on for being treated this way are small kids he frightens by pressing the button inside the costume when they grab his beak.
Jacob puts up with the weekly humiliations by thinking about the extra money he’s earning and by the steady consumption of beer, which he can drink inconspicuously after modifying the inside of the costume to include a can holder. Occasional trips to away games, where he meets others clubs’ mascots, represent the nearest thing to variety that he experiences in his otherwise uneventful and unsuccessful life. Jacob only achieves an acceptance of his alter ego, the toucan, on his ‘vodka days’, on which he prepares for the match in the pub with an excess of the odourless spirit. Encouraged by the alcohol, he might get a sadistic kick in belting kids with his beak, or by deliberately riling the fans. Overall, though, his job burdens him with permanent feelings of underachievement and humiliation in a sad, degrading existence from which he can’t escape because of his own lethargy – his life as a mascot strikes him as a dead end.
When he meets Sabina, therefore, his fear of missing the chance to hook up with her outweighs his desire to be honest with her. For while he likes to use his joke job to show up his parents in front of their friends, he feels the same sense of shame towards Sabina, so that in the course of the story he becomes mired ever deeper in his own lies in order not to lose her. He carves an alternative identity for himself as a footballer, helped by the fact that his girlfriend doesn’t seem to be overly interested in his job. This constructed fake identity nonetheless threatens to land him in trouble, because he’s tight with his money, only takes her to cheap places to eat out, and always insists that she pays her half of the bill. He explains the fact that he has no car by telling her that the club, in co-operation with the local community, is taking part in a campaign to promote environmental awareness by having the players cycle to training every day.
The obvious absurdity of his excuses weighs heavily on his conscience and finally he tells her the truth. But it turns out that Sabina knew about his deception all along, and that in fact she even played a role in it: she works as a director for the PR agency that took over the club’s marketing account, and was personally responsible for the concept of Topsy the Toucan. This humiliation leads to the end of the relationship, which is also good from Jacob’s point of view – as he says, he could never forgive her for having created Topsy. The story concludes with the sober report of his final game and how he was expelled from the stadium by the police after, in a state of advanced inebriation, he overstepped all boundaries of decency. In this way Jacob gets his revenge for all the degradations he’s had to experience, which reached their lowest point with Sabina’s confession, by radically breaking with his role as Topsy and rebelling against his identity as club mascot with one final, excessive appearance.
Self-loathing and Humiliation: Failure In The Context of Football
The figure of Jacob stands not just for failure in itself, but also for the relationship between self-loathing and professional fulfilment. Jacob embodies a character for whom individual personality weaknesses prevent any career progress, which on the other hand leads to a manifestation of these weaknesses (lethargy, pessimism, and a generally negative attitude towards himself and the world around him) – a vicious cycle of failure.
This failure stands out especially when placed in the context of the football world, which is especially associated with success and social recognition, but also with community feeling and experience. While all the other texts discussed so far deal with the more obvious protagonists, fans and players, in this story the example of the man hiding himself on the inside of the mascot brings another dimension to football: players and fans are characterised by their place in the collective and the common, binding facets of the collective’s identity, while the mascot, as an isolated figure on the edge of football, is in no way tied in to this collective. Sure, he represents the club and promotes support for it and a positive image, but as the story makes clear, this is the result of what can hardly be described as a fully grown emotional sense of belonging that might allow him to express criticism. Rather it’s the result of a clearly defined professional contract. Even if the players too have a similar contractual relationship to their club, they differ from the mascot not just because of the latter’s complete anonymity, but also through the different social recognition of their professional status, reflected not least by the drastic differences in income.
The story highlights this in particular because of Jacob’s over-qualified status as a drama school graduate that in no way does justice to his role as Topsy the Toucan, even when he observes with a mixture of irony and pride that, in contrast to some of his former co-students, at least he’s managed to appear on a stage before a large audience. The status that the mascot enjoys can be interpreted as follows in the face of the constant humiliations that Jacob has to suffer: despite the idea behind its conception, the mascot doesn’t serve to portray a positive image of the club, it’s much more an outlet for the built-up aggression of the fans, which can be vented without censure at the ‘faceless’ costume.
In Plenderleith’s tragi-comic story a world is evoked in which there are not just winners and losers in the game of football, but in which the weekly humiliation of the mascot stands in stark contrast to the idolisation of the players. With his lie, Jacob therefore tries to change sides and take on an identity which not only stops him looking laughable, but which also assures him the recognition of others.
In the end, the story should not just be reduced to its football theme, because on a more general level it’s also about a fundamentally more abstract theme, namely the analysis of a failed character. Jacob embodies a person who, for a mixture of social reasons such as poor employment prospects, and personal deficiencies like lack of motivation, pessimism and alcoholism, lives a life devoid of success in social isolation. Failure as a centric principle of his life is reflected in the absurdity of his job as an oversized, fake toucan, whose job it is, paradoxically, to get the fans into a good mood despite his own incessant failure.
The microcosmic football world here serves up a simultaneously clear and comic juxtaposition of the heroes on the pitch and the loser in the toucan costume on the sideline.