Chuck Culpepper - Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer

Contents

In memory of
Louise, Florence, Jim, and Ed

Acknowledgments

Look, I hail from a smallish Virginia town, so I cant believe I even know Dave Kindred. I cant believe I have conversationsand e-mails!with the same great American sportswriter I read in the Washington Post while a student in Charlottesville. I cant believe he knows my name and can summon it immediately upon the sight of me, let alone that Im privy to his towering decency, or that we share the regal distinction of having been Kentucky sportswriters.

So I really cant believe that when I covered the 2005 Kentucky Derby for Newsday, he suggested that I write my first book, nor can I believe that he arranged for me a meeting with his New York agent.

I mean, come on. Im from a smallish town in Virginia.

I would have trouble believing that just weeks later I went trembling into the offices at the David Black Literary Agency, had I not been there at the time.

Thanks then to David Kindred for everything, and to David Black himself for his humanity, which I found so striking I felt I should pay the going counseling rate$175?and for his exquisitely astute guidance toward this England venture. Thanks to David Larabell and Susan Raihofer of the David Black Literary Agency for their insight and help, and then to a phenomenal English editor Alan Samson, not least for inviting me to the front row at Arsenal.

Next came Doubleday and Jason Kaufman as the unexpected privileges mounted. Thanks immensely to Jason for navigating my proposal, for the honor of co-working, and for a maestros calm expertise. Thanks to Rob Bloom at Doubleday for a whole lot of everything that included a whole lot of patience.

Theres an extraordinary human being out there who doubles as the worlds foremost blue bear in my opinion, and my gratefulness will prove ceaseless for this young Englishman Charlie Allum, as well as for his fellow Portsmouth devotees Dan Pawsey and Hopkins, whose first name is Dylan if we must get technical. These Three English Guys Youd Most Like to Meet in a Pub adopted me during the 20062007 season, shepherded me toward the bartenders, and supplied a few hundred laughs. I am lucky to have found them upon this overcrowded orb.

Immeasurable thanks to Randy Harvey at the Los Angeles Times.

Thanks to a lawyer named Duncan, a fan named Mary, two exuberant young men named Chris and Jak across the aisle on a train and extraordinary friends named Teresa Malyshev, Jerry Ferguson, Debra Justus, and Isabel Murray.

Ive required a ton of encouragement as a person of fluctuating confidence, so the word encouragement will dominate from here. Im steeply grateful to a publishing-industry gem named Lyda Shuster for her decades of friendship and encouragement. Im steeply grateful to have walked forlornly to a new bus stop in a new neighborhood in fifth grade and found one Karen D. Schell, and for the thirty-five years of stalwart friendship and encouragement that has followed. Encouragement came also from Bill Erdek, who epitomizes goodness.

Sportswriters know the unspeakable horror of writing, so I could mention a hundred. My friend Karen Crouse forges a rare combination of excellence and generosity, plus the you-can-do-it encouragement. Thanks to Lisa Olson, a luminous soul Im astronomically lucky to know, for her steadfast encouragement, and to Johnette Howard whom I adore with all might, for her outstanding presence and patience and encouragement, and to Susan Reed, for heryepencouragement way back when. Thanks to that glorious baseball writer Susan Slusser for being the glorious Susan Slusser, and for the encouragement.

Aloft in the stratosphere of my cranium, theres one Mary Gwen Knapp, columnist and thinker and colossal heart, not to mention a supplier of encouragement.

Thanks to Kay and Dick Culpepper, whom it would be a privilege to know even if they hadnt birthed and raised me; to Greg Culpepper, an absolutely marvelous sibling; and to Gayle Treakle, the kind of inspiring aunt who would grace every life in a perfect world.

Thanks to Kentuckians, to Oregonians, to New Yorkers, to Britons for their celestial wit, and to the great fans of the club Pompey, or Portsmouth, for their instructive exuberance. Admiring thanks to all the many people Ive met from the nation of Colombia, a people too shining for earthly woes to occlude. Thanks to Tom and Marion Hewson for extraordinary kindness plus Toms soccer guru-dom, to Lynne and David Gentle for Virginian hospitality in London, to Doug and Sandra Cress for soccer instruction and friendship plus lifes largest honor, to Barry Shaw and Rabih AbouJaoude for their many human glories.

And above all, thanks to my hero, Alfonso Avendano Meza. To reside alongside such a singular soul of such humor, buoyancy, kindness, and strength counts as staggering privilege.

Authors Note

An American brain might not necessarily implode when trying to comprehend English soccer, but it might reel and roil at the complexities of the standings and the schedule. We must be patient with ourselves.

Not only do English professional clubs play on multiple and changing levels, but they play in multiple competitions per season, quite apart from thirty-two teams pursuing one Vince Lombardi Trophy in the NFL or thirty teams pursuing one Commissioners Trophy in Major League Baseball.

First, Englands tiers:

Premier League, or Premiership. Twenty clubs. The top division. The most popular sports league on earth. A thirty-eight-game season from August to May. Each May, clubs finishing eighteenth through twentieth drop to the second tier, while three clubs from the second tier rise to the summit. This is the exciting concept known as relegationforeign to American sport.

The Championship (second division). Its a mysterious name for a second division, but there you are. It has twenty-four clubs. Three rise to the Premier League each May, and three drop to

League One (third division). Again, League One is an ironic name for the third tier, which also features twenty-four clubs. Four suffer relegation at the end of each season, as four join from below.

League Two (fourth division). Here you find the charm of the small stadiums and a relative absence of corporate staleness. There are twenty-four clubs, four of which rise to League One each May, and two of which fall into the oblivion of conference.

Conference. A vast array of more than six hundred clubs that teem below the ninety-two clubs in the top four divisions. You see them on TV rarely if ever, but you faintly know theyre out there, nobly chasing speckled balls on Saturdays.

For a more beastly cranial exercise, then, there are the number of cups the clubs hunt each season. In certain situations, clubs might speak of trying to win four separate titles in one year. All the competitions exist separately, the outcomes in any one unrelated to any of the others.

An incomplete list that eschews highly marginal competitions to prevent galling confusion: