Among The Thugs

When I was in high school there was this propaganda spread around to all the students, that to get into anything close to a good college a student had to take at least 2 years of a foreign language. Maybe it was the guidance counselors who spread this lie, or the language teachers wanting to ensure their services would be in high demand. Nevertheless, my fellow students and I bought into it and were soon choosing our classroom aliases and looking up curse words in the English to foreign language dictionary.

I took Spanish and during my second year I had a fresh out of college, 5 foot small, meek and incredibly kind-hearted woman for a teacher. And we made her life, or at least the class period, miserable. The class was filled with sophomores. Now sophomores are essentially freshmen trying to act like juniors, full of delusional immaturity. What made things even worse is that of the 25 students in the class only 4 were girls. There was so much testosterone in that room it's surprising that the girls didn't sprout whiskers as a result of a contact high.

So needless to say we were beyond jerk status in our treatment of this woman. I remember almost nothing she actually taught, but I do remember how we would rhythmically pound on our desks in the middle of her lesson, how we would steal things off her desks and hold it above her head as she would jump and try to get it like some kind of poodle. On a number of occasions we somehow convinced her to let us listen to the song The Humpy Dance during class, and to celebrate the end of the year we had her show us The Goonies. And again this was Spanish class.

I'm not sure how many times we made her cry during class. It was enough to make us feel bad but not enough to make us stop. Clearly we were complete and utter bastards to this poor woman. But the thing is we weren't bastards by nature. Individually, we weren't troublemakers. We weren't making frequent visits to the principal's office. In fact many of us had never seen the inside of it. However, when we were thrown together in that classroom together we transformed into a pack of incarcerated vikings.

I choose to read Among the Thugs because, A. I read Buford's book Heat some time back and enjoyed it and B. it's about soccer (or I should say football), a sport I'm not any good at but have enjoyed playing ever since I was six years old. I was about 20 pages into this book when I came across an article in the latest issue of Newsweek called "Fifty Books for Our Time", and in a serendipitous moment this obscure, 19 year old book, that I couldn't even find in a book store or libraries, was listed. This was my first hint that this book was more than just soccer.

Among the Thugs is about the author's time spent around soccer hooligans in Europe and analyzes crowd violence. Some even see the book as being insightful in understanding terrorism. Maybe if that Spanish teacher had read it our Digital Underground fueled attacks would have been squashed.