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2 books match the query 'Liverpool Football Club'

cover of A Sports Odyssey: My Ithaca Journal

A Sports Odyssey

My Ithaca Journal

Grant Farred

Temple University Press, 2025

Grant Farred has long had a passionate connection with sports. In A Sports Odyssey, he weaves together an account of his own sports fandom that is profoundly personal and universal.

As readers of his Long Distance Love know, Grant Farred has been a supporter of the English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club, for decades. His fandom for that team launched an unexpected connection with a world beyond the limits of the apartheid state of his upbringing in South Africa. However, A Sports Odyssey shows that as Farred’s fervor for Liverpool ended, he developed a new set of sports attachments in Ithaca, New York: to his son’s youth basketball career, to the men’s basketball team at Cornell University and its coach, and even to professional teams like the New York Knicks. Farred’s bemusement at finding himself a sports parent, a New Yorker, and a company man, only underline the sincerity of his affections.

In A Sports Odyssey, Farred writes elegantly and eloquently about how sports and sports fandom create a sense of belonging, but also loss. This is a heartfelt examination of how we find “home” in who and what we love.  

In the series Sporting
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cover of Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football

Long Distance Love

A Passion for Football

Grant Farred

Temple University Press, 2008

Grant Farred is a lifelong soccer fan.  He has been rooting for one team -- Liverpool (England) Football Club -- since he was a child.  Long Distance Love explains how "football" opened up the world to a young boy growing up disenfranchised in apartheid South Africa.  For Farred, being a soccer fan enabled him to establish connections with events and people throughout history and from around the globe: from the Spanish Civil War to the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s, and from the experience of racism  under apartheid to the experience of watching his beloved Liverpool team play on English soil.

Farred shows that issues like race, politics, and war are critical to understanding a sport, especially soccer.  And he writes beautifully, with candor and lyricism.  Long Distance Love does for soccer what C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary did for cricket: it provides poetry and politics in equal measure, along with insights on every page.
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