ultras - 2010 - Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong

2010

A & C Black

256 pages

In Italy, Football fanatics are called Ultras and engage in many of the same soccer related activities as the Casuals in England. They fight with each other and they sing songs to their team while insulting the fans of their opponents.... and so forth. There are some differences too, though, unlike the English Casuals the UltraS wear their team colours and that’s about it for differences as far as I can tell from reading Football, Fascism, and Fandom. If there are other differences, they’re obscured by this book’s degree of focus on strictly neo-fascist UltraS firms, and their focus on uncharacteristically large firms.

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong make all the connections needed to satisfy the reader that the Irriducibili, supporter of SS Lazio, and the Boys, supporter firm of FC Roma, are great admirers of Mussolini, opponents of immigration, lovers of violence, etc. Just like everywhere, in England the English Defense League recruits from hooligans and in Germany, Football hooligans are thought to make up a significant component of the Islamophobic Pageda movement. It is interesting to read about the unique ways that these attitudes are given form among fans in Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, as the teams whose supporters are the object of study for this book both play in a stadium created by the Fascist regime in a city where some monuments to that period still stand.

While Testa’s and Armstrong’s book gets into all of the specific ways Fascism is given a new voice in Italian sports-fandom, particularly in these support clubs, there’s something disappointing about the tight focus this book places on Irriducibili and Boys when the book’s subtitle ‘The UltraS of Italian Football’ led me to believe that I would be reading an overview of the Italian UltraS scene with a focus on political attitudes. The two firms the book discusses, in that they support major clubs in Rome, are undoubtedly at the heart of Italian football, and they may be taken by the reader, at first, as representative of the larger UltraS scene. When reading through the book though, its suspect how typical they are. Irriducibili have built a brand of merchandise using the logos of their firm. How many other firms have a reputation that’s commercially viable? Additionally, they’re both neo-fascist groups, but its not surprising that there are connections between sports fandom and rightwing politics. Major league sports with city teams has, on a surface level, a lot to offer to adherents of the political right. There are moments in reading Testa and Armstrong’s account of these firms where they allude to other Italian teams having left-wing supporters, and I’d like to know more about them and how they come to be.

So essentially my issues with the book dont emerge from any problem with the book content but rather from a gap I perceive between the book and its content.

There was one statement in the book that I found especially troubling, when the authors noted that the method spectator’s used to express racism, that is, grunting like an animal when a black player took possession of the ball - the same method of expressing racism Bill Buford described witnessing on the English terraces in the 1980s in his 1991 hooligan ethnography, Among the Thugs - was practiced by the spectators at large, and not simply by the UltraS, and are therefore ‘beyond ideological explanation’. It is not at all clear to me how such a statement is true.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.