From the book LEGS HEARTS MINDS: Loss and Its Remedies by Chris Jones. Copyright © 2026 by Chris Jones. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
I'm not sure the city of Hull has a best face, but a sodden evening in March 2023 is not it. My son Sammy and I looked through the rain-streaked windows of our train at the North of England, a thousand shades of gray. I'd picked out a hotel within walking distance of Hull's ground, but it still felt like a bit of a forced march, the rain falling, the crunch of broken glass under our feet. The opening legs of our football pilgrimage had been made in posh and sunny London, where we'd seen games at Tottenham and Fulham, sitting among the Premier League's aristocrats. Now he was bearing witness to a different reality, to his great-grandfather's reality, where football is less an entertainment than what gets you through. I made sure my grandfather's Burnley scarf was hidden under my rain jacket and explained to Sammy the subtle etiquette of not getting your head kicked in.
Fans of North American sports who haven't experienced English football would be surprised to learn what rivalry really means. A Championship game between Hull and Burnley isn't a Glasgow derby, but supporters don't mix. In football, there is always a dedicated section for away supporters, penned in by rows of security in a corner of the ground, with buffers of empty seats on either side. In Hull, the usual DMZ of empty seats was covered with fishing nets, and Sammy and I sat on Burnley's front line, with two thousand reinforcements behind us, immediately next to the divide. Across the nets, grim-faced Hull supporters stood and faced us, holding two crooked fingers in the air and making the international gesture for vigorous self-pleasure. I thought Sammy might be intimidated. Hull makes hard people, and then the football usually puts them in worse moods. There is a certain breed of English football fan, Homo miserablis. They are not hooligans, because their violence is purely spiritual, and you can occasionally have a good time with a hooligan. Homo miserablis has never given or experienced joy. They are machines custom built to loathe everyone and everything, and physically very much of a type, which has made me wonder whether they are made or born. They are almost always white males in late middle age, bald or balding, with rock-hard barrels for guts, dressed in what might pass for fashionable in an upper-end nursing home. Their skin is usually some shade of crimson, or at least it can turn instantly from translucent to purple on demand, like an octopus on the run. They usually have glasses perched somewhere on their noses, which are either bulbous or pinched, looming over their more universally thin mouths, set to a frown at rest and designed to release spittle, given the absence of lips to catch it.