In new book, Farred breaks down his long-time sports fandoms

Grant Farred remembers the exact moment that 52 years of intense allegiance to Liverpool Football Club (LFC) began. He also remembers how and when it took on a new, less-consuming form.

Farred, a professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center, and professor of literatures in English, in the College of Arts and Sciences, chronicles his passionate, albeit long-distance love for his Reds – and an unexpected bonding with the Cornell men’s basketball team, spurred in part by his hoops-loving teenaged son Ezra – in “A Sports Odyssey: My Ithaca Journal,” published July 25 by Temple University Press.

In 1970, Farred was a young boy in apartheid-era South Africa. One day, he picked up the afternoon newspaper – the Cape Argus – for his father, as was his ritual. On that day, he turned to the sports section, found the English First Division standings and saw “Liverpool” in second place.

For some reason, the team resonated with him, and he was hooked.

“I was 8 years old. I made this decision, and the next 52 years of my life I dedicated to learning everything about Liverpool,” Farred said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. I believe in God – and God lives in L4 (postal code for Liverpool’s stadium, Anfield). As a friend of mine who’s also a Liverpool fan said to me, ‘That’s the ultimate postmodern moment, because it’s completely arbitrary.’ Something just said ‘Liverpool,’ and that was it. I never deviated.”

Immersing himself in LFC, a team whose home was 8,000 miles from his, propelled the young Farred out of apartheid South Africa, away from the oppression that taught him to distrust the institutions that knowingly and forcefully held him – and people who looked like him – down.

“I think, for me, my devotion to Liverpool was a visceral response to apartheid, even though Liverpool was an all-white team,” Farred said. “They would come to represent for me a certain kind of excellence, a commitment to playing hard. … South Africa was untenable, and the ways in which I survived, until I left in 1989, was through this deep and ongoing commitment to Liverpool.”

It wasn’t his only commitment. After moving to the U.S., Farred developed an abiding love for basketball.

“I was at Columbia University on a Fulbright Scholarship and lived at 120th and Amsterdam. And the property manager – a Puerto Rican guy called Tony – hooked me up with illegal cable,” he said. “My daughter was 6 or 7 months old at the time, and the first proper names she learned were the New York Knicks’ starting lineup. This was my introduction to American basketball, and calling the games was the greatest Knick of all, Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier.”

As a late-Boomer, he said, he still harbors a “profound skepticism for institutions,” and assumes he must be “a sort of unreconstructed Marxist because I believe in alienation.” He favors the distant to the local, although his passion for the Big Red men’s team – and close ties to Jon Jaques ’10, the Big Red’s head coach – grew during Cornell’s successful 2023-24 season, which ended with a heartbreaking loss at Ohio State in the National Invitation Tournament after falling short of the Ivy League title.

“Mr. Jaques, as I still call him, was one of my students and truly was one of the two or three most dedicated and best Cornell students I’ve ever had,” he said. “And then I meet (former head coach) Brian Earle at one of Ezra’s summer-league practices a few years back, and we start talking. And this is just when all this NIL (name, image, likeness) stuff is happening, so we can pay someone to work with Ezra, and it turns out to be ‘Zeke’ (former Big Red guard Isaiah Gray). That’s when the die is cast for us, and Ezra, Jane (Farred’s wife) and I start going to the games.”

For Farred, this connection was – and continues to be – a complete departure from how he understands fandom.

“It’s like, I teach at Cornell, but I’m not a ‘Cornell professor,’ right?” he said. “I’m not an institutional person, but with these guys, I’m all in.”

The pandemic, along with pre-match violence at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris, have led Farred to pull back on his obsession with LFC. Just how fanatical was he? In 2004, while an associate professor at Duke University, Farred was asked to give a talk at Liverpool John Moores University, and agreed to pay his own way to travel there. His one request: “Make sure that God comes to my talk.” For Farred, “God” was John Barnes, his all-time favorite LFC player and among the club’s greats.

The university got Barnes there, and when Farred spoke with Barnes, the former’s knowledge of the latter was so detailed that Barnes noted: “You can’t have very much to do in Durham, can you?”

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