In my teens, I read the books of Fred Exley’s “Fan” fictional-memoir trilogy one after another, and I remember hoping to never be within a million miles of someone as fucked up and frightening as the author’s doppelganger. That Exley is a fascinating character but also the height (and depth) of American male insecurity: violent, self-pitying, alcoholic, furious, a mess. He realizes too intently that he’s on the wrong side of an ugly score.
The second and third volumes are so-so, but the original, A Fan’s Notes, is a searing, heartbreaking thing, and everyone who’s picked up a copy probably thought of it again this weekend when hearing of Frank Gifford’s death. I know I did.
The USC and Giants great was the “star” to Exley’s “fan,” and the segment about the back running headlong into a Chuck Bednarik guillotine, which put him in the hospital for ten days and on the sidelines for 18 months, is unforgettable. If Gifford, the golden idol, could be felled by life, what chance did Ex have in the bleachers?
At Grantland, Fred Schruers has a beautifully written article about the literary “relationship” which begat a real one. An excerpt:
Ex, as he called himself and answered to among friends, had begun the fixation on Gifford that led to this nostalgia-and-booze-soaked threnody of dysfunction around 1951, when both men were enrolled at USC. Gifford, a converted quarterback and defensive back who became a halfback his senior year and slashed for four touchdowns against Ohio State, was campus royalty; Ex was a legendarily hard-drinking English major. Like Gifford, Exley would head to New York, having been raised upstate in Watertown as the son of a crusty semi-pro footballer. Before he truly discovered his great gift — striving to redeem his own scattered life in long, lapidary sentences touched with wit and pathos — Exley would spend his twenties as the victim of his own deep emotional maladies. He would know a depression that led to electroshock therapy. In his three main works, he would explicate a painful grapple with attempts to capture the love of the kind of unreachable American princesses he longed for.2
Though he never saw Frank play in college, Exley would understand the mythic heft of this transformed oil driller’s son who became an All-American. Exley’s Fitzgeraldian tangle of thoughts about Gifford only deepened as no. 16’s NFL career soared. In one mid-novel excursion, Exley explains his own role as a failing writer among the working stiffs around him in the $1 bleacher seats:
It was very simple really. Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his … he became my alter ego, that part of me had its being in the competitive world of men …