Their reverence for the sport is total, while their irreverence reminds us the most important part of fun and games is the fun. Bennett and co-host Michael Davies, a fellow Brit, met when their wives dragged them to a wedding on the day of the World Cup final in 2006, and they’ve been conspiring and commiserating on their soccer musings ever since. If you’ve never seen nor heard “Men in Blazers,” you may be taking yourself or your soccer - maybe both - a bit too seriously. He’s a renaissance man whose interests range far and wide, from poetry and literature to music preservation and, of course, soccer. I wanted to retrace my steps, to try to understand that dream.” “I almost retreated into this notion of the American dream, which had elevated my life. “The impetus of writing the book was definitely the grim everyday reality I was exposed to,” he said. For Bennett, it made perfect sense to write his tribute to his adopted homeland while trapped by a deadly pandemic in an Upper West Side apartment listening to a soundtrack that was equal parts protest marches and the sirens of ambulances racing to pick up COVID patients. But the one he was sworn into was one President Donald Trump described as “American carnage.” It was the kind of precipitous drop mirrored by Bennett’s beloved Everton, which hasn’t won a league title since Reagan left office.īut then America, like Premier League success, is more an ideal than an actual thing, something aspirational that belongs less to the person or club on top than to those striving to make something of themselves. The America Bennett pined after growing up was one President Ronald Reagan described as a shining city upon a hill. Chicago in particular, home to the Bears and White Sox and the backdrop for “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink.” The fact that he’s succeeded is the impetus behind “(Re)Born in the USA: An Englishman’s Love Letter to His Chosen Home,” a 318-page paean to America. So like many Europeans, he was determined to seek his fame, fortune and freedom in the U.S. As he remembers it, it was a cold, dreary place of Dickensian despair and hopelessness, relieved only occasionally by the success of the Everton football club, which won eight trophies that decade. Roger Bennett, the irrepressible half of the “Men in Blazers,” the two-man podcast and frequent NBCSN show that focuses mainly on the Premier League, never has been shy about sharing the depression of his childhood in 1980s Liverpool. I’m Kevin Baxter, The Times’ soccer writer, and we begin today with a book that has both nothing and everything to do with soccer because, at its core, it’s one that reminds us dreams only come true if you believe in them.
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