Let's face it, Americans are second rate when it comes to hate. They like to call the Yankees-Red Sox a rivalry but please. It's a media fascination and fabrication, a hype fest with all the hate of a couple of kids playing in a sandbox. Celtics-Lakers? Laker fans are softer than the US economy. Same thing with Duke-North Carolina in college basketball or the NFL with the Cowboys-Redskins, Bears-Packers and Steelers-Browns. It's all second rate hate, no more, no less.
When it comes to getting a good hate on, the Yanks need look no further than across the Atlantic to see how it is really done because no one has been as accomplished and proficient at social and sporting hate like the English.
In the latter stages of the 20th century with their once invincible empire crumbling, rage was all the rage in England. Punk rock came a screaming and a snarling, spitting and spewing great biles of unmelodic hate. Throw in all the class warfare that the ultra-conservative former prime minister Margaret Thatcher inspired and the rise of hooliganism in English football and there it is: a generation of pure, unadulterated hate.
But don't take my word for it. Treat yourself to a quick primer and rent the DVDs Sid and Nancy and The Firm and check out Gary Oldman's generational defining performances in both.
It's all nostalgia now though, and nowhere is that more prevalent than in English football. Twenty-five years ago it was a perverse badge of honour for hooligans when English clubs were banned from playing in Europe on the heels of a tragic riot at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium. Domestically, English stadiums were in disrepair resulting in 96 lives being lost in the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 largely because of inadequate crowd control. The English game had truly bottomed out.
Today? A scant twenty years later the English Premier League is far and away the most popular professional sporting league in the world, where it reaps billions upon billions of pounds sterling beaming matches to audiences in 211 countries. Merchandise for Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea leaps off shelves from Baghdad to Beijing.