How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (7 page)

They murdered one and left another in critical condition.

If these events hadn’t coincided, perhaps Findlay could have defended himself in the press. But the environment wouldn’t stand for any excuses. The morning that the Findlay story broke in the paper, he resigned from Rangers management. Over the next few months, as Scottish eminences lined up to condemn him, he purchased pills and flirted with suicide. St.

Andrews University, where he had just finished a six-year term as rector, canceled its plans to award Findlay an honorary degree. The Scottish Faculty of Advocates, the body governing the nation’s lawyers, fined him 3,500 pounds.

Findlay had become the touchstone for a nation-wide debate. Delivering the keynote at the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland’s great composer James MacMillan declared, “Donald Findlay is not a one-o¤. To believe that is self-delusion because our [society is] jam-packed
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

with people like Donald Findlay.” He argued that Scotland su¤ered from a case of “sleepwalking bigotry.”

Newspaper columnists pronounced Findlay a national stain. But he had his defenders, too. Even some of the management at Celtic testified to Findlay’s good heart.

In e¤ect, the Donald Findlay debate cut to an essential question of the Old Firm: When they talked about murder and terrorism, was it just good fun or an expression of rotten consciences?

Nearly three years after the videotape, Findlay remains one of the five wealthiest barristers in Scotland. He has rehabilitated himself just enough to become a fairly regular newspaper and television pundit. The Tory party in Scotland doesn’t really have a more prominent spokesman. Yet, he can’t put the episode behind him. It haunts and obsesses him.

When Findlay agreed to meet me, I devised clever plans to coax him onto the subject of the tape. He immediately renders them superfluous. “About the tapes: I should have put up a fight. I would try to challenge them to provide one human being who’d been

adversely a¤ected by me because of religion, color, or anything else.” Fighting the politically correct elites, he would have proven that the songs are essentially harmless traditions: “It’s about getting into the opposition’s head; it’s a game; it’s in the context of football. Do you want to be up to your knees in Fenian blood? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Like many of the staunchest supporters of Rangers, he didn’t grow up in Glasgow. He came from the east of Scotland, a small town called Cowdenbeath, born into a staunchly Tory working-class family. And like
most Rangers supporters, he doesn’t believe in the Protestantism that his team represents. “I’ve got no religious beliefs. Believe me, I’ve tried hard but you can’t teach that.” What he did inherit was a belief in the monarchy and the British union that disparaged the Scottish-Catholic a¤ection for the Irish motherland. He jokingly, I think, announces his preferred test for British citizenship: If a troop carrying Queen’s colors

“doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, then fuck o¤!”

It’s easy to link support for a soccer club with reli-giosity. But in an important way, Rangers has actually replaced the Church of Scotland. It allows men like Findlay to join the tradition and institutions of their forefathers, to allay fears about abandoning history without having to embrace their forefathers’ eschatology.

Findlay splays across our booth, his pants pulling up past his ankle. He enjoys his cigarillos. From the moment we meet, he advertises himself as a provoca-teur. By the middle of our conversation, he provokes.

“The one absolute barrier is that you must never prejudice a man for his religion. If I wanted to hire a black, lesbian, Catholic, great. But are you not entitled to say that you have no time for the Catholic religion, that it involves the worships of idols?” The statement is structured rhetorically, like a law school professor’s hypo-thetical. With his academic tone, I expect the defamations of the Catholic faith to stop after he has made his point. They don’t. “Why can’t you be forgiven for thinking that confessing to a priest who is confessing to God is ridiculous and o¤ensive? Or that the pope is a man of perdition?” A bit later he suggests that Scots should have the right to say “that priests immerse
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

themselves in jewels and wealth while they live amid poverty.”

Scottish society is a paradox. It has more or less eradicated discrimination in the public sphere.

Catholics have their fair share of representation in the universities and workforce. Nevertheless, bigotry against them persists. There was no civil rights movement to sweep away anti-Catholicism—discrimination only faded thanks to globalization. Glasgow’s shipyards and steel mills, which had practiced blatantly anti-Catholic hiring, folded in the wake of the ’73 oil shocks.

Much of the industry that survived came under the ownership of Americans and Japanese, a new economic order that came from “places where they are not nearly so obsessed with defending Derry’s walls against the Whore of Babylon,” as the critic Patrick Reilly has put it. Catholics gained their social equality without forcing Scotland into a reckoning with its deeply held beliefs.

That’s why Scottish society continues to harbor, and even reward, Donald Findlay, Rangers fans, and their ideology.

V.

A day after the Old Firm match, I travel to Belfast on the choppy winter sea. The last major Irish migration to Scotland ended about forty years ago. Each time Celtic and Rangers play, however, there’s a demographic rip-ple. Several thousand Northern Irish, Catholics and Protestants, ride the ferry to Glasgow to see the Old Firm. Several thousand make the trip. A sociologist
called Raymond Boyle has determined that eighty percent of Celtic fans in Belfast make sixteen voyages a year to see their club. To finance these ventures, they must spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds.

By the time I catch the boat, the vast bulk of the supporters has already gone home. Only the hardcore, who want to squeeze every last pint of lager out of their weekend, remain. A contingent from Carrickfergus, 10

minutes up the coast from Belfast, had started on Friday, after a half-day on their jobs as lorry drivers, construction workers, and barmaids. Some didn’t even have tickets to the game and little hope of scoring one.

They began drinking upon boarding the ferry, which has two bars serving a definitive selection of alcohol, and never really stopped. Jimmy, the thirty-two-year-old unoªcial leader of the group, slept in Glasgow on a friend’s floor with a bottle of wine by his side to stave o¤ uncomfortable vicissitudes in his blood-alcohol level. On the ship back to Belfast, with his wife awaiting his arrival, Jimmy has another five pints.

Because the ferry often carries both Celtic and Rangers fans, there’s usually an unspoken code of behavior. Supporters of the home crowd can sing as loudly and obnoxiously as they please. Meanwhile, the small groups supporting the visiting team don’t acknowledge their aªliation or object to their opponents. Since this is the last Sunday night ferry, the crossing contains plenty of Rangers fans, this week’s home team, but it also contains couples who’ve spent the weekend shopping in Glasgow and middle-class folk who visited relatives.

Only the loud, sloppy drunks in the back of the boat clearly indicate that an Old Firm match has taken place.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

Most of the Rangers fans on this late boat adhere to a new set of etiquette. In this highly mixed crowd, inevitably packed with Catholics, taunting is verboten.

The drunkenness of the Carrickfergus crew, however, prevents the practice of restraint. Jimmy, scrawny, blond, and dressed in a track suit, leads the group through a song list in the spirit of unabashed triumphalism. They don’t really converse; just go from song to song. At the mere mention of a phrase —“top of the league,” “King Billy,” “shit Fenian bastard”—they’re o¤.

Because I buy a round of drinks, they enthusiastically welcome me. Jimmy asks me to pile into an already crammed corner of the ship. “Whatever you want to know, I’ve got it. Ask away. I’ll answer anything.”

But before I can ask him anything, he begins to boast about his friendship with the guy who dresses as the Rangers team mascot. In the background, Jimmy’s traveling companions sing their anti-Catholic medley, repeating the phrase “Fuck the pope” with particular relish.

Jimmy joins them, and then puts his beer on the table and his arm on my shoulder. “Say, ‘Fuck the pope,’ Frankie boy,” he implores me. “We won’t talk to you until you say it. Come on, ‘Fuck the pope.’ It feels good to say it.”

Jimmy’s minions—two twenty-something women,

an older mustachioed carpenter named John Boy, Ralphie the lorry driver, and about six younger guys—take their leader’s cue. They begin clapping and chanting rhythmically, “Fuck the pope!” One of the women is most strident: “Don’t be a fuckin’ Fenian, Frankie. ‘Fuck
the pope,’ come on.” I shrug my shoulders, look around the ship to see if anyone else is watching, and try to recite the phrase as a rhetorical question. To the tune of

“Camptown Races,” they begin to sing, as if planned in advance, “Frankie’s a sectarian. Doo-dahh, doo-dahh.”

It’s obvious that the repeated and vociferous use of the phrase “Fuck the pope” hardly endears us to the rest of the boat. For the entire trip, Jimmy has traded looks with a middle-aged man in a sweater. Another group in a nearby bank of seats has been muttering about the songs. “Ruining our trip, they are. I didn’t pay forty quid to be insulted like this,” a woman complains to a stewardess. A few moments later, the stewardess approaches us. She leans over and says, “I’m sorry. You’ve got to stop. It’s the rules. It’s in your interest to stop.” Apparently, this is the third time that she has reproached the group. When we arrive in Belfast, she says, security will be waiting to deal with us. Under normal, more sober circumstances, the threat might have meant something. “Okay. Fine,” Jimmy tells her and then points his finger at me, “It was this American sectarian causing all the trouble.” Once again, he starts singing my name. The stewardess rises and walks away.

The connection between Scotland and Ireland—or more precisely, the connection between Glasgow and Belfast—runs deep. You can see it across Belfast. In downtown, both Celtic and Rangers have shops selling their gear. Around the city, the Rangers fan clubs double as the lodges for the Orange Order. A cab driver called Billy takes me to his club in the middle of a neighborhood that had once been Protestant, but had almost overnight turned Catholic. His club has a bar, a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

billiards table, a TV set for watching games, and chairs for meetings. It’s a place you can unself-consciously roll up your sleeves and display the “’Gers” tattoo on your forearm. Billy’s club stands as the last foothold against inevitable Catholic encroachment in this part of town, a battle-scarred fortress without windows. A tall fence surrounds the building. A Scottish standard flaps atop a pole. Garbage lies scattered through the parking lot in front. “We’re more interested in staying than making it look pretty,” he apologizes. Across the street, he points to the rubble of a Protestant church. It had been burned to the ground three times.

Old Firm matches, it seems, stir up as much may-hem in Northern Ireland as in Glasgow, if not more.

Where the violence in Glasgow takes a desultory pattern, dependent mostly on drunken thugs randomly crossing paths, it occurs regularly in Northern Ireland on the frontiers that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The day I arrive from Scotland, a battle had waged through the night, across the province, in the town of Derry. The Old Firm had coincided with an annual Protestant march through town, and the

confluence of the two events was explosive. News reports showed the town lit by burning cars, bands of Catholics marching en masse toward the city center to disrupt the Protestant celebrations, police holding their line as the Catholics shot fireworks at them. Stabbings and gunfights were reported.

There’s a basic reason for the Northern Irish to embrace the Old Firm with such fervor. They have nothing comparable on their side of the Irish Sea. The country simply can’t accommodate it. It wasn’t always
so. Once upon a time, the city housed a team called Belfast Celtic, ripped o¤ from the original Scottish concept; and it even had its own Protestant rival, a team called Linfield. But in 1949, the Catholic squad folded.

Belfast Celtic’s management felt that the club could no longer depend on the Protestant police to protect its players and fans. A year earlier, they had watched police cheer Linfield goals. When Linfield’s fans invaded the field and began beating players, even breaking legs, the cops stood on the sides. Eventually, all the Catholic clubs in Northern Ireland followed Belfast Celtic in withdrawing from interfaith competition. Stripped of its own rivalries, it was natural that Northern Ireland turned to Scotland.

On the ferry, Jimmy keeps slipping from playful-ness into earnest discourse. Sipping his lager, he leans back in a banquette, his sneakers propped up on a table. “Glasgow’s not like here.” He pauses. “You can walk down the street there in a Rangers top and nothing will happen to you. It’s life or death here, mate.

They’re fucking animals. They’d kill little children.”

Glasgow, he explains, allows for a strange kind of political escapism. It’s not that you leave your politics behind at home. In fact, the opposite occurs. People like Jimmy can indulge their deepest political passions in Scotland.

They can indulge them in the most fanatical ways. The di¤erence is that in the safety of the Glasgow soccer stadium they don’t have to incessantly calculate the consequences of screaming their beliefs.

Before the ferry lands in Belfast, Jimmy’s friends begin to settle themselves into a less frenzied state.

One of them had been jumping up and down on the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

deck of the ship singing a song called “Bouncy, Bouncy,”

an orange Rangers jersey clinging to his beefy frame.
If
you canny do the Bouncy Bouncy, you’re a Tim.
Set against the night, the fluorescent shirt made him the only visible sight on the horizon. Disembarking at the port, he puts on a navy windbreaker and zips it up to his neck. He looks down at his waist to make sure that his shirt doesn’t hang out from the bottom. Pulling his blue Nike cap over his eye, he turns back to me. “All right,” he says and fades into the crowd of arrivals.