Snooker loopy

"Snooker loopy nuts are we ..."No doubt the current World Championship in Sheffield and on BBC2 is drawing respectable audiences. And if Ronnie O'Sullivan wins this year it will give the sport a fillip. But snooker feels some way distant from it's all-conquering pomp back in the 1980s. Indeed, the very notion of O'Sullivan, Judd Trump and Ali Carter teaming up with the current equivalent of Chas and Dave (Olly Murs maybe?) and getting in the charts is so ridiculous it has a sort of charm to it (not that I'd want to hear the result or anything). But it's ridiculousness does emphasise how far snooker has fallen since those halcyon days.
Or rather maybe it's a reminder of how, for a while, Britain went a little demented over the sport.
In John Landis's glorious 1981 horror movie An American Werewolf In London, if I remember rightly, the American director's had a character trying to watch British telly and finding only ads for the News of the World and darts on the box.
If the film had been made, say, five years later, I suspect Landis may have opted for snooker, so ubiquitous was the sport in the mid-eighties. Indeed it reached its apotheosis in 1985 with the most celebrated final of all, when Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis on the black ball in the last frame, prompting a letter of praise (among many others) for Taylor from the H Block.
We know that because Donald Trelford, former editor of the Observer, mentioned it in his 1986 book Snookered, a book which itself was a symptom of the game's infiltration of the culture. Indeed the same year also saw the late (and often great) Gordon Burn - best known for his books on Damien Hirst and British serial killers - publish Pocket Money about "Britain's boom-time snooker".
Today only football has the same cultural penetration as snooker had back then. It was inescapable. Not that I wanted to escape it. I was one of the millions who sat up to watch Taylor's incredible victory which seemed at the time a double victory. I could cheer because the winner was a fellow Northern Irishman (and I did), but also because Davis seemed to represent the enemy at the time - he was a Tory for a start. Then there was his mechanistic playing style, that ability of his to grind out results.
And why was that a problem? Well probably because the man who had made snooker the game it was, the man who put the game on the cultural map was never a man for grinding out results.

Alex Higgins won his first World Championship in 1972. "Snooker was never the same again," Clive Everton, the doyen of snooker reporters, told Trelford. Higgins was a very seventies figure in many ways. A lad who liked his drink and liked women and liked showing off. He was a George Best for the baize (the temptation to link the two was one I couldn't avoid in Whose Side Are You On?). He even carried with him,the Daily Mail said at the time, "the raw sense of the streets".

That, of course, was always the problem with Higgins. His emotional volatility and vulnerability saw him drink too much and fight too often. Most notoriously, he once threatened that he'd have his fellow countryman Taylor shot the next time Taylor was in Northern Ireland. Given that Taylor was a Catholic and Higgins a Protestant it's difficult not to see a sectarian element in such a dumb sentiment.

Higgins was always a problematic hero. His neediness, his kneejerk anti-authority attitude, the man's emotional explosiveness meant he did a lot of collateral damage in his life. But bloody hell could he play. He brought a louche danger to the staidest of sports and a jerky nervous energy that radiated off the TV screen. The afterglow of that hung around him, carried him through his own excesses and meant his death prompted an outpouring of genuine sorrow in Belfast.

I'm not sure if it's a sign that I'm now unmistakeably middle-aged but these days I find myself rather liking Steve Davis. Yes he was a Tory but he is wryly funny and loves his soul music. I think he'd be good company. I'm not sure in his later years you could say the same about Higgins. For some sense of what he could be like I'd recommend you read the first chapter of Bill Borrows's excellent biography of the man.

But without him would we be watching snooker in the first place?

I Love the 70s: It's Iam not Ian McFaul

Continuing our 1970s theme here's another page from The Tiger Book of Soccer Stars 1971.
Today's star is another goalkeeper. This time it's Newcastle United's number one Iam McFaul.
I've always thought McFaul was tiny for a keeper but according to Tiger he was 5ft, 9 and a half inches. Which is taller than me if nothing else.
In his time at Newcastle he helped the team to victory in the 1969 European Fairs Cup. They beat Rangers in the semi-final and then Hungarian side Ujpest FC 6-2 on aggregate in the final over two legs.
He played for his country too but he had the misfortune to be a contemporary of Northern Ireland's greatest keeper, Pat Jennings.

Best of Times?

I have missed some of Dominic Westbrook's current BBC2 series so I don't know if George Best has featured in it at all, but "the football folk hero" (as Sandbrook dubs him) does turn up in the historian's 2010 book State Of Emergency when it turns its attention to football in the early 1970s.
It is difficult to find anything new to say about Best now so much has been written about him over the years. In fact writing Whose Side Are You On? I felt quite privileged that by focusing on him as a specifically Northern Irish figure I had some space to reframe his story to some degree.
 Even so, the patterns of the story are now well engrained, almost mythical, with Best as a kind of Mancunian Icarus soaring through the sixties only to have his wings singed when the decade changed. As a result he fell hard (into a bottle most likely).
There is also a tendency to make Best's story emblematic, to see in him a marker for football in that era. In some senses that's inevitable. Where Best led, the likes of Rodney Marsh, Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington and all the other seventies fancy dans followed as football became the new rock 'n' roll. (Best is described in the Tiger Book of Soccer Stars 1971, above, as having "pop star hair".)
For some that was a reason to celebrate. For others it was a reason to despair. In State of Emergency Sandbrook does rather cleave to the latter line. He quotes Arthur Hopcraft who in 1971 said that Best was synonymous with "contempt for authority and heedless petulance". For Hopcroft Best had "come to represent almost every extreme in the modern footballer's lifestyle".
This argument is reflective of one of the main strands of conservative thinking on the 1970s which sees it as a time of decline. That decline might have been an economic one (caused by the rise of union power) or a social one (the death of deference: Best's drunken insubordination at his club can stand - unsteadily perhaps - for this ). Football was violent off the pitch (from Best it's notable that Sandbrook moves on to look at football hooliganism) and arrogant on.
It's tempting - just out of pure contrariness - to try to put a different spin on Best's actions. Is it possible to argue that he in fact represents the employee railing against the strictures placed on him by his employer? This was still a time when players were not in control of their destiny. They were there to be bought and sold and in between they were expected to do what they were told. And Best always complained that he felt he was carrying Manchester United at the start of that decade.
Or can we say that he was the embodiment of individualism in a team game? In short that he represented an otherness the powers that be in football and in the wider culture couldn't contain and so condemned?
It's a stretch, perhaps. All too often Best was his own worst enemy and increasingly football was less important to him than wine or women. But that said, it seems harsh to condemn as all that was wrong with football culture. His failings were his own.
And it should be said that while football fans are conservative in all sorts of ways the narratives they most respond to - and celebrate - are utopian ones. And so for them Best the footballer tends to matter more than Best the alcoholic. The striker who left defenders with, in Alex Ferguson's memorable phrase, "twisted blood". On the field Best was anything but conservative. That was what was great about him

PS: In the May issue of GQ Robert Chalmers interviews Pele. Right at the start they talk about Best. "An unbelievable player," says Pele. "To me he never looked like a European. He was a Latin player - a Brazilian player." What is it Northern Ireland fans sing? "We're not Brazil". Oh let's imagine we are. Just a little.

Nostalgia at 12 and 6

I was back in Northern Ireland for Easter, when one of my jobs was to go up into the attic and clear out some of my belongings. Mostly that meant an awful lot of Marvel comics which were, for a while, the most important thing I could imagine. Even more than football.
But there were a couple of football annuals that now seem far more important to me than Spiderman Comics Weekly or Planet of the Apes. The earliest - and best - of them is the Tiger Book of Soccer Stars 1971, which I must have got at Christmas 1970 when I was seven.
More than 40 years on it is a gloriously nostalgic artefact, helped by its full colour images. Just the names conjure up memories of sitting up to watch Match of the Day. Tony Book. John Hollins. Terry Paine. Another age.
Northern Ireland is represented by a number of players. Two goalies, a "wonderful winger" and the Doug.

It's quite a large format so as you can see my scanner is not quite up to the job but I'm going to post a few spreads from the annual over the next few days. It seems appropriate to start with a number one, so here's Pat Jennings. "Spurs are proud of their good looking Irish No 1". Jennings joined Spurs in 1964 for a fee of £25,000. Wonder what he would be worth now.

Who am I? I'm still working on it

I was chairing a debate in the National Library of Scotland last night (get me!) about the impact independence might have on Scottish culture. Oranised by Irish Pages and Gutter Magazine, it brought eight authors (four Scots, four Irish) together to debate what might happen to Scotland if independence came to pass, how had independence changed Irish culture and how might Scottish independence impact on Northern Ireland.
It was an interesting debate which shot off in all sorts of interesting directions. At one point the Irish poet Thomas McCarthy argued that Scots, if they do opt for independence, should then feel a duty of care to Ulster Protestants - the Scots Irish - in the same way as the Irish Republic felt a duty to Northern Irish Catholics. In reply, the Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson pointed out that many Northern Irish Protestants might not appreciate Scots telling them they were now responsible for them.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the idea of independence for Scotland. I'm not bothered by the economic arguments particularly - we are all in such deep waters when it comes to economy I'm not convinced it will make a huge difference - but I do like the idea that it would mean Scotland would be forced to grow up a little, to take responsibility for itself (if not those on the other side of the North Channel), to renew its own idea of itself. That's a challenge but also an opportunity.
What has any of this to do with sport? Well, sport is itself at times a projection of identity. We are currently in the midst of a huge pre-Olympic publicity drive which is sending out messages about Britishness.
Some of those messages - however you feel about Britishness in general - seem hugely positive to me. The Olympic Britain we are being offered is an ambitious, multicultural, inclusive place. Now you can argue that this is PR hype, but it's an attractive vision and sport is one of the areas where multiculturalism plays out in a relatively equal playing field (we are all marked by the realities of class, gender and race but if you get to the playing fields and you have talent then there's a chance your talent is what you will be judged on).
As someone who has written a book about feeling Northern Irish mostly because of Gerry Armstong's goal against Spain in the 1982 World Cup I suppose I would naturally argue that sport can define identity. But why sport? I love 1980s English pop music made in Manchester, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the films of Michael Powell and the paintings of Paul Nash - all which makes me a huge Anglophile, And yet I don't feel English at all.
For a while - in the eighties - I did feel Scottish, wanting to embrace something that wasn't Northern Irish, an identity I was keen to get away from at the time. And to do that I started becoming very interested in Scottish sport - Scottish football in particular. But before long I drifted back to liking English football because I had an emotional connection with it. It's what I had grown up watching. My Northern Irishness manifested itself via English football bizarrely enough.
I'm not sure what the point I'm trying to make is (obviously) but I guess it's got something to do with the idea that identity is fluid. It isn't fixed. Or doesn't have to be. We can remake ourselves in whatever way we want.
Some, of course, don't want to. In Northern Ireland this week Linfield fans went on what the local papers claimed was "a rampage" after their side had been beaten in a Setanta Cup tie with Derry City. The event was marked by claim and counterclaim but it is just another example of how football in the north allows a platform for a form of sectarian theatricality (the Old Firm provide the same in Scotland).
And yet the first leg of the Cup saw Martin McGuinness make his first visit to Windsor Park. In January Peter Robinson travelled to Armagh for the final of the McKenna Cup - the first time he had attended a GAA match. Token gestures you could argue but the fact that they are being made at all seems worth applauding. Robinson in the past had been a bitter critic of the GAA for its Republican links.
And the other week the DUP mayor of Ballymoney Ian Stevenson gave his public support to his local GAA team Lochgiel Shamrocks. Stevenson had recently found out that his grandfather played for the Shamrocks in the 1920s. As a result a culture he presumably felt no part of has provided a personal entry point for him.
The point is nothing is fixed. Identity may be something inherited but it is also to a large degree created. We are who we think we are. And sometimes we learn that who we think we are is only because we haven't got all the evidence to hand. Or because we've thought better of it.

Match rating

"Jamieson weaves together sport and a history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland together to produce an account of sectarianism that, incredibly after all this time and all that has happened, still has the power to shock."

The author and critic Lesley McDowell reviewed Whose Side Are You On? in the latest issue of The Scottish Review of Books. It's first rate, she says. Nice review. You can read it in full here: http://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=468:gallimaufry-lesley-mcdowell&catid=55:volume-8-issue-1-2012&Itemid=149

And just a reminder that I am appearing at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow on Sunday alongside Rodge Glass, Alan Bissett and Richard Wilson. Details here: http://www.ayewrite.com/programme/events/Pages/Football-and-Sectarianism.aspx

See you there maybe?

Whose Side - the live experience!

So, next Sunday I've been invited to speak at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow. I'm joining a discussion on football and sectarianism with a trio of writers who in their various ways are engaged with the subject of the beautiful game and it's sometimes baleful side-effects.
Rodge Glass's new novel Bring Me The Head of Ryan Giggs is a fictional take on Manchester United's golden generation, following one of the Beckham/Neville/Scholes generation that didn't quite make it. I'm about 80 pages in at the moment and it's a wonderfully pacy, engaging read. Rodge is a Man U fan I believe but we'll not hold that against him.
Alan Bissett's latest novel Pack Men also has a Manchester link. It's a fictional account of what happened on that fateful night when Rangers fans went on the rammy in the city in 2008 on UEFA Cup final night ("the battle of Picadilly Gardens" as some called it).

And, because all these things tend to dovetail beautifully, Rangers FC is at the heart of the book of the third speaker Richard Wilson. Richard is a freelance journalist and contributor to The Herald and Sunday Herald. His book Inside The Divide looks in depth at the Old Firm.
I'm there just to make up the numbers but it should be an interesting afternoon at Glasgow's Mitchell Library. next Sunday (Kick off 3.30pm).  For more details of the event visit http://www.ayewrite.com/programme/events/Pages/Football-and-Sectarianism.aspx
And if you make it along say hello.