Edinburgh Away

Just a quick note to say I will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival alongside the estimable Rodge Glass on Monday night.at 8.30pm. The title for the event is When Sporting Dreams Turn Sour. And I don't think we're talking about Spurs's failure to get into the Champions League. Northern Ireland, Man United and Rory McIlroy may all feature.
Rodge's latest book Bring Me The Head of Ryan Giggs is that rare thing, a football novel. Even rarer, it's a good one; a fascinating take on the corrosive nature of failure and the rise of celebrity footballers.  (a good excuse,too, to use that front page of The Sunday Herald, above).
Rodge is excellent company and should ensure that the event is a success with or without my input. And if nothing else you'll get the chance to enjoy the comedy of hearing me read out loud (something I've done only once since I was about 15).
For more details visit the Book Festival's website. And if you do manage along, say hello.

Colour Me Olympian

The eminent journalist and provocateur Eamonn Mallie has caused a small fuss in the last few days by condemning Northern Ireland's Olympic celebrations. Despite the fact that London 2012 saw the greatest ever success for Northern Irish sportsmen, he has argued in his blog that the province's celebration of their achievements was shamefully divided, with the Belfast boxers Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan, who won bronze medals boxing for Ireland, being festooned in green, white and gold in Belfast, while the celebrations of the three Coleraine rowers, Alan Campbell and the Chambers brothers were to be decked out  in red, white and blue during their own hometown celebration.
You can listen to his despair on his website here:  http://eamonnmallie.com/2012/08/bigots-in-victory-too-how-pathetic-are/
This morning I was asked to contribute to the Stephen Nolan Show on Radio Ulster this morning, as a counterpoint to Eamonn. As I didn't really disagree with what he was saying I'm not sure I was a particularly enlightening contributor, but I thought it might be worth looking at his points in a little more detail here (it was a very brief discussion).
Eamonn argued that the achievements of the Olympians has been undermined by the sometimes begrudging reception they received, pointing out that the Dublin media had mostly ignored the achievements of the three rowers who were representing Team GB. He also wanted to know why there wasn't a joint celebration of all of Northern Ireland's Olympians, a celebration that didn't divide by flag.

My own brief contribution to the debate amounted to saying that that was indeed a good idea but to also say why shouldn't the boxers be celebrated in Belfast and the rowers in Coleraine? Why shouldn't they be acclaimed in their own communities? Isn't the challenge for Northern Ireland to get to the stage where we don't see one community's celebration as in some way diminishing for the other?
There is some talk of Stormont organising a large celebration of the province's Olympians following the completion of the Paralympics, which hopefully will address Eamonn's main contention - that each community is only celebrating its own and not embracing those from the other side. I hope that does indeed take place. In some senses it strikes me that this debate goes to the very heart of what I wanted to talk about in Whose Side Are You On? The idea that sport is and always has existed in a political framework, and as a result has been tugged and twisted to fit political agendas. That twisting and buckling is the story of Northern Irish sport over the last half century (and more).
But that's not the only story sport tells. It also reveals that sometimes we can find ourselves finding common cause with "the other side" through sporting heroes - from George Best to Dennis Taylor, Barry McGuigan to Alan Campbell and Paddy Barnes. It also tells us that sport can be used as a vehicle for attempting to heal divisions, whether it be in the work of grass roots organisations such as Peace Players International or in the way  local Irish League football clubs have forged associations with GAA clubs.
One of the points Eamonn made this morning was about symbolism. He reminded Radio Ulster listeners that the DUP First Minister Peter Robinson has gone to a GAA match and the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has turned up at Windsor Park. These are symbols of politicians embracing the sporting environments of the other community. Sport allows for these gestures of reconciliation because it has so often been a point of division. It can be a vehicle for both.
There's another story that sport tells too, one that sometimes gets overlooked in Northern Ireland because we are so keyed to symbolism. That's the story sport tells about sport. The reasons why an Olympic celebration should matter in the first place is because of the efforts of five Olympians from the province. They may well have wanted to win a medal for the country they were representing but it's not difficult to imagine that in the first place they wanted to win a medal for themselves as a recognition of their own effort. Sportsmen and women are sportsmen and women because they love sport. Some may have political opinions, some may not. But those come second to the desire to compete. Sport is about competition first and foremost. The flags are an afterthought.

George Best Bites His Nails

Last Monday night I went along to an open air cinema in Brunswick Street in Glasgow to watch a film I've wanted to see for years - Football Like Never Before, a 1971 German film about George Best in which the film-maker Hellmuth Costard used eight 16mm cameras to film Best during a game against Coventry City in 1970 - the same trick Glasgow artist Douglas Gordon would do with Zinedine Zidane more than 30 years later.

It's an interesting trick but one that does demand some endurance. Costard's film offered some aesthetic pleasures - the slab red of Best's top and socks popping on the screen against the green of the pitch, the raven blackness of his long hair and the way it matched his boots which, as the man behind me said, looked like winklepickers - but by the end of the game I wasn't really surprised that there was only myself and the organisers left (along with maybe a couple of people who had retreated to the outdoor seats at the Brunswick bar).
The film was rather at the whim of circumstances and the game Costard chose to shoot turned out to be a rather dreary one, especially in the first half. But for those of us who never got to see Best play live it offers a unique opportunity.
There's a good summary of the film here for those who want more details, but my own impressions were fragmentary. I was taken by how little the warm-up amounted to - basically George attempting a flick-kick if the ball came near him  - by the lack of football tops in the crowd (the early seventies, another world) and by the game's puritanism (Bobby Charlton gets a handshake when he scores and that's it. Best gets an arm in the mouth and he gets up, makes sure he's not bleeding and gets on with it).
But when I got tired of looking at the crowd or trying to identify who was playing for Coventry (I noticed WIlly Carr and Ernie Hunt which immediately made me think of trying to recreate their famous goal after seeing it on Match of the Day) I was left watching George and what struck me was how lonely he looked.

I'm trying not to project here. I'm trying not to read his future into this. But it is striking for how much of the game he is in the frame alone. He ambles about, making cursory tackles here and there, passing the ball when it comes to him, starting a run, getting tackled, falling over then waiting for the ball to come near him again.
Part of this isolation is down to the fact that he is on the periphery of the game for long stetches of course. In the second half he scores and sets up the Charlton goal and now and again you get a sense of what he was capable of as he accelerates from a standing start in huge lung-bursting surges past the pale blue Coventry shirts. Then again, the only time he seems to talk to any of his team mates is just before the second half kick-off and when he's not involved in the game he is biting his nails.
It all ties in with a remarkable sequence at half time when the camera cuts away from the game and we find ourselves in the back corridors of Old Trafford. This is clearly a different day because Best is now heavily stubbled, whereas he's clean shaven during the game. He walks in front of the camera and then turns and for a few minutes he is looking at us (or so it seems) as we look at him. He says nothing. The cameraman says nothing. It's a sequence that feels revelatory. Here is Best the man before us, exposed. Does he look uncomfortable? Does he look wounded?
Sorry, I'm projecting again. But I suppose that's what the film leaves you with. A fleeting sense of the man behind the myth. Yes, he was talented and yes, he was good-looking (there's no question that at times the film has almost homoerotic overtones as the camera repeatedly focuses on Best's thighs, his backside, the nape of his neck), but he was also human. He made the wrong decisions in games. He chose the wrong path. He got knocked down. But he got up again.
 It's the getting up again that makes you a sportsman, I guess.

We shiver in the rain by the touchline ...

Coleraine Academical Institutution finished me as a sportsman. When I arrived in 1975 my previous high standing as captain of the Killowen Primary School football team counted for nothing. Mostly that's because Inst didn't play football. It was a grammar school. Rugby, cricket and rowing were its sports. And I was too weedy for rugby and rowing. I'd also had an unfortunate encounter with a real cricket ball a year or two earlier which has left me suspicious of the sport ever since.
In first year I stood on the touchline in a mustard yellow top hoping the rugby ball would come nowhere near me before eventually opting out of sport for the weekly run which over the years slowed to a leisurely stroll, dreams of a sporting future shrivelling with every step. By then I was more interested in comic books and movies anyway.

Clearly whatever resentment I might once have felt towards the school's anti-football tendency (and believe me, there were times when it made me livid. I mean, Killowen had won, oh I'd say, maybe two games under my captaincy) has faded because this week I was glued to the TV to watch the two Coleraine Inst "old boys" compete in the rowing at Eton Dorney. To see the emotion and sheer agony on Alan Campbell's face after the single sculls yesterday was to be reminded of the agony and ecstasy of sport. Sitting in a wheelchair trying to respond to John Inverdale's questions he looked in such pain it felt like a cruelty to watch him.

And yet today he can feel warmed by his achievement. And in the space of a couple of days my home town  can suddenly boast three Olympic medal winners and Coleraine's name has been appearing in national newspaper headlines, following the silver for the Chambers brothers, Richard (who also went to Inst) and Peter  in the lightweight four. All three once belonged to the Bann Rowing Club.
 Campbell and the Chambers Brothers will undoubtedly  receive some kind of civic reception in the near future. If it takes place in the Coleraine town hall they may pass by the statue of another sporting hero of the town, Bertie Peacock which has pride of place in the Diamond. Sport is a way of writing places into the popular consciousness. There are much worse ways. As Northern Ireland knows all too well.

Olympic Cycles

There are three Olympic stories told in Whose Side Are You On? The first is the most famous - the story of Mary Peters who left a bleak, bomb-blasted Belfast in 1972 to travel to Munich to compete in the Pentathlon. After two days of competition she returned to Northern Ireland with a gold medal hanging around her neck (and a death threat hanging over her head). Hers is the great Northern Irish Olympic story. The story of an athlete who pushed herself and pushed herself and got her rewards. I always think her success is underrated in the British Olympic story, given the paucity of facilities she had to train on in Belfast at the time and the violence that marked the city at that time (no mention, for example, in this morning's Radio Four Olympic montage).

Then there's Wayne McCullough's story. McCullough is one of Northern Ireland's best ever boxers, born and raised in the heart of Protestant Shankill.who represented Ireland - because boxing is organised on an all-island basis in Ireland - in the Seoul Olympics in 1988 at the age of 17. He was asked to carry the Irish flag at the opening ceremony and maybe was too young to realise how that would be perceived back in parts of Belfast.
The third story is the least well known, I guess. But I thought it's worth retelling here because it's a little cameo of the way sports stories are constantly at the mercy of politics. It concerns a cyclist called Noel Teggart, a lorry driver from Banbridge. Teggart was 31. He was representing Ireland, cycling, like boxing, being one of those sports organised on an all-island basis. Unfortunately there were other Irishmen in Munich  who were keen to make a protest. Members of the National Cycling Association, an organisation banned by the sport, wanted to make a protest against the "British occupation of Northern Ireland". To do so they hid in a ditch all night with the aim of then jumping up and interrupting the race.
Unfortunately, they didn't realise the race had been delayed for 24 hours. Still, they were back in the ditch 24 hours later and when it finally got underway they emerged from hiding, grabbed Teggart's bike and refused to let him move for a couple of minutes, by which time whatever chances he had in the race were long gone.
The story of cycling in Ireland after partition is a litany of organisations being banned and new organisations being formed usually along religious and political lines. Teggart was unfortunate in that his story was subsumed into this larger one.
And to little purpose in the end. Although the NCA's protest - although widely reported in Ireland, north and south - was largely ignored by the rest of the world. That's because the Palestinian Black September group had by then mounted their own protest by seizing Israeli athletes in the Olympic village. The siege ended in a gun battle that killed nine of the athletes. It remains the greatest disaster in Olympic history and the greatest stain on the Olympic ideal. The 40th anniversary of that tragedy is just around the corner. 

Sporting Snobbery ... A Confession

Is it me or has the Tour de France been a bit dull this year? No? So definitely just me then? Honestly, I can't say I've been able to get too excited about the prospect of the first ever British winner of the greatest race in sport. Good on Bradley Wiggins and all that, but his success has not really raised my heart rate.
Two reasons. One is that the race itself this year has been quite unexceptional. Team Sky has bossed it and as a result Wiggins has never really been truly tested. Maybe that's because there's no one good enough to test him (except his team mate Chris Froome).
Yes, I know that controlling the race is itself a huge sign of sporting prowess but it's not what I want from the Tour. My most cherished cycling memories have always been those moments - usually in the mountains; I've never been that bothered about the sprint finishes - where a rider is on his own against his closest rivals and has to put up or shut up. And so, as I've mentioned before, my favourite Tour moment of all is Stephen Roche's astonishing recovery on La Plagne in the 1987 tour when he hauled himself back to within spitting distance of Pedro Delgado after the Spaniard had attacked and opened up a 90-second lead. That and the time the (dope-assisted) Bjarne Riis rode away from all his rivals (including Miguel Indurain) on Hautacam in the 1996 tour in a contemptuous display of acceleration, not once, not twice, but three times.

If I'm honest, though, this isn't just about sporting taste. There's something else going on here too that I think I have to own up to. The reason I kind of don't really want Bradley Wiggins to win is that, well, he's not exotic enough for me. He's called Bradley and he's British and he doesn't fit in with my own sports snobbery. 
Back in the 1980s when Channel 4 first started screening highlights of the Tour part of the appeal for me was that it was not mainstream. I was living in Scotland but only my bike-loving mates Gerry and Davy knew who Robert Millar was at the time. Following the Tour was a mark of difference for us.
And marks of difference mattered then. Pop culture in the eighties was very bipolar. You either bought into the Tina Turner/Phil Collins mainstream or you bought the NME, listened to the Smiths and kidded yourself on you were cooler than everyone else. Coolness was a political statement. It meant you'd probably heard of  (if not actually heard) Test Department, seen the odd Wim Wenders movie and didn't vote for the Tories. Almost inevitably that outlook extended into your sporting tastes. And so Alex Higgins was cool, Steve Davis wasn't. Eric Bristow was cool, John Lowe wasn't.
You (okay, I) formed perceptions of sportsmen and women and put them in one camp or another. Davis was uncool because he was linked to Barry Hearn, was a very effective snooker player and turned up once at a Tory party conference. Alex Higgins was Alex Higgins.
In more recent years I've rather warmed to Davis, while the more I learned about Higgins's messy life the less I liked him. I still think he was the more thrilling - if not necessarily better - snooker player though.
You would think I'd have grown out of this by now, but if I'm honest I still carry a fair freight of sporting snobbery around with me. And so it doesn't seem right to me that a British team called Team Sky should dominate the Tour. It's too ordinary. I want it to be some exotically-named Spaniard or Italian. Or Colombian. (Whatever did happen to Luis Herrera?)
 Nor do I want English teams to win the Champions League (unless, of course, it happened to be Spurs, but I don't think there's any danger of that happening soon). And I rather enjoy it when England or Scotland are outplayed by a technically superior European or South American side because it plays into my vision of the rest of the world being cooler than us (though if it's Northern Ireland playing allegiance trumps snobbery).
I can't be alone in this, can I? There must be many of you out there who rave about the superiority of Serie A over the Premier League, or talk knowingly of the superiority of Cuban boxing in comparison to the rest of the world. (Examples welcome.)
The real triumph of cycling in recent years, of course, has been the huge explosion in its popularity in Britain. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins the sport is moving into the mainstream. It's getting extensive coverage in the press (rather than just a column buried somewhere deep in the sports pages) and you can buy creamy, luxurious magazines like Rouleur dedicated to the sport.
In some sense I'm thrilled by this - there's a sense of vindication inherent in the fact that everyone is cottoning on to something I've always known about -  but the snob in me is still slightly put out. Where were you all in 1984, eh? Now excuse me, I've got some Rough Trade B-sides to catalogue.

Green Days

Now that Spain are champions of the world and champions of Europe (again),  it's worth remembering that it wasn't always so. Here's a slightly longer version of the piece I wrote for the Sunday Herald to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Northern Ireland's victory over Spain in Valencia in the 1982 World Cup:

"Gerry Armstrong ... What a worker he is ..." For most of us, I’d imagine, there are a handful of sporting moments that we hold closer than most, moments where the thrill of what we’ve seen has seared itself into our memory never to be dislodged. " ... Striding away there with Hamilton to his right ..." Ask me and I’ll happily reel my own off: Ricky Villa’s goal in the 1981 FA cup final replay, the Chris Eubanks-Nigel Benn fights of the early 1990s, Stephen Roche coming round the corner on La Plagne still close enough to the wheelrims of Pedro Delgado to ensure he’d win the 1987 Tour de France, Usain Bolt seeming to slow down to look around as he won gold at Beijing four years ago (running the fastest time ever as an added bonus). "Still Billy Hamilton, he’s gone past Tendilio ... " But my absolute favourite came 30 years ago, on a hot night in Valencia, soundtracked by John Motson’s commentary. " ... Arconada ... Armstrong!"

Thirty years. Half a lifetime. I can still see the living room of my parents’ house in Coleraine where I sat that night; the sofa, the fireplace, which in winter still held a real fire back then, and the TV in the corner, small by today’s standards, the colour images fizzing and strobing from the satellite feed. I was just a couple of weeks from my 19th birthday, a couple of months from leaving Northern Ireland to start life as a student in Scotland and start untying myself from the place I came from.

At the time it couldn’t come soon enough. The Troubles had started when I was six years old and were showing no signs of stopping. The early eighties were a particularly grim time. We were only a year on from the hunger strikes. A month on from this night the IRA will detonate bombs in Hyde Park and Regents Park in London, killing 11 British soldiers. Back then I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Northern Irish any more.

But I still wanted Northern Ireland - a ragged bunch of motley journeymen with only one recognised world class player (Pat Jennings) - to win that night. They were still my team. I still sat forward in my chair as Gerry Armstrong picked up the ball in his own half and surged forward. He was the only white-shirted player on the screen until Billy Hamilton moved up on the right wing. Hamilton played for Burnley, had a wee spidey moustache on his upper lip and would never be as famous again as he was on this night. Armstrong knocked the ball wide to him and moved towards the Spanish box. Hamilton almost casually shrugged off a challenge from the Spanish defender Miguel Tendilio and pushed the ball into the Spanish penalty box. But right at the Spanish keeper Luis Arconada unfortunately. The keeper just had to drop on it and that would be the end of the attack. But for some reason Arconada elects to punch instead. Straight to Armstrong who fires it into the back of the net. 1-0 to Northern Ireland. For a moment the world - or my world at any rate - stopped.

On my TV screen Armstrong is embraced by a limping Sammy McIlroy and given a bear hug by Whiteside (who at 17 and a matter of days is the youngest player to play in the World Cup finals to this point) and as he does so I swear I hear the whole street I live in erupt; a ragged, raucous cheer echoing from house to house. This is the sporting moment I love most, the moment I remember feeling most simply, happily, giddily Northern Irish too. For the next 40 minutes Spain batter at the Northern Ireland back line but can’t find a way through. Northern Ireland have beaten the hosts, topped their group and gone through to the next round of the World Cup. It is a glorious night.

A few hours later at around two in the morning my father is on patrol with the Ulster Defence Regiment between Magherafelt and Garvagh when a 500lb landmine is detonated under his landrover. He came limping home the next morning (limping worse than Sammy McIlroy) and told me in the vaguest possible terms what had happened.

What’s curious to me now is how far apart my head had separated these two memories. It was only a couple of years ago, prompted by reading a private history of his regiment, that I realised they had happened within hours of each other. It’s as if I had deliberately rubbed out the linkage, as if not wanting to sully the good memory with the bad.

June 1982 is the high point of my life as a Northern Irish sports fan. Other days and nights - arguably greater days and nights - followed: watching Dennis Taylor, Barry McGuigan, right up to Rory McIlroy winning the US Open. But they’re not football.

I guess 1982 has other resonances too. It was - or I like to think so - represents a utopian moment, a moment when Catholics and Protestants played together in the same team and no one thought anything of it. Just over ten years later Northern Ireland would play the Republic of Ireland in Windsor Park on a night full of sectarian chanting. Just over 20 years later Neil Lennon would receive a death threat and never play for his country again. And even today players like Sunderland James McClean who come from nationalist backgrounds say they don’t feel comfortable playing for Northern Ireland, despite major efforts by fans and the Irish Football Association to address the problem. Back in 1982, Gerry Armstrong, a player who grew up in nationalist west Belfast was a hero of the fans. He never received any sectarian barracking because of his religion.

I can’t believe anyone today would still claim that sport and politics don’t mix. The problem in Northern Ireland has been that for the last 40 years sport and politics have too often mixed in the same way as guncotton and nitroglycerin. June 25, 1982 is one of those moments, though, when that didn’t apply. That’s why it still seems something to savour.

A few years ago I went to a race meeting at Down Royal. On the way I passed the site of the former Maze prison. It was a clear summer’s day. There were people dressed in their Sunday best, punters in denim (many with Billy Hamilton taches) and bookies all of whom were from south of the border. The punters got drunk, the well-dressed had their pictures taken, the bookies got rich. I remember standing in the grandstand, tearing up another losing betting slip and looking out across the course to the fields beyond. Those tight little fields that surrounded me in my younger years. All those different shades of green. And I thought of all they might represent. The green of the land, the green of football shirts, the green of UDR landrovers. People were cheering and - I’m pretty certain about this memory - I thought about Gerry Armstrong.