Jackie Robinson’s presence transformed the culture of baseball, slowly chipping away at clubhouse racism. Mo Johnston, strangely, had the opposite e¤ect. The team began to travel with a picture of the Queen that it hung in the dressing rooms it visited. Players began to appear in Northern Ireland, photographed alongside paramilitaries.
Scottish Protestant players allegedly defecated all over the Celtic changing room when Rangers borrowed it for a match. Even Mo Johnston himself was witnessed singing the “Sash,” a ballad with anti-Catholic inflections. And Rangers’s growing contingent of Catholics followed his lead in singing songs that insulted their faith.
How to explain this strange inversion? Glasgow is not an enormous city. Average people regularly encounter their soccer heroes. They run into them in the pubs and on the streets. If the players aren’t appropriately enthusiastic about the cause, their lives can become very diªcult. They already have to contend with half the town hating them; they don’t need their own fans turning on them, too. It creates a feedback loop that ensures sectarianism’s persistence. When Graeme Souness left the club in 1991, he told a press conference, “Bigotry never sat easily on my shoulders, and bigotry will always be at Ibrox.” With Dummy whispering into my ear —“I’ll never hire a Celtic supporter”— I think I know what he means.
III.
The next day, as I leave my hotel for the stadium, the sta¤ tries to give me advice. Most of them had never been to a Celtic-Rangers game, despite the importance HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
of the event in the life of the city. Still, they felt a sense of civic pride, constantly assuring me of my safety at Ibrox. As I departed, a receptionist rose from her chair.
“You’ll have a fantastic time,” she said, suddenly stopping me. “Hold on. Open your jacket.” A few days earlier, I’d told her that I su¤er from a very mild red-green colorblindness. Now, she wanted to proofread my clothes to make sure that I had filtered out all royalist blue, Ulster orange, and Irish green that might incite a drunken thug. Every sane Glaswegian had told me to advertise my neutrality as clearly as possible. “Wear black,” one friend advised. Before the receptionist’s intervention, I’d already set aside sweaters whose hues I didn’t want to risk. The receptionist laughed at herself for conducting this examination, “You’ll be fine. Just remember, whatever you hear, they don’t really mean it.”
Everything I do at the game to register my noncom-batant status seems to fail. Although I introduce myself as an American writer on a research mission, my neighbors in the Celtic stands insist on partisanship.
Frank, the roofer in the seat next to mine, tries to explain the atmosphere by pointing to the field and intoning, “Good versus evil.” Another neighbor wraps a
“Fighting Irish” scarf around my neck. He hoists my arms in the air above my head, a reverent gesture, during the singing of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
After Celtic score a goal twenty seconds into the game, a stranger’s embrace lifts me above my seat. My cell phone tumbles out of my pocket, two rows down.
Our section turns to the Rangers fans and sings about the exploits of the IRA. I don’t know the words, and can’t always cut through the brogues to decipher them, but there are certain phrases that are easy enough to pick up. Fuck the Queen. Orange Bastards. Frank the roofer translates for me, until he explains that the vulgarity makes him feel ashamed.
Spurred on by the home fans, Rangers players
exude the dour Calvinism that they are supposed to represent. They tackle hard and neglect no defensive detail. Their midfielders slide into Celtic’s. Their e¤ort yields a string of three unanswered goals. When the Protestants sing “shit Fenian bastards,” we have no response other than to extend our middle fingers and use them as batons to ironically conduct their taunts.
Rangers wins the match three-two, and there’s only one explanation for the outcome: Celtic’s sluggish and sloppy back line of defense. That fact doesn’t interfere with the explanations I overhear for the defeat. “Give a goddam Orangeman a whistle. . . .” Another man refers to referees as the “masons in black.” Of course, grousing about refereeing is a bedrock right of sports fans.
Why blame the team that you love when culpability for defeats can be easily transported elsewhere?
Celtic fans are a special case. They don’t just believe that referees try to ruin them. They believe that they’ve definitively proved the phenomenon. The case against the “masons in black” has been made on the op-ed pages of broadsheets and in the pages of the Glasgow archdiocese’s newspaper, and, most elaborately, by a Jesuit priest called Peter Burns. Basing his study on several decades’ worth of game accounts in the Glasgow Herald, Father Burns found that referees had disallowed sixteen Celtic goals, while denying Rangers a HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
mere four. Celtic had won two “dubious penalties” to Rangers’ eight. “It seems reasonable to conclude,” he wrote, adopting the tone of a disinterested academic,
“that the oft-made and oft-denied charge of Rangers-favoring bias by match oªcials, at least in Old Firm games, does indeed stand up to scrutiny.” When Celtic supporters make their case, they invariably point to a string of incidents. First, they point to a passage in the memoir of a Rangers player recounting a retired referee bragging to him of preserving Rangers victories with bogus calls. Next, they recount that a player was ejected from a game in 1996 for crossing himself upon enter-ing the pitch—a deliberately provocative gesture, the referee called it.
In the mainstream press, there is a phrase to
describe these complaints: Celtic paranoia. The notion is that Catholics have imagined the crimes committed against them, have grown too attached to the idea of su¤ering. This smells of victim blaming, but the closer one examines the evidence the more reasonable the thesis becomes. Celtic fans have a predilection for dredging up ancient history and conflating it with recent events. Burns’s Jesuitical study, for example, relies on newspaper clippings from the 1960s to make the case against the Scottish referees.
In a way, this confusion of past and present perfectly captures the Scottish Catholic condition. Without question, they continue to su¤er prejudice in the present day. But when asked to give examples of the wounds inflicted by Scottish Protestants, they fall back on stories they’ve inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. To be sure, these are often devastating tales: Catholics denied jobs, shut out of universities, and prevented from falling in love with Protestant women. Western Scotland had been a place, in the words of the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, where “the birds on the trees sang sectarian songs.”
But the memories of the past are so easily accessible that they shade perceptions of the present. When commentators call for creation of a new secular school system that would abolish funding for parochial institutions, some Catholics smell the second coming of John Knox.
“We must try to be invisible or su¤er the inevitable dis-criminatory consequences,” the literary critic Patrick Reilly has fumed in response. They complained vociferously when the newly created Scottish parliament took up residence in the old Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland. Never mind that the Church of Scotland, like the rest of mainline Protestantism, has become a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism, racked with guilt over its anti-Catholic past. And never mind that parliament only occupied the building for temporary accommodation.
While discrimination might not exist in spades, prejudice does. Sitting in Ibrox, listening to the taunts of Rangers supporters, Catholics know for certain that some of these fanatics are members of the Scottish parliament and critics of Catholic schools. It’s hard not to be wary.
IV.
With Dummy’s Guinness-stained gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, he looks undeniably like a soccer fan. Don- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
ald Findlay does not. He wears a three-piece suit with striped pants and a navy jacket constructed from lush Sa
ville Row cloth. Across his vest, a gold pocket watch chain holds a miniature crown and family keepsakes.
His Gilbert-and-Sullivan facial hair covers his cheeks and then stops at his chin. At Ibrox, they a¤ectionately refer to him as Muttonchops. In his career as one of Scotland’s greatest barristers, he evinced a melodra-matic persona to match his overwrought attire. Findlay achieved his infamy by freeing some of his hardest clients, including hooligans on both sides of the Old Firm. His flowery oratory flooded the jury box with tears.
After the match, I met Findlay at a hotel bar.
Despite a legal career filled with high-profile successes, he will always be best known for his time as the flamboyant vice-chairman of Rangers. Attending games at Celtic Park, he’d sit in the box reserved for the opposing management. He’d deliberately show disdain for his surroundings, kicking up his wingtips and placing them on the box’s polished wood. Besieged by a torrent of verbal abuses from Celtic fans, he’d take long drags on his pipe, appearing utterly unmoved. When his Rangers scored goals, Findlay liked to celebrate as ostentatiously and gleefully as possible, the only man standing and cheering amid a sea of dejection. In interviews, he’d go a step further. He made a running gag out of the fact that he didn’t celebrate his birthday, because it fell on St. Patrick’s Day. Instead, he said that he celebrated on July twelfth, the anniversary of King Billy’s triumph. In his living room, he would stage Orange marches. On a May night in 1999, his tenure at Rangers
came to an abrupt end. Findlay sang, “We’re up to our knees in Fenian Blood” on the karaoke machine, his arm drunkenly draped over a player’s shoulder. He had gathered with the rest of the Rangers club to celebrate a victory over Celtic. In his jubilation, he had repeated lyrics that Rangers supporters blare on a weekly basis, that leading lights of society had sung for generations.
Most of them, however, hadn’t been captured on a video that would be handed over to the Daily Record. On the same spring evening that Findlay raised his pint glass and damned the papists, Rangers’ darkest impulses were responsible for dark acts. Rangers fans stabbed, shot, and beat senseless three young Celtic supporters.
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 supp
orters 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¤.
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