HOLD THE BACK PAGE:HAD YOU been to Lahore for the 1989 Hockey World Cup you would have seen the Pakistani police and army casually but brutally beat queuing locals with large, swishing rods. Instant headline news had it occurred in Manchester or Dublin.
The women in Lahore were fine that day in Gadaffi Stadium. They were corralled into one triangular segment, separate, isolated, caged. Some of the fans climbed up and on to the roof of the main stand and happily sat with their legs dangling over the side slapping each other on the back, inches from falling to their deaths.
If you were in Atlanta for the 1996 Olympic Games you may have gotten an official bus from the airport to your television and telephone-free student accommodation 30 minutes away but found yourself passing the same restaurant for the third time two and half hours later.
The volunteer driver from New York, who had arrived in Atlanta for the first time the week before was tired, beaten and mewed to an apoplectic German like the impatient receptionist in Spinal Tap; 'Sir, I am only as god made me'.
Security folk at the Centennial Games would take your lap top apart one day and the next you'd breeze past the recently turned soil of the bulldozed ghettos to the boxing venue without so much as a gun slinging cop or sniffer-dog to slow progress.
Veterans of Belfast saw that comical security for what it was. One bomb later in Centennial Olympic Park with two people dead and everyone did too.
When you travel as an athlete or spectator you are expected to take what is thrown at you in Africa or Asia or America. You try to use the cultural adversity to your advantage, or simply survive it. The recent hyperventilation replete with sniffy undercurrents of racism, where first world athletes expect European arrangements in third world countries are as realistic as New Delhi becoming a model of Vorsprung durch Technik efficiency.
Nuclear-powered India is not blameless for the Commonwealth Games fiasco but there has been no threatening chorus from similarly embattled countries to withdraw because New Delhi's lavatorial delights are no worse than what many athletes are used to and better than what some countries serve to their own Commonwealth citizens.
The city is not responsible for the out break of dengue fever or the corruption which, like Ireland, appears common. The affair is a reminder of the description of athletes by Britain's straight-talking head coach, Dutch man Charles van Commenee. The former social worker remarked last year – and reported in the London Times this week – he didn't want his athletes to be seen as 'wankers and pussies'. You can't help but find yourself in agreement with candid Commenee when watching the avalanche of hysterical coverage, from snoozing cobras in the bathrooms to wild dogs hot bedding in the athlete's quarters. Nor can you escape the perception coming from certain quarters that when Mountbatten led the retreat in 1947, the colonial power had left the job of civilising the harijans, sudras, kshatriyas and brahmins only half done.
Saracens fight for the right to annoy the suits
SARACENS’ DECISION to send Steve Borthwick to a bootcamp bonding session in Munich for the Oktoberfest rather than the Heineken Cup launch seems like a stinging snub to authority from the English club, given too the famous festival celebrates Bavarian beer and not the sponsor’s brew.
If you enjoy clubs jamming the grinding wheels of officialdom, regardless of whether Saracens were right, wrong, self-serving or not, their decision seems deliciously subversive, even calculated to offend.
The obligatory promotional exercise to kick-start the European rugby competition appears to be another episode in the English club’s willingness to defy rugby chieftains and chip away at authority.
They are fast becoming the Beastie Boys of the rugby world, a sexy image to hold but standing up for their right to party may bite them back down the road.
At last season’s Premiership semi-final against Leicester in Welford Road, Saracens coach Brendan Venter, a qualified GP, was involved in a public spat with the RFU over an incident with the home crowd.
Venter was accused of hitting an angry fan in the mouth with the back of his hand. He convinced the panel it had been an accident and claims to have said to her:
“You will die of a heart attack.”
The hearing was pleased he had actually used his medical authority to tell her to “calm down or she would have a heart attack”.
Venter was also alleged to have stood up, bowed at the broiling fans, blown them a kiss and cried: “I love you all.”
He manfully confessed to a charge of sarcasm.
But for his attitude and comportment throughout, there was little sympathy.
Venter appeared to do what he could to antagonise the Judge Jeff Blackett-led farrago of “learned friends” with a mix of impudence, cleverness and a confident brashness they didn’t normally encounter.
Judge Jeff, who we might recall from the Dean Richards saga, banned Venter from the touchline for 14 weeks and described the World Cup winning centre as showing “disdain” for the hearing itself by coming back to hear his sanction eating a biscuit and throwing sweet papers across the table.
Saracens contended the RFU was run like “a rural prep school.”
The anticipated four figure fine from the ERC for Borthwick’s no-show? Saracens will have drunk that on the first night in the beer hall.
Fennell and GAA could do with a Bosman
WHAT IS touted as the most democratic sports body in the land has inadvertently created a Kafkaesque situation for footballer Eamon Fennell. The festering transfer issue between O’Tooles, who Fennell has wanted to leave since 2007 and St Vincent’s, who he wishes to play for, is absurdly but legitimately using GAA byelaws to bring the game into what some people would see as disrepute.
The Bosman ruling liberated professional athletes across all sports in Europe and used employment law to undo the stranglehold clubs had on individual players. It appears the amateur GAA and the decisions of county boards need a Bosman in the house.
The Dublin county board that voted 33-33 on Fennell’s move before a casting vote blocked him is democracy at work. The beautiful thing about democracy is it can change its mind come the next election or the next vote. That it did when the county board correctly voted 39-21 a second time to block Fennell’s move, which all seemed heartlessly hard line.
Fennell won’t play for O’Tooles, can’t play for Vincent’s. A Dublin county midfield player, who won a Player of the Month award back in March but has no Dublin club to represent, is democracy’s triumphant masterpiece.
When Franz Kafka wrote his book The Trial he spoke about issues marked by a senseless disorienting and problems that were often of menacing complexity. There were no clear courses of action or any ability to see beyond immediate events.
Franz was in a confused place. So, it appears, is a fed up Fennell, judging by his quotes.
In a statement issued by the county board they explained part of the reasoning: “A player is expected to always owe allegiance and loyalty to the club he first legally participated with in club competition.” That sounds like the Catholic church. Sign up when you are young and it’s devilish hard to get out. The community-centred GAA represents much more than sport in Ireland. It didn’t attain that high standing in the affections of the country by crushing the butterfly on the wheel.
Elite athletes well schooled in every way
F I N A L S T R A W:A HEADMASTERS conference in Britain was recently told sportsmen and women achieve better exam results than their non-sporting peers. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, 48 percent of British medal winners came from private schools. Private schools make up just seven percent of the total in Britain.
Tiger Woods and 21-year-old Rory McIlroy, because of their precocious talents, didn’t go to school as much as their less talented class-mates – McIlroy has said that Sullivan Upper in Holywood outside Belfast was not on top of his priority list – although Tiger will argue that he attended college. And he did.
Often the single-minded attitude that got athletes that far in sport kicks into education too. England cricket captain Mike Atherton went to a grammar school in Manchester and from there to Cambridge University, where he gained first class honours in history.
During his undergraduate years his team mates on the England team would refer to him as FEC. Even then they could tell he was a Future England Captain. Atherton duly obliged and nailed down that particular job by the time he was 25 years old.
Portis talking absolute packages
NFL’S CLINTON Portis (of the Washington Redskins) has been enlightened by nine seasons in the NFL. But Portis is more of a meat head than we might imagine. In the US, reporters, male and female, operate equal access to the locker room for interviews.
“You know, man, I think you put women reporters in the locker room, in positions to see guys walking around naked,” he said recently.
“And you sit in the locker room with 53 guys, and all of the sudden you see a nice woman in the locker room, I think men are going to tend to turn and look and want to say something to that woman,” added the Redskins running back in a radio interview following alleged harassment of a female reporter Ines Sainz (not by Portis).
“And I mean, you put a woman and you give her a choice of 53 athletes, somebody got to be appealing to her,” he continued. “You know, somebody got to spark her interest, or she’s gonna want somebody. I don’t know what kind of woman won’t, if you get to go and look at 53 men’s packages.”
And we worry about inarticulate, socially damaged men’s packages like Wayne Rooney. It’s because of the Portis packages of the world that we light candles.
