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Snare drums would buzz like rattlesnakes in two fierce crescendos, the entire house would moan, stiffen and wince, and then they’d strike with fanged discord.
Bagpipes, beautiful if beyond the horizon, can crack teeth and induce fevers if played at high volume and, in my childhood home, they woke us on Sundays viciously.
My father, immune to their venom, would blare the Royal Scots Dragoons Guards on the stereo, surround himself with sections of The New York Times, sip his tea and sing along to the instrumentals. My mother, battling dizziness and sweats like the rest of us, would make rounds of toast and hurry us to prepare for Mass and soccer games. Hand gestures were enough when we couldn’t hear her over The Wee Wee German Lairdie. Sometimes in our desperation to escape, we’d forget to resist going to St. Robert’s and just pile into the car, our ears bleeding onto the cleats looped around our necks. My father would meet us later, after church, on more serious earth.
Many of my neighbors in suburban New Jersey couldn’t understand my father. They viewed his intensity about soccer with alarmed curiosity, but his language, even when it wasn’t obscene, just made people shake their heads helplessly.
“Your Dad’s Swedish?” a kid asked me once.
“Glaswegian,” I responded.
“Oh sure,” he nodded, “in Africa.”
Even those Americans who can place Glasgow on the right continent and Scotland on the right island misunderstand the nature of the place. Americans tend to romanticize the country, at least partly because of movies like Braveheart. While the industrial landscape of west central Scotland bears no resemblance to that film’s craggy hills or misty lochs, one doesn’t need to look far to find fierce tribal loyalties, breastfed resentments and underhanded violence. The troubles in Glasgow, though, are not primarily between the Scots and the English. They’re between the Scots themselves.
Once while trick-or-treating on Halloween, I knocked unsuspectingly on the door of another family from Glasgow. I recognized the accent of the gentleman who answered, explained to him that my parents had immigrated to the States from his city in the early 1970s, and remarked on the coincidence of them settling in the same neighborhood. He stared at me blankly, but undeterred and eager at ten years old to connect with anyone from that mythic town, I plowed forward, introducing the only subject in Glasgow about which I knew anything: “Which football team do you support?”
To anyone outside Scotland, this is not a loaded question. Even in England’s or continental Europe’s hooligan circles, the inquiry is as frank as the violence the wrong answer might provoke. In Scotland, though, the question is a thinly guised probe and the response can determine the direction of a relationship.
I’ve learned since that Halloween never to ask The Question and, if asked it by someone else, to claim loyalty to “Albion Rovers,” a benign, basement division club. That answer wriggles out of the pin and normally everyone has a good laugh.
On that day in October in central Jersey, though, the man at the door sighed, “Rangers.”
I chirped, “Celtic.”
And the door was shut.
In that gentleman’s defense, I might’ve made him sick to his stomach. He might have thought my parents had trained me to ask “Celtic or Rangers?” the way their generation had been drilled to screen new acquaintances. He might have thought he’d escaped Scotland’s intolerant climate and was disgusted to encounter it 3,000 miles away in a neighborhood dominated by Italian and Jewish Americans.
In reality, of course, I simply didn’t understand what I’d asked. In fact, I didn’t have any sense of it until about twelve years later, when I attended a match between the clubs at Ibrox, hallowed ground to the Rangers Football Club.
The stadium can hold 51,114 swaying and singing, blue and red, predominantly Protestant Rangers fans. Its nemesis plays before chanting and dancing sell-out crowds of 60,000 in Celtic Park, also known to green and white hooped Catholic supporters as “Paradise”.
While the Scottish National Team has never fared particularly well in international competition and in recent years neither Rangers nor Celtic have advanced far in European tournaments, Glasgow recently ranked behind only London and Rome in weekly attendance at football matches.
The locals’ passion surely reflects an appreciation for the grinding, fast-paced style of Scottish football, but there’s no doubt that the combustible mix of religion and politics in Glasgow’s games contributes heavily to their popularity. Early in their histories, the clubs’ managements recognized the financial benefits of promoting the teams’ religious identities, and before long the sporting press had dubbed their rivalry “The Old Firm”, a sly reference to the lucrative commercialization not only of football, but of the sectarianism among Glasgow’s football faithful.
When Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1517 and William III, Prince of Orange, defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, they couldn’t have anticipated inspiring songs and stabbings at football matches centuries later. In the late 1800s, when impoverished Irish-Catholics began pouring into west central Scotland and competing for jobs with Presbyterian Scots, the immigrants and the natives shared little except religious devotion and long memories. Soon, however, thanks to Celtic and Rangers, they also shared fanaticism over sport.
Founded in 1888 as a charitable organization to raise money for the poor of Glasgow’s mostly Catholic East End, Celtic’s popularity and success compelled the Protestant community to meet its challenge. Rangers F.C., inconsistent on the pitch since its founding in 1872, suddenly rose to success on a tide of anti-Catholicism and, by the turn of the century, Glasgow’s sectarian dramas had two official theatres: Celtic Park and Ibrox.
Typically, Celtic and Rangers stage four productions each year. Glasgow’s Herald’s Graeme Spiers commented on their November 9, 2005 meeting: “Parkhead was throbbing. Just when you think you are accustomed to the Old Firm, you suddenly enter a cauldron such as this and take the atmosphere full in the face. Little wonder, amid such a racket, the play is so fast and aggressive.”
Even if the atmosphere never grows dull and suspense surrounds the final score, the characters, costumes, dialogue and plot are more or less predictable. At some point the Rangers supporters, still swaggering after battles won centuries ago, fall into swaying song:
It’s old but it is beautiful,
Its colors they are fine,
It was worn at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen,
And the Boyne,
My father wore it as a youth,
In byegone days of yore,
So on the Twelfth I proudly wear,
The sash my father wore.
Long a Rangers’ favorite, the bouncy march “The Sash” is sung by Protestants in Ulster and Glasgow during Orange Parades that commemorate The Battle of the Boyne each July 12th. If the song and the parades are intended as taunting reminders to Catholics of their systematic oppression, they do the trick; the parades incite riots in Belfast and the song at Old Firm matches riles the audience on the other side of the police cordon.
Equally thrilled to dredge up the past and eager to remind themselves of their own miseries, the Celtic fans inevitably raise their scarves and voices in mournful melody:
By lonely prison walls,
I heard a young girl calling,
‘Michael, they are taking you away.
For you stole Treveleyn’s corn,
So the young might see the morn.
It’s so lonely ‘round the Fields of Athenrye.’
A traditional tune and for years the team’s unofficial anthem, “The Fields of Athenrye” tells the story of a young Irishman imprisoned by the English for a petty crime and of his young wife who’s left to raise their child in poverty. It’s a long, maudlin meditation on freedom and, truth be told, the Unionists among the Rangers supporters never seem particularly ashamed of themselves while the Celtic fans slur the lyrics.
Not all the songs that echo through Ibrox and Celtic Park refer to Britain and Ireland’s tumultuous history, but one can sense a theme in the repertoires, especially when the fans lose patience with subtlety and simply demand blood. Irish Republican Army (IRA) songs erupt without warning from the green and white stripes while sweet choruses of “Up tae yer knees in Fenian blood—surrender and ye’ll die” break loose from the royal blue sea. Both clubs have made an effort to silence blatantly violent lyrics, but in the religiously charged atmosphere of an Old Firm match, it’s difficult to love thy neighbor as thyself.
Occasionally, fans do more than sing about murdering each other. A few years ago, a Rangers fan shot a kid wearing a Celtic jersey with a cross-bow. The boy died with a bolt in his chest. Another rabid supporter used a serrated knife to slit the throat of a young Celtic fan outside a pub full of Rangers faithful in the middle of the afternoon. A bus driver, who happened to be a Rangers’ supporter, stopped his bus, jumped off, and held his scarf against the kid’s neck. He identified the murderer to the police.
The managements’ efforts to distance the clubs from the Troubles in Ulster resulted at least partly from the infamous Ibrox Disaster, arguably the rivalry’s darkest moment. Until recently, the clubs traditionally rang in the New Year with a match on January 1st and, while authorities recognized the potential for drunken trouble every year, in 1971 sixty-six Rangers fans were crushed to death in a stampede. Some still debate the cause, but most believe it resulted from fans trying to reenter the stadium after Rangers scored a goal in the final minutes. In the stunned silence that followed the tragedy, there existed the opportunity for both sides to reflect on football and religion, life and death. There was a chance to reconcile their differences.
A few days later, a crowd of Catholic kids sparring with Protestants in Belfast’s Upper Springfield Road neighborhood took up the chant: “Celtic 0, Rangers 66! Celtic 0, Rangers 66!”
Frustration over supporters’ insistence on politicizing football matches eventually wore even on one of Celtic’s greatest legends. A deity to many, a mere hero to the rest, Protestant manager Jock Stein lead Celtic to victory in the 1967 European Cup, brought the team to the Cup finals again in 1970, and in what seemed an insurmountable feat until Rangers matched it in the 1990s, won the Scottish League nine consecutive times.
In 1972, though, soon after Bloody Sunday and the ensuing riots in Northern Ireland, Stein grew so fed up with paeans to the IRA that he climbed into the stands and chastised the crowd during half time at a game in Stirling. Writing later in the fanzine The Celtic View, Stein explained: “What I did on Saturday was something I’ve felt like doing for quite a while… Surely there are enough Celtic songs without introducing religion or politics or anything else.”
Stein’s attempt to suffocate Celtic’s less palatable elements was repeated in 1996 by Fergus McCann, a millionaire native son who returned from Canada to bail the business out of near-bankruptcy and launch a determined effort to rid the club of bigotry. At an Old Firm match in Celtic Park twenty-five years after the Ibrox disaster, the new owner insisted that the capacity crowd honor one minute of silence in commemoration of the victims. McCann’s efforts to impose silence on the 60,000 spectators initially met taunts and hisses, then an uneasy quiet. While his brilliant managerial skills rescued Celtic from financial ruin, changing attitudes proved a more formidable task.
Graeme Souness, another legend in Scottish football, encountered similar resistance to reversing a century of sectarian policies in Ibrox. After successful careers in Liverpool and Italy, he returned to Scotland in 1986 to become Rangers’ manager. Immediately, he vocally challenged the club’s unspoken policy of never signing a Catholic player, but it wasn’t until the spring of 1988 that he scored a coup by not only signing a Catholic, Mo Johnston, but also by stealing him away from Celtic.
Rangers fans burned their scarves and season ticket books outside Ibrox and hung over management’s door a wreath that read “Traitor’s Gate.” The unrepentant Souness then marched Rangers to nine consecutive League championships, matching Celtic’s heroic string of titles while the Hoops struggled to match Rangers’ spending on players. Tails between their legs, many of the fans who had disowned the team crept back into Ibrox to cheer for the new Catholic players with the same old bigoted slogans.
Johnston’s signing did signal a new era at Ibrox, but Souness’ successful changes on the pitch didn’t translate to immediate changes in the stands. Even though the words to the sectarian tunes played over the stadium’s loudspeakers were changed to innocuous lyrics about American Civil War battles, the fans continued to sing the originals over the family friendly versions. Souness’ efforts didn’t necessarily change things in the Ibrox directors’ box either: Catholic players were barred from making the sign of the cross within sight of the crowd until 1998, and vice-chairman Donald Findlay had to resign his post in 1999 after being video-taped singing sectarian songs at a Rangers celebration.
Prejudice, for my parents’ generation in Glasgow, was part of the curriculum. My mom recalls her father instructing her how to question a prospective boyfriend when she was age ten or eleven: “There were three questions that needed to be asked: First, are you Catholic? Second, are you Irish? Third, do you support Celtic? If it was no to any of those, they were immediately unacceptable.”
At the time, the buildings in Glasgow were covered in soot from the factory chimneys. Eventually, the city scrubbed the bricks and stones clean, restoring their original character. In a city where most schools are still segregated, cleaning black edifices has already proven easier than bleaching orange and green mentalities. As Brian Dempsey, a colleague of Fergus McCann pointed out: “You can’t erode centuries of intolerance just by issuing edicts.”
While in the mid-1980s Glasgow experienced a renaissance that peaked in 1990 when it was named European Cultural Capital, the city was a less attractive tourist destination in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More people fled than arrived in those years and many ended up in places like Kearny, New Jersey, proving if nothing else that the Glaswegians are a practical lot who value wages more than scenery. Two Scottish textile companies in Kearny, Clark Thread and Michael Nairn, attracted so many Scots immigrants that it seemed like entire neighborhoods had been lifted off the Clyde and dropped within sight of Manhattan’s skyline.
As a first step toward assimilation, the new arrivals cleared football pitches and established two clubs: Kearny Rangers and Kearny Celtic. A third squad, the Kearny Scots, competed with the other two until they folded; although it has never achieved more than semi-pro status, the team probably holds a title for stubborn longevity in American soccer.
My father, who played for Kearny Scots in the 1970s and early 80s, remarks that Catholics and Protestants played together on the team without incident. Generally, he claims, it was considered uncouth to refer to the orange and green divide. When a player broached the topic, it was all in jest: “Maybe someone would lean between tables and say, ‘Listen, that’s enough out of you, you Papist bastards.’ But everyone would crack up.”
Light-hearted parodies of the situation characterized any discussion of Scotland’s religious cold war in my house when I was growing up. My brothers and sister and I knew that my uncle and aunt had married in Brussels to avoid the thorniness of a cross-Christian sacrament in Glasgow, but we never shuddered at the mention of the religious tensions that characterized my parents’ childhoods. It all seemed too far away and ridiculous to be taken seriously, especially since most stories about bigotry had a punch-line. When my dad was playing for Dunfermline Athletic against Celtic, for instance, my uncles stood on the terraces, festooned in green and white, cheering for his slaughter. The ball arrived at my father’s feet and a man behind my Uncle Terry spat down, “Get the Orange bastard!” Terry turned and calmly corrected him, “He’s a bastard a’right but he’s no’ Orange.”
Beginning as early as the 70s, fans thousands of miles from the terraces could hurl epithets and phlegm at players on the pitch. Satellite broadcasts brought Scottish international matches to North American audiences even before pubs popularized beamed games in major cities and college towns. In testament to the Scottish fans’ reputation for die-hard loyalty, and perhaps perverse masochism, Madison Square Garden broadcast a game between Scotland and Peru in June of 1978, when the World Cup was in Argentina.
The spectacle struck my brother Andy Logan, who was thirteen at the time, as simultaneously very cool and very odd. “I imagine there were between five and ten thousand people in The Felt Forum, which is where they usually have the boxing,” he recalls. “They had a huge screen and outside the Garden they had all these pipe bands marching up and down. When you think about it, how weird would it be for an American to pay big bucks to take their kid to see a satellite transmission?”
North American bars and other venues began pulling patrons off the street by scrawling game times on sidewalk chalkboards as satellite transmissions became more available and affordable in the early 1990s. In Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, an indoor sports complex called The Soccer Dome began showing matches every weekend. Andy was a regular. He describes the atmosphere of Old Firm matches as “semi-civilized,” but points out that the two sets of fans sat on opposite sides of the room. “Most of the games were on at ten in the morning,” he shrugs, “so it wasn’t as if people were getting out of control beforehand.”
At a broadcast of a recent Scottish international game, Andy found himself sitting among the Raleigh Rangers Supporters Club. About halfway through the game, one of them pointed toward the Celtic supporters, who were on the other side of the room, and said, “Well, you know, that’s your lot over there. Do you know any of those guys?” He didn’t, so he stayed put.
Andy reasons that the divide he has witnessed in sports bars during Scottish league and international matches probably has more to do with friendships than with feuds: “I think they’re just used to sitting around having a couple of beers with the guys they know.” Furthermore, most of the Scots he’s encountered seem happy to leave the sectarianism behind: “The last thing they want to do is replicate what they tried to get away from.” He had a business associate from Northern Ireland, a Protestant who is a committed Rangers supporter, but best friends with a Celtic fanatic. “There was a time when Rangers had won x number of titles, and he admitted, ‘Yeah, I’d like to see Celtic win it.’ For him, the last thing he wanted to do was get that stuff dug up again.”
My brother Chris encountered similar circumstances in Washington, DC, where he served briefly as president of the local Celtic supporters club. While tempers didn’t run high between Celtic and Rangers fans, people were happy to stick with their own. “We were having trouble finding places to watch the games, so we were looking at this place in Alexandria, Virginia called Summers,” Chris recalls. “We knew the Rangers club watched their games there, so we called them to ask if they’d be interested in doing a cost-sharing thing. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
The distrust revealed itself more comically later on, when an organizer of the local Scottish Games contacted Chris about putting together an exhibition game between the Celtic and Rangers clubs: “I thought to myself, ‘Eeagh! What a terrible idea,’ but I asked around and the reaction was, ‘Eagh! What a terrible idea!’ I called the guy back and told him, ‘There’s not a whole lot of interest.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I heard from the Rangers guys and there’s not a whole lot of interest there either.’”
If a “live and let live” ethos characterized the sports bars my brothers frequented, though, open bitterness flavored the green and orange world they encountered in cyberspace. “When the Internet came around in 1995,“ Andy recalls, “You could get into a chat room for the Celtic supporters clubs internationally. That was the first time I really saw just how crazed some of these supporters were. Some of it was just incendiary. Most of the commentary was from ex-pats in Canada and the US. It was guys who’d been living here for ten, fifteen, twenty years, but they certainly hadn’t lost their edge.”
The ugly side of the rivalry is apparent to Jimmy McGuire as well. President of the Kearny Celtic Supporters Club, he’s seen appalling behavior on the street, not just on the Internet, and explains it by quoting the Scottish comedian Billy Connelly: “You know, they all emigrated over here with their wee suitcases full of bigotries.”
McGuire feels that relations between Celtic and Rangers supporters in Kearny are quite good, but they’re less friendly in other parts of North America. “I went up to Canada, and I couldnae believe it the way they’re at each other. It’s like being in Glasgow or being in Airdrie or being in Larkhall, back home. Sometimes you can cut the tension with a knife. It’s unreal. But I would say Canada’s a lot worse than in America.” The few troublemakers in Kearny can be kept under control, he says confidently, then pauses thoughtfully and adds, “As long as you batter both their heids in.”
The only real trouble between the clubs in Kearny, McGuire observes, comes from the “hardcore” elements among the Rangers fans. The president of the Kearny Rangers Supporters’ Club, Les White, agrees that overzealous fans are the problem, especially the ones who visit from New York: “There we have the real radical Celtic Supporters Clubs. They’re just over the top.”
McGuire claims that Kearny’s Celtic Supporters’ Club is the oldest overseas club, dating back to 1963. The Rangers club has existed in some form since at least 1972, when Les White arrived to find fans gathering to listen to the games on BBC shortwave radio. Scores of other Celtic and Rangers Supporters Clubs have cropped up all over the planet since then. Every major city in North America, as well as some minor ones, boasts at least one club where Scots can gather to watch satellite-fed games.
While violence between supporters still mars most Old Firm matches, whether the fights and muggings occur in the stands or in the streets, everyone seems to agree that the situation has improved. Part of that improvement has to do with the efforts of the teams’ managements to heal old wounds, but McGuire hesitates to give them too much credit, pointing out that it’s in their interest to create good publicity: “But I think at Ibrox it will never change. At Celtic Park, it changed years ago. If you’re good enough to play for Celtic, that’s what matters. But with Rangers, oh God, it took them a hundred years before they signed a Catholic. They’ve signed Catholics since then, but it’s usually been foreign Catholics.”
White agrees with McGuire that the situation will never change. “It will always be the same ‘til the day I die. Absolutely. Apart from the fact that Rangers now sign Catholics and have even had a Catholic captain. It’ll never change back there.”
As McGuire sees it, even when Rangers finally signed Catholic Mo Johnston, it occurred in the spirit of theft and treachery. When I spoke to McGuire, he was expecting to see Johnston, who was coaching the New York MetroStars, at a benefit in Kearny held by the Celtic Supporters.
“He asked one of the guys who works for him, ‘Would you find out from your club president if it’s okay for me to come over?’ The guy asked me at the last game and I said, ‘I don’t have a problem at all with him coming over. If you tell him just to stay in the main hall, stay away from the bar, don’t get separated, everything should be fine.’”
McGuire’s ominous advice to Johnston echoed in my head a few weeks later. Driving out of Vermont in frozen darkness, the drone of BBC news as soothing as my coffee, I plotted how I would evade questions about my heritage, my allegiances, my motivation for traveling 300 miles roundtrip to watch a football match at 7:30 AM on a November Saturday morning. I wouldn’t identify my parents’ neighborhoods. I’d leave my green wool coat in the car. I’d restrain myself from gasping if Celtic hit the post, from grinning if they put the ball in the net. I’d pay my twenty dollars, locate escape routes, pretend to watch the game, and lie my way out of trouble if necessary.
When I arrived at their lair fifteen minutes into the first half, no one was guarding the unlocked front door. The main barroom was empty and chairs were stacked on the tables. For a second I considered the possibility that the club president, detecting my background from my three sentence email inquiry, had deliberately sent me to the wrong place. I muttered obscenities, but stayed calm.
Choosing at random a tunnel off the central cavern, I stumbled forward, jumpy from too little sleep and too much coffee. If nothing else, I’d find a men’s room before turning around, heading home, and never mentioning this ridiculous trip to anyone. Mumbling voices lifted my head and I followed them around a corner. Their accent was incomprehensible—a good sign. As I climbed a flight of stairs, someone yelled above the increasing din, “Och, yer shite!”
I relaxed a bit. I knew these people.
The Boston Rangers Supporters Club meets in the Seaport Bar and Grill, a sunny restaurant with deck seating on the harbor next to the World Trade Center. Their theatre’s cappuccino walls are bare, and a tired palm tree slumps like a wet cigarette in a corner by the enormous television. The morning I visited, four old men occupied seats at a table, while the rest, maybe fifteen in total, perched like vultures on the backs of chairs or stood with their sneaky hands in their sneaky pockets. Some turned and nodded, even smiled, as I entered, then went back to nervous viewing.
There wasn’t a pint glass in sight. Coffee brewed next to homemade baked goods and munchkins. One of the pots was decaf.
Throughout the first half, I waited patiently for the supporters’ veneer of domesticity to break down. Surely, a flagrant foul or a shot of jeering Celtic fans would ignite the accumulating fumes of hatred. But the harshest words thrown at the TV in the first forty-five minutes were against the Rangers players and management. There wasn’t a trace of the deplorable behavior I’d journeyed so far and eagerly to see.
The red and blue jester cap worn by Ed, the club treasurer, did nothing to create a festive air, although it jingled to his cursing whenever Rangers lost the ball. At half time, when Celtic was up 1-0 on a goal scored before my arrival, he collected my dues and explained that fifteen is a small turn-out for an Old Firm match. “They’re not doing well at the moment, so people aren’t as motivated to come see them,” he reasoned. He had an American accent, but the lilt that infects some people when they’re in the company of native Scots. Originally, he went on, they watched matches with the Celtic Supporters Club. “That didn’t work out, though,” he chuckled. “Some of these guys are now banned from their bar.”
I examined the crowd again. Everyone looked sullen, but no one stood out as a delinquent. The room had the atmosphere of a wake: men spoke in low voices, laughed sadly, bravely, and shook their heads in disbelief.
The morning wasn’t working out. No one was granted the vision of Heaven or Hell he’d paid to see.
Particularly for those raised in, then repelled by, the cold misery of Scotland’s Catholic and Presbyterian churches, football is succor for lost souls. Many have pointed out the sport’s religious dimensions before: Desmond Morris, in The Soccer Tribe, explains football’s allure in terms of primitive rites and rituals, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán makes a similar argument in Fútbol: Una religión en busca de un Dios. None of the anthropological or sociological theories previously posited fully accounts for the Scots’ commitment to the sport, though. There’s no doubt that identity politics plays a role, but that theory would be easier to swallow if any Scottish team could compete successfully at the international level. After all, there are other ways to take pride in one’s heritage than by celebrating draws as if they were championship victories. There’s a missing number in the equations academics normally formulate to explain Scotland’s football phenomena: laughter.
Celtic and Rangers do profit from bitterness and anger, but they also capitalize on the Scots’ wry sense of humor. The theatre staged at Celtic Park and Ibrox isn’t only drama and tragedy. It isn’t just romance between the supporters and their heroes—it’s also comedy. Even at the grimmest moments in the history of Scottish football, fans have managed to find a way to amuse themselves.
When Jock Stein, who coached the national team in 1985, collapsed dead on the sidelines from a heart attack as Scotland scored the equalizer in a World Cup qualifying match against Wales, a fan interviewed after the game remarked: “It was the only attack Scotland had all day.”
Less twisted but no less cold: when Scotland’s Willie Johnstone was sent home from the World Cup in 197x after testing positive for a banned substance, BBC Scotland sent a camera crew to the pubs on a Friday night in Glasgow. “What do you think of Willie Johnstone getting sent home for taking stimulants?” asked the reporter.
“Shtimulants?” an inebriated fan managed in mock surprise. “We thought the whole fucking team were on tranquilizers.”
Lots of the laughter is at the teams’ and fans’ own expense. During a game against Barcelona FC, in which Celtic miraculously managed to tie a squad of international superstars, a Celtic fan shouted to the pitch: “Hey Ronaldinho! You’ll never be a Paul McStay with that haircut!”
The songs of the Tartan Army at international competitions often include the rallying chorus: “We’re going to win fuck all!”
Even the bigotry itself can induce paroxysms of laughter. In the stands at Motherwell, a town southeast of Glasgow, my father and brother witnessed a ten year old boy scream down to Henrik Larson, then Celtic’s dread-locked Swedish star: “Larsen! You’re nothing but a Fenian bastard!”
Given the cheerfulness of their murderous passion, it seems too neat, too clean to explain supporters’ behavior as deflected religious devotion or desperate identity politics. If the hilarity of the rivalry dried up completely, if the laughable absurdity of the schism disappeared, far fewer Scots would bother with the Old Firm. Celtic Park and Ibrox would become echoing shells scattered with stone-faced fanatics, much like other places of worship. Football is serious business, but explanations for the immense popularity of the game have to account for supporters’ refusal to take life too seriously. It’s not all as serious as young men finding meaning or a sense of belonging. The cheap thrill shouldn’t be underestimated. The adrenaline rush after a brilliant goal. The buzz after a couple of pints.
If it’s not just about politics and religion and cultural heritage, then why don’t football fans in Glasgow support other teams?
“A lot of people do,” answers my brother Chris. “Before the ’98 World Cup, the Scottish team came over to play the US at RFK Stadium. I ran into some guy dressed as Braveheart. He had a big broadsword. We were chatting and I suppose I did the wrong thing, breached the etiquette by bringing up club support at an international game, but he said, ‘I support Aberdeen. I don’t go in for that whole Old Firm thing.’ “
While there’s consolation in the fact that a man who advances the stereotyping of the Scottish nation distances himself from sectarianism, a lot of other people still do take sides in the rivalry. My own father, himself a proud Scottish caricature, still supports Celtic, even though he considers the bigotry associated with the Old Firm appalling.
For him and others wrapped up in Glasgow’s football culture, loyalty to Celtic or Rangers is irreducible. It’s tangled up with memories and friendships, nightmares and dreams. Their love for their one team is bigger than any hate between the two.
Glasgow has no hold on me. I follow Celtic from a distance, more closely just before I visit my brothers or dad. Ice-hockey competes with soccer for the limited attention I give to sports. Ironically, inexplicably, and to my uncles’ horror, my father raised me as a fan of the New York Rangers. I was always vaguely disappointed when we went to watch them at Madison Square Garden and the crowd could barely manage a three word chant, never mind three stanzas of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I envied the passion of Scotland’s bottle-throwing hordes.
Still, when someone asks me why I’m a NY Rangers fan, I shrug and sound like someone caught up in the Old Firm: “I’ve always been one.”
And that simple, cheerful refusal to think any more about it, probably explains the whole thing.
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