The Old Firm are stumbling - and that's good news for all of Scotland |
On Tennessee whiskey at 2am, I bonded with an engineer from Chicago in my first week at university. Benny would tell me about his devotion to the Chicago Cubs baseball team, while I shared my love of Celtic FC with him. These are sacred moments in young men’s lives. We were in October, 1980. Celtic were playing Rangers at Parkhead the following week, and I invited him along to feel for himself the full force of what I’d been talking about. Soon, I was performing the role of unofficial ambassador for Glasgow. This principally involved deconstructing the Rangers’ support’s No Surrender loyalist anthems and my mob’s Irish republican folk tunes.
I think I may have conveyed the impression that we were all united in a jocund festival of goodwill and were sharing cultural fellowship at a UNESCO-sponsored Heritage event. The charade disintegrated within minutes of kick-off. You see, Benny was a southern Baptist and the sheer volume and artistic range of the swearing and profanity going on around him was making him jaggy.
When Charlie Nicholas scored an equaliser for Celtic in the second half, the roof of the Jungle seemed to depart its foundations and so, it seemed, did Benny’s soul. As I turned to hug him, he burst into tears. Had the big man, after a week of Fenian evangelicalism by me, become a fully-fledged Timaloy? Not quite. Poor Benny had simply been caught off-guard by the burst of emotional intensity breaking upon him. For a few moments, his senses were scrambled and this, I think, had jolted his neurophysiological balance. I’m only relaying this to provide a snapshot of what can happen when Celtic and