February 2008 Archives

A CURIOUS development in Spain suggests football could be on the cusp of a more enlightened age. No room for complacency - sport, and football in particular, remains one of the last bastions of unreconstructed homophobia - but the response so far to a tabloid controversy in the land where blacking up and showering racist invective on Formula One drivers is part and parcel of erm, a day at the races, hints at an embryonic new tolerance.

Cuore, a Spanish women's weekly, last week ran a photo - now all over the web - of the Real Madrid captain Jose Maria Gutierrez Hernandez, Guti to his mates, appearing to lean out of his car and kiss another bloke. Full on the mouth, with a bit of tongue by the looks of it. Guti himself has retained a dignified silence over the picture - why should he not? - although his people seem to be putting it around that the camera lieth and that the bloke is actually a woman with short hair, Guti's sister in fact. They were, apparently, celebrating the fact that she is pregnant. Funny how they do things, those Spaniards.

At any rate, the midfielder's wife, television presenter Arancha de Benito, has informed the press she has decided to "take a break" from their eight-year marriage, a move that will fuel speculation that her husband has not exactly been playing straight.

Whether Real Madrid supporters - among whose ranks there lurks an unashamedly fascist element - stand foursquare behind their man remains to be seen, but unless I am badly mistaken the reaction from most quarters, and certainly in Britain, has been a fairly nonchalant "who gives?". Only the pink press has been genuinely excited.

As well it might be. It is a glaring statistical anomaly that none of the 4000 or so professional footballers in this country are openly homosexual. Politicians can come out without so much as a batted eyelid from the commentariat, while in showbusiness Achilles had nothing on the modern-day hetero. Heavens above, even the stuffy old Church of England accepts gays these days.

In football, though, where much has been done to stamp out racism, homophobic chants still pass the censors, while it is privately acknowledged within the FA in England that gay players are encouraged to stay in the closet and are even advised, in some cases, to find girlfriends to maintain an image.

Until the day when they feel able to come out without fear of prejudice, the paradigm of Britain's first openly gay footballer Justin Fashanu's suicide in 1998 will remain a stain on the game's conscience. Maybe then even players who are single and read books will escape the suspicions of their dim-witted colleagues.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

We have become so inured to our private lives - from our consumption of pies to our lack of participation in sport - being the focus of incessant political kibitzing, that even the most preposterous announcements are now greeted with blubbery indifference.

Politicians who want to be seen as bold and radical these days are guaranteed media coverage and the adulation of their chums in the medical establishment if they say something vaguely health-related, but even so it was an odd spectacle to see Gordon Brown's health minister, Alan Johnson, chafing the trade unions about their members being fat and useless this week.

An initiative was launched to shame lardy workers into taking up a sport, presumably in order that they also take up less room on the buses and give the government something to congratulate itself on when the next obesity league tables are published. It comes on the back of a scheme dreamt up last month to actually pay fat people not to eat, so one can only assume there will be a weigh-in to get things started: if you're off the scales it's off to play badminton. Shed a pound or two and catch a glimpse of your own genitals then you're in the money ... but don't spend it all in McDonald's.

The whole business will probably be televised, so not only will our fleshy brothers, mothers and colleagues incur our resentment at being given public money to spend on new clothes that fit, they will also be thoroughly patronised and humiliated. All of which might be a success - insofar as those extreme makeover shows are a success by turning hideously overweight people with low self-esteem into emaciated, evangelical bullies.

A far more interesting idea, one which should strike at the flaccid heart of obesity - at least in schools - without resort to state-sponsored jabbing of bellies has been championed this week by the Tories, although it was initially touted by Gerry Sutcliffe, Labour's Sports Minister. Its beauty is in its simplicity: boxing for all, or at least for all those who can be persuaded to box.

No doubt the very notion will have health and safety officials in cardiac arrest and there will be nine different forms to fill in before a single glove can be laced up, but in our risk-averse age boxing makes a lot of sense. Boys in particular need to be exposed to competition, let off steam and learn to take responsibility for their actions. In a controlled environment the sport is no more dangerous than cricket and can instil a sense of discipline and respect for others.

Nelson Mandela, who boxed as an amateur, once said: "I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it." It is faulty science that suggests truckers should be forced into playing table tennis to cure a nation's ills.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald