Hand-sheiks, Vacuums And Villains
The Tweet
I hope you’re well.
Last Saturday this throwaway tweet I sent while eating a leisurely late breakfast went viral, rendering my notifications a hornet’s nest for many, many days.
The video in Tammy’s tweet shows a Qatari sheik ostensibly ignoring a female soccer official, which led me to ask the question - how can we have a World Cup in such a place?
Now, the debate about Qatar ever being awarded the tournament (which raged again in my mentions) is not one I want to go over again. Suffice to say that, although I am delighted to see the world’s greatest tournament break new ground, it could probably choose somewhere better than a country with 50-degree summer temperatures and an extremely iffy human rights record.
The Reply Guys, whose USP is a constant struggle with comprehension, were in like a flash, calling out my “ignorance” of Islam and informing me that men aren’t allowed to touch women that they aren’t married or related to.
Except nowhere in the tweet did I say that the sheik in question was under any obligation to touch the female official.
The point is not that he didn’t touch her - it’s that he didn’t acknowledge her existence in any way whatsoever.
If this World Cup in Qatar is to fulfil any function (other than to make certain people even richer and more corrupt than what they already are), then surely it should be to facilitate a discussion around what kind of world we wish to build together.
I would much rather see nations like Qatar embrace things like equality and human rights over the rapacious, naked capitalism that seems to be what passes for progress in parts of the Middle East these days.
Mind you, I’d like to see the same happen in the West too.
The Podcast
… I had a couple of interviewees lined up but, for various reasons, they have been postponed for a week or two, so instead it was used to expound on the topic above.
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating people when I just do a podcast on my own rather than with a guest, and yet some listeners seem to prefer it.
The Economy
We’re at the time of the year when my accountant (who is a book-keeping goddess) wants to close the books for 2020 and gently steer me towards doing things that are more profitable and less costly. She knows it’s a losing battle, but she’d be in dereliction of her duty if she didn’t.
The way it tends to work is that I spend half of my time doing work that brings in money, and the other half doing stuff that ends up costing me money, but that I really want to do. Like virtually everyone else in the media business I’m looking for a business model or models that would make what I do sustainable in the long term.
Things like podcasting and writing articles that I publish on my blog or Patreon, Kofi or here don’t generate a whole lot (if they generate anything at all), but they are often the content that gets people to engage with me, and for me the engagement is probably more valuable than dollars and cents.
For instance, the money I’ve made from major soccer tournaments has taken me to a remote Icelandic island to interview former England goalkeeper David James, and a trip to make a radio documentary in Los Angeles gave me an opportunityto drive to Las Vegas to interview UFC anti-doping czar Jeff Novitzky.
I do this job to share stories, some of which are my own, some of which have been entrusted to me, and that has enormous value, even if it can’t be measured in money.
The Time Of The Year
This week I wrote a piece about the victims of the Stardust tragedy and their 40-year wait for justice. As someone from the northside of Dublin, what happened in the early hours of February 14, 1981 is an indelible part of me, even though I lost no family member among the 48 dead or the hundreds more injured.
It got me thinking about how justice is not something that working-class people are ever entitled to; here was a case where 48 people died in an inferno, many because the fire exits were chained shut, and yet those who held the keys to those locks will die comfortably in their beds. Not only that, the owners received massive insurance payouts too.
How can this be right? On what planet can this be OK? How can anyone - judge, politician, policeman - look at what has happened over the last 40 years and say that it is acceptable?
And yet history - especially Irish history - is littered with incidents like this.
The Vacuum
The rehabilitation of mob boss-turned-wannabe-boxing guru Daniel Kinahan continues apace. I just watched a YouTube clip of some idiot interviewing some other idiot about him and one of the questions was along the lines of how much would the sport miss him if Kinahan was to walk away?
The answer is: more than you would think, but that’s not the point.
Kinahan thrives because he looks after boxers. They get a few quid and they can train in a way that they mightn’t be able to if they had a proper job. The problem is that any stipend or wage or sponsorship they get from him is generated from crime or the proceeds of it. Whether it is rental income from a building bought with drug money or the drug money itself is a moot point; it all comes form the same place.
Yet what we often forget is that Kinahan is filling a vacuum that society won’t.
I’ve been in boxing and martial arts gyms all over the world, and they are all pretty much the same, as are those who inhabit them. Most are in areas where rent is cheap, they are cold and often damp and in need of a lick of paint. The fighters are people for whom fighting is a way of life, who started at the bottom of society’s ladder and who have had to struggle just to get their foot on the first rung.
In 20212 there was a story of how the gym that produced one of Ireland’s greatest athletes of all time, Katie Taylor (arguably the greatest) had no toilet or shower, and the only people who were shocked by that news were the ones who know nothing about boxing.
Boxing attracts the kind of people whose only power is in their fists - everything else is outside their control, often even their own careers. Daniel Kinahan’s power comes from the threat of a violence of a different kind, and when he shows up all of a sudden and invests in them and takes them seriously, then clearly he will have their loyalty.
This is repeated throughout sport, throughout the world. When society or the community doesn’t provide, someone else has to step in; and by the time you realise that those stepping in are maybe not the kind of people we want our young people looking up to, it’s too late.
The Circus
In two weeks my buddy Haidar and I will be back on the hamster-wheel of publishing as our two youth novels hit the bookstores. Once again we have a million ideas for how to get the books under the noses of the teenage soccer fans we expect to read them, but we’re always left wondering which ones will work and which ones won’t.
Marketing a book and doing interviews is weird - the first book was written three or four years ago, and the second one was ready to go this time last year, so we have to try to go back to who we were then and what we were talking to each other about to try to relate the stories of how the books came to be.
The second one is no problem - the first book had been published and we were in America doing the aforementioned radio documentary together. We got up at 4 AM one morning in Los Angeles, had breakfast and drove the four hours to Las Vegas to interview Novitzky.
On the way we argued and fought and battled but by the time we got there we had pretty much laid the foundations for the second book in a series of notes on Haidar’s phone, and it turned out to be incredibly quick and easy to write.
Some of the details changed in the writing process but by the time we rolled into the UFC parking lot we were done. The rights for a film script for the first book have already been sold, and the rights to the second one might turn out to be even more valuable.
What’s gratifying is that the early reviews are good and the reviewers see a clear improvement, but at the end of the day it will all come down to how many we sell.
The Week Ahead
God only knows what it holds. The other day a plane ticket dropped into my inbox that will take me to the Tokyo Olympics, if it happens. Things are stable at the moment but I miss the certainty and the uncertainty, of knowing I will be out in the field but not knowing what is going to happen. At least I know I’m going to be somewhere, and that’s a start.
Have a great week.