They laid wreaths to mourn the passing of the club’s Protestant identity. In Northern Ireland, supporters clubs passed resolutions banning travel to Glasgow for games and boycotting the purchase of Rangers products. Eªgies of Graeme Souness burned in Belfast streets.
By becoming the Jackie Robinson of Scottish soccer, Johnston put his own life in jeopardy. Celtic fans staged their own protests, denouncing him as a turncoat. They sprayed graªti threatening, “Collaborators Can’t Play Without Kneecaps.” For a while, it looked as though the authors of that phrase—or their sympathizers—might turn the threat into reality. A month after Johnston’s arrival, police detained Celtic fans who had allegedly plotted to assassinate him. To keep their new purchase alive, Rangers shipped him from Glasgow to London each night on a chartered jet; Johnston later moved into a safe-house outside Edinburgh. By the mid-nineties, he fled Scotland altogether, resettling in the friendlier confines of Kansas City.
Jackie Robinson’s presence transformed the culture of baseball, slowly chipping away at clubhouse racism. Mo Johnston, strangely, had the opposite e¤ect. The team began to travel with a picture of the Queen that it hung in the dressing rooms it visited. Players began to appear in Northern Ireland, photographed alongside paramilitaries.
Scottish Protestant players allegedly defecated all over the Celtic changing room when Rangers borrowed it for a match. Even Mo Johnston himself was witnessed singing the “Sash,” a ballad with anti-Catholic inflections. And Rangers’s growing contingent of Catholics followed his lead in singing songs that insulted their faith.
How to explain this strange inversion? Glasgow is not an enormous city. Average people regularly encounter their soccer heroes. They run into them in the pubs and on the streets. If the players aren’t appropriately enthusiastic about the cause, their lives can become very diªcult. They already have to contend with half the town hating them; they don’t need their own fans turning on them, too. It creates a feedback loop that ensures sectarianism’s persistence. When Graeme Souness left the club in 1991, he told a press conference, “Bigotry never sat easily on my shoulders, and bigotry will always be at Ibrox.” With Dummy whispering into my ear —“I’ll never hire a Celtic supporter”— I think I know what he means.
III.
The next day, as I leave my hotel for the stadium, the sta¤ tries to give me advice. Most of them had never been to a Celtic-Rangers game, despite the importance HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
of the event in the life of the city. Still, they felt a sense of civic pride, constantly assuring me of my safety at Ibrox. As I departed, a receptionist rose from her chair.
“You’ll have a fantastic time,” she said, suddenly stopping me. “Hold on. Open your jacket.” A few days earlier, I’d told her that I su¤er from a very mild red-green colorblindness. Now, she wanted to proofread my clothes to make sure that I had filtered out all royalist blue, Ulster orange, and Irish green that might incite a drunken thug. Every sane Glaswegian had told me to advertise my neutrality as clearly as possible. “Wear black,” one friend advised. Before the receptionist’s intervention, I’d already set aside sweaters whose hues I didn’t want to risk. The receptionist laughed at herself for conducting this examination, “You’ll be fine. Just remember, whatever you hear, they don’t really mean it.”
Everything I do at the game to register my noncom-batant status seems to fail. Although I introduce myself as an American writer on a research mission, my neighbors in the Celtic stands insist on partisanship.
Frank, the roofer in the seat next to mine, tries to explain the atmosphere by pointing to the field and intoning, “Good versus evil.” Another neighbor wraps a
“Fighting Irish” scarf around my neck. He hoists my arms in the air above my head, a reverent gesture, during the singing of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
After Celtic score a goal twenty seconds into the game, a stranger’s embrace lifts me above my seat. My cell phone tumbles out of my pocket, two rows down.
Our section turns to the Rangers fans and sings about the exploits of the IRA. I don’t know the words, and can’t always cut through the brogues to decipher them, but there are certain phrases that are easy enough to pick up. Fuck the Queen. Orange Bastards. Frank the roofer translates for me, until he explains that the vulgarity makes him feel ashamed.
Spurred on by the home fans, Rangers players
exude the dour Calvinism that they are supposed to represent. They tackle hard and neglect no defensive detail. Their midfielders slide into Celtic’s. Their e¤ort yields a string of three unanswered goals. When the Protestants sing “shit Fenian bastards,” we have no response other than to extend our middle fingers and use them as batons to ironically conduct their taunts.
Rangers wins the match three-two, and there’s only one explanation for the outcome: Celtic’s sluggish and sloppy back line of defense. That fact doesn’t interfere with the explanations I overhear for the defeat. “Give a goddam Orangeman a whistle. . . .” Another man refers to referees as the “masons in black.” Of course, grousing about refereeing is a bedrock right of sports fans.
Why blame the team that you love when culpability for defeats can be easily transported elsewhere?
Celtic fans are a special case. They don’t just believe that referees try to ruin them. They believe that they’ve definitively proved the phenomenon. The case against the “masons in black” has been made on the op-ed pages of broadsheets and in the pages of the Glasgow archdiocese’s newspaper, and, most elaborately, by a Jesuit priest called Peter Burns. Basing his study on several decades’ worth of game accounts in the Glasgow Herald, Father Burns found that referees had disallowed sixteen Celtic goals, while denying Rangers a HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
mere four. Celtic had
