I Understood It in Desire

I was thirteen when Mike Myers and Mark McKinney appeared on Saturday Night Live as the hosts of Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly.

I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Two bald men. Thick accents. Football. Fury. Scotland presented as a country permanently five seconds from a fight.

It was absurd.

I loved it.

The title should have warned me.

Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly.

Soccer.

The sketch first aired in January 1995. Two Canadians were performing a North American caricature of Scottish football back to the world.

I did not understand it in reality.

I understood it in desire.

I was born in Glasgow and raised in Canada. At thirteen, I did not want to become a football hooligan.

I wanted to be that certain.

The men in the sketch never had to explain where they came from. Scottishness filled the room before they said anything. There was no awkward qualification. No birthplace followed by a but. No need to prove that somewhere still belonged to them.

Children of the diaspora understand this.

Countries do not cross oceans intact. The ordinary parts get lost along the way. What survives is usually whatever can be carried, repeated and recognized quickly.

Names. Flags. Football clubs. Songs. Grievances.

The quieter parts of a country rarely travel as well as its certainties.

My father supported Rangers. I grew up and chose Celtic. My mother’s people were Irish Catholic.

That story is personal, but it is not unusual.

Scottish families are full of these crossings and contradictions. Catholic and Protestant. Irish and British. Celtic and Rangers. People marry across divisions their grandparents considered permanent, then inherit the arguments anyway.

Children receive the feeling before they receive the history.

They know the shirt before they understand the migration. They know the song before they understand the insult. They know who “we” are because somebody has already told them who “they” are.

At six, I knew the songs before I knew the history.

At thirteen, I knew the caricature before I knew the country.

That is how inheritance works. Meaning often arrives later.

In west-central Scotland, “Celtic or Rangers?” has often asked several questions at once: Catholic or Protestant? Irish or British? Which school? Which neighbourhood? Which version of history belongs to you?

Football did not create sectarianism.

It gave it a platform.

It gave old prejudice somewhere to gather every weekend. It gave it colours, rituals and a fixture list. It allowed grown men to pass religious and ethnic hatred to children while calling it football culture.

Tradition is a useful word when nobody wants responsibility.

The song came from a father. He learned it from his father. Everybody inherited it.

Apparently nobody chose to keep singing it.

That is bullshit.

A child may repeat words without understanding them. A grown man knows when a song is intended to humiliate another people. Calling it heritage does not make it harmless.

It makes heritage an alibi.

Scottish football does not need sanitising. It carries community, loyalty, humour, memory and place. A match should be loud. The rivalry should matter.

Rivalry is part of the game.

Hatred is not.

The histories are not equal. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice travelled far beyond the terraces into workplaces, housing and public life. Calling everything “Old Firm trouble” can hide the power beneath it.

But carrying a real wound does not give anyone permission to wound somebody else.

The Mike Myers sketch was funny because it pushed the exported image of the Scottish football hard man into lunacy. The anger, the accent and the absolute certainty were the joke.

I missed the joke.

Or perhaps I understood another one hiding inside it.

For a boy raised an ocean away, the caricature looked like belonging. These men did not seem displaced, divided or doubtful. They were completely, ridiculously Scottish.

Caricatures do not have to be accurate to become attractive.

They only need to look certain.

The Scottish league begins again this week. Rangers open on Friday. Celtic begin on Monday. The old arguments will resume as though they were merely paused for summer.

I am home for it now, still a Celtic man and still the son of a Rangers father.

I still want the noise.

I still want the rivalry.

I still want Celtic to win.

But the football is enough.

It does not need the poison.

I look back at Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly and understand what that thirteen-year-old saw.

He saw men who appeared to know exactly who they were.

The season is beginning.

The shirts will come out. The flags will go up. The songs will start.

The children are listening.

We should pay attention to what we teach them to sing.

Giff on the Way Home.