From Old Tom Morris to Andy Murray: an examination of the Scottishness of Scotland’s sporting celebrities

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the concept of the sports celebrity in the context of Scotland with a specific focus on the impact of localised national discourses on their formation. Relatively few Scottish athletes have become celebrities perhaps because traditional Scottish cultural values have militated against the cultural elevation even of the most successful individuals. Having explained the cultural context, the paper proceeds to consider the role of Scotland’s golfing pioneers. There follows an examination of the significance of personal tragedy in the construction of other Scottish sports celebrities, with a particular emphasis on football based on nuanced, culturally specific and personal insights into Scottish society. The final section of the paper examines the celebrity status of a tennis player, Andy Murray, arguably Scotland’s greatest ever athlete. Tragedy, political acuity and a wry sense of humour have been combined in Murray’s celebrityhood which has, in turn, been consistently influenced by his dealings with the relationship between Britishness and Scottishness. The main theoretical contribution of the paper is situated in the argument that, although typologies of sports celebrity can be useful, we should not lose sight of the significance of local specificities, with the celebrities who are discussed belonging to three distinct eras in Scottish political development.

KEYWORDS:

• Scotland
• sport
• celebrity
• golf
• football
• Andy Murray

Introduction

When Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote in 1926, ‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf way hoose, but aye be whaur extremes meet’ (‘I’ll have no half way house, but always be where extremes meet’) (MacDiarmid 2008), he could easily have been referring to the internal conflicts that can take over people’s lives as characterised by the Scottish novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson (2012) in his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Of particular relevance to the underpinning focus of this essay are the following words of the Scottish-born polymath, Patrick Geddes,

Here we are divided between two exaggerations – one, that of a legendary superiority in almost every conceivable respect to almost all conceivable people; the other of excessive self-deprecation, as if we had no nationality worth the name (cited in Macdonald 2009, p. 152).

For most Scots, the loss of statehood in 1707 and the establishment of the United Kingdom have meant living in that liminal space between extremes and specifically between Scottishness and Britishness. At the extremes, this has meant either trying to be more British and more successful in science, business, literature and sport than the English or seeking comfort in repeating tales of Scotland’s past glories (Daiches 1952). Most Scots, however, have found themselves, until relatively recently, somewhere in between. This has certainly been the space which many Scottish sports people have been obliged to inhabit.

Three specific celebrity types are identified in the paper and the lives of representative examples are located in different eras in Scotland’s political and social development – the nineteenth century when the union was secure in no small part due to the economic benefits of empire, most of the twentieth century when it remained secure with a pro-union Labour Party a dominant force in Scottish politics and society and the closing years of the twentieth century with the increased popularity of the Scottish National Party and the growing support for independence. The golfing pioneers who are discussed became celebrities, a status that has arguably been enhanced by the passage of time, by virtue of the role that they played in the making of a global sport. The footballers are representative of the self-destructive celebrity type, their emotional tensions – the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome – but have arguably paved their way to celebrityhood in the eyes of their Scottish admirers. Finally, Andy Murray represents a more modern celebrity type but one whose status in his native country can be understood to a considerable extent by reference Scotland’s evolving relationship with the United Kingdom and more specifically with England. The analytical focus throughout the paper is on the political and cultural context of Scotland and the impact of localised national discourses on the formation of sport celebrities. Before we turn to the athletes themselves, however, it is important to say something about the concept of celebrity itself in a Scottish context.

On celebrity, sport and the Scots

With a population of a little over five million, Scotland is generally understood to be an historic nation located within the considerably larger multi-national nation state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In her influential study of the origins of those factors that have held the British state together since 1707, Linda Colley (1996) identified wars with France, Protestantism and a commercial and military empire. However, both unionism and a collective sense of Britishness have become ‘increasingly disconnected in different parts of the United Kingdom’ (Rosie and Hepburn 2015, p. 141). Arguably, this is most apparent in Scotland which, by a significant majority, voted against the UK leaving the European Union. Wars with France have long been forgotten and, indeed, never had the same salience in Scotland as in England. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland has remained a pillar of Scottish civil society but with considerably less influence than in the past. The empire is no more and, without the benefits that it undoubtedly brought to Scotland, it is relatively easy north of the border to think of it as a largely English project which even though untrue is given some credibility by those English politicians who seek to make Britain great again by way of Brexit.

In addition to its former contribution to empire-building, Scotland has enjoyed a reputation for excellence in a range of fields of human endeavour, including medicine, engineering, philosophy, literature and sport (Herman 2001) although, in the case of the latter, there are many who would argue that its best days are behind it, not least because of the declining fortunes of the men’s national football team. It is notable that Scots do not feature in most of the best-known works on sporting celebrity (e.g. Andrews and Jackson, 2001; Whannel 2002, Wenner 2013). Yet star performers from a variety of sports, including football (Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish), boxing (Benny Lynch, Ken Buchanan and, most recently, Josh Taylor), golf (Sandy Lyle), Grand Prix motor racing (Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart) and cycling (Robert Miller and Chris Hoy) have a legitimate case to be regarded as Scottish sporting stars, excellent in their chosen sports but not necessarily granted celebrity status. For reasons that shall become apparent, however, this paper identifies three types of celebrity and proceeds to examine the lives of selected Scottish athletes who exemplify these.

Turner (2010, p. 19) argues that ‘while the textual complexity and dynamism of celebrity culture is among its key attractions, celebrity studies must be aware of the danger of responding only to that – of using its analytical strategies to produce something that is, in the end, largely descriptive’. Although this essay contains numerous descriptive elements, these are interrogated throughout with reference to aspects of Scottish history, culture and popular discourse in an attempt to paint a picture of a nation and its sports celebrities. According to Miller (2013, p. 21), ‘athletes become celebrities when their social and private lives grow more important than their professional qualities’. The overwhelming majority of sports celebrities are distinguished by their athletic prowess and not merely for their well-knownness (Boorstin 1963). It is true that the extent of an individual sportsperson’s celebrity status is necessarily relative; it is very much a matter of which sport, where and when. A star performer in baseball is far more likely to be granted celebrity status in the United States than in India. However, playing a leading role in the origins of a sport that has subsequently become a global phenomenon, as was the case with a number of early Scottish golfers, has allowed certain sports stars to escape at least some of the limitations imposed by the cultural relativism which can make an Indian a massive celebrity in his own country remain unknown in most parts of the world. But how are celebrities subsequently received in a small country such as Scotland where one of the most dominant and persistent myths is that of an egalitarian national-popular world view, one of the ‘national beliefs’ which Paterson (1994, p. 25) describes as important?

Although a long-established Scottish toast proclaims, ‘Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us? Gey few and they’re a’ deid’ (‘Here’s to us. Who’s like us? Very few and they’re all dead’), the cultural specificities that are arguably most significant in relation to the idea of sporting celebrity in Scotland are ironically those that run counter to the very idea of achievement. They are captured in two well-known Scottish sayings – ‘Ah kent his faither’ (‘I knew his father’) and ‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’ (‘We are all John Thompson’s children’). The former implies that no matter how much someone has achieved in life, their origins should never be forgotten. The latter makes an even stronger case for the claim that, ultimately, we are all descended from common roots and that no one is entitled to claim superiority over anyone else. In Scandinavia, the equivalent belief is to be found in the idea of jantelagen (Jante’s Law), ‘the refusal to recognize distinction or achievements, a second effect of which is often personal modesty’ (Matory 2015, p. 50). This might help to explain why some Scottish sports performers, notably the golfing pioneers, have been celebrated largely for what they achieved, the reputation of others who have achieved celebrity status is often the consequence of the problems they have encountered away from the field of play and that have made them not only more flawed but also more human in the eyes of their admirers. Before considering that type of Scottish celebrity, however, there follows a discussion of the type of sports person who achieved celebrity status, some of it posthumously, for helping to make a global sport. With specific relevance to the aims of this paper, they did so in an era when the union was secure, with Protestantism a major force in Scottish society and the British Empire providing opportunities, riches and, at the very least, employment to many.

Scotland’s golfing pioneers

Graeme Turner (2014) argues that celebrity is a product of extensive media representation, thereby linking it to the rapid expansion of media technologies since the latter part of the twentieth century. Yet, according to Smart (2005, p. 1), ‘the popularity and prominence of sporting figures is by no means a recent phenomenon. From the beginning of modern sport in the nineteenth century there have been numerous sporting heroes’. The early history of golf in Scotland provides ample evidence of this and it is appropriate to begin our investigation with one of the few sports which are regularly cited as having been invented by the Scots and which enjoy the status of being a national sport (Bairner, 2009).

The nineteenth-century Scottish pioneers included Willie Park senior, Allan Robertson, Andra Kirkaldy and James Braid. In addition, the history of golf also includes, in Campbell’s (2001, p. 10) florid prose, ‘the Scottish golfing missionaries who took the light of their great game into a darkened world for the betterment of all’. Rather more prosaically, it is undoubtedly the case that Scottish professional golfers such as Tommy Armour recognised and seized the opportunities offered abroad not least in the United States with its burgeoning interest in golf during the first half of the twentieth century. Those who stayed behind had no reason to feel as conflicted about the relationship between Scottishness and Britishness as some of their sporting successors. The demand for Home Rule did not emerge until towards the end of the nineteenth century and support for the Scottish National Party until some years after the Second World War. As Harvie 1977, p. 34) put it, ‘out of step with nationalism elsewhere in the world, the Scots were until the twentieth century judged and dismissed by its criteria’.

By far the best known name of all the Scottish pioneers of golf was Tom Morris (both ‘Old’ and ‘Young’) which will always be associated with the town of St Andrews. ‘Old’ Tom Morris was born in St Andrews on 16 June 1821. He died in the same town on 24 May 1908, having fallen downstairs in the New Golf Club in a street that runs parallel to the eighteenth fairway of the celebrated Old Course. His biographers, Malcolm and Crabtree, write, ‘From an age of great Victorians, Tom Morris emerged, if not the greatest, certainly the most widely-known of sporting figures’ (2010, p. 278). They add that ‘Tom’s name endures because of the indelible impression he left on golf’ (2010, p. 282). His grave in the cathedral burial ground has become a place of pilgrimage for lovers of golf from all over the world. ‘His features’, claim Malcolm and Crabtree (2010, p. 283), ‘remain instantly recognisable to everyone who plays the game that he, more than anyone, made great’.

Morris won the Open Championship in 1861, 1862, 1864 and 1867. He held the record for the largest margin of victory in a major championship (14 strokes in the 1862 Open) until Tiger Woods won the United States Open in 2000 by 15 strokes. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1976. In addition to his playing achievements, he has been recognised for his contributions to golf course design and to greenkeeping innovations. He also played a leading role in the introduction of both prize money and gambling to the game of golf. Following controversy about using the newly invented guttie percha golf ball, made with gum resin, Morris left St Andrews temporarily for Prestwick. He returned to St Andrews in 1865 at the explicit request of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (Campbell 2001), remaining an active evangelist on behalf of golf for the rest of life.

Notwithstanding the exploits of other notable early Scottish golfers, in light of his contribution to what has become a global phenomenon, ‘Old’ Tom Morris is the one who deserves to be regarded as Scotland’s first sports celebrity and one of its greatest of all time, despite living in an era when celebrification was not yet a product of mass mediatisation and corporate branding. In this regard, however, it is important to recognise the importance of the print media in a country which enjoyed relatively high levels of literacy in the nineteenth century, the result of the reformed churches’ emphasis on bible-reading and a 1696 statute passed by the Scottish parliament which charged all parishes with the responsibility of setting up schools (Rendall 1978). Newspapers were among the main beneficiaries with the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury being established in 1718 and 1720 respectively. The exploits of Tom Morris and of his son were communicated by more than word of mouth.

Morris’s son, also Tom, whose short life perhaps bears even more of the hallmarks of the modern cult of celebrity, provides a link to the characteristics of self-destruction and tragedy that, as we shall see, are more often associated with the second type of sports celebrity exemplified by certain twentieth-century Scottish footballers. ‘Young’ Tom, as he is always known, was born in St Andrews on 29 April 1851. He won the Open Championship on four successive occasions (1868, 1869, 1870 and 1872), there being no competition in 1871. This established a record that has never been beaten as did his initial victory being achieved when he was only seventeen years old. He beat his father for the first time at the age of thirteen and competed in the Open for the first time in 1865. He achieved the tournament’s first ever hole-in-one in 1869 and his name was the first to be inscribed on the famous Claret Jug awarded to Open champions ever since. For all his success on the golf course, however, it is personal tragedy that marks ‘Young’ Tom Morris out as a very modern type of celebrity.

The Morrises were playing a match against Willie and Mungo Park at North Berwick on 11 September 1875 when Young Tom received a telegram requesting that he returns to St Andrews where his wife had gone into labour. Father and son finished and won the game and then travelled by ship across the Firth of Forth. By the time they arrived, both Young Tom’s wife and his new-born son had died and he himself passed away less than four months later, on Christmas Day at the age of twenty-four. He had competed in a prize match, on which many bets had been placed, that began on 30 November and resulted in him having to play through a snowstorm. According to Malcolm and Crabtree (2010, p. 147), ‘talk through the years in St Andrews is that Tommy never recovered from this match and that, through a combination of ill health and unhappiness, he began drinking heavily’. They add, however, that there is no evidence that he drank to excess or that alcohol played any part in his death. Indeed, having consulted an eminent pathologist, they conclude that Young Tom probably died as a result of a ruptured aneurysm of a large artery leading to fatal bleeding into the right chest cavity (Malcolm and Crabtree 2010). Regardless of the medical evidence, however, romantics preferred to believe, from the outset, that Young Tom had died of a broken heart. Newspapers throughout the country reported Young Tom’s early passing, ‘written in language that attested to the respect, affection and admiration he enjoyed’ (Malcolm and Crabtree 2010, p. 148). Scotland now had the first in a long line of tragic sporting celebrities – those who died young or in traumatic circumstances together with those who have found social dislocation and fame difficult and, in some cases, impossible to handle. It is they who provide the subject matter for the next section of this paper.

The Scotland in which they came to prominence was very different from that of the golfing pioneers – increasingly industrialised, with an urban proletariat more interested in such sports as football and boxing than golf and often torn between the rival attractions of heavy drinking and high-minded socialism as opposed to Calvinist moral teaching. In addition, with the growing importance of professional football in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the emergence of international competition, at first only involving Scotland and England, another pillar in Scotland’s autonomous edifice was erected. In constitutional terms, however, the most significant event during the entire period was arguably the 1973 referendum on Scottish devolution which was ‘won’ by a narrow majority but ultimately failed having been unable to get the support of 40% of the electorate.

Scottish football, moral homilies and personal tragedies

In British football and, indeed in British sport more generally, the epitome of a successful celebrity is David Beckham with his ‘talent, glamour, drama and status’ (Cashmore 2002, p. 197). Other footballers have been less fortunate but no less well known. Writing about another football star, Whannel (2002, p. 127) comments, ‘The life of George Best … has been transformed into a moral homily – a warning, like a nineteenth-century moral tract, concerning the dangers of giving way to emotion, desire, hedonism and alcohol’. As for a former England footballer, Paul Gascoigne, who has faced similar personal issues, Whannel (2002, p. 149) writes, ‘At the heart of the “Gascoigne problem” was indiscipline – a failure to conform with the high standards of professionalism and commitment that were a significant feature of the new competitive individualism articulated during the 1980s’. Scottish sport has experienced more than its fair share of individuals such as these. According to Palmer (2016, p. 174), the ‘restitution narrative’ is a common feature of the biographies and autobiographies of many celebrities in search of redemption. Denham (2013, p. 36) similarly notes the importance of ‘recovery’ in the mediation of fallen sports celebrities. As is argued below, however, Scottish sportsmen (and they are almost always men) are frequently redeemed in the eyes of their admirers by virtue of the fact that their human frailty highlights that they are no better as people than anyone else and the egalitarian myth is thus vouchsafed.

Among Scots of this type in the first half of the twentieth century was footballer Hughie Gallacher, born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, in 1903. Like so many Scottish players before him, Gallacher played most of his football in England in an era when Scotland had transitioned from being a junior partner in the union to the status of supplicant – ‘totally dependent on the policies of the British state’ (Dickson 1980, p. 284). Only 1.65 metres tall, he played at centre forward for eight senior club sides and represented Scotland on twenty occasions. He scored a remarkable 463 goals in 624 appearances, including 133 goals in 160 games for Newcastle United between 1925 and 1930 and twenty four goals in his twenty games for the national team. Although he was one of the so-called ‘Wembley Wizards’ who beat England 5–1 at Wembley Stadium in 1928, his celebrity arguably owes more to other aspects of his life. Transferred to Chelsea in 1930, his time at Stamford Bridge was marked by suspensions for indiscipline on the field of play and controversy of it. He found himself in the bankruptcy court following prolonged divorce proceedings and was sold to Derby County in 1934. He ended his playing career with Gateshead and continued to live in the north-east of England after he retired (Forsyth 1990).

After his wife died suddenly in 1950, Gallacher became depressed. He was subsequently alleged to have assaulted his son and, although many people, including Newcastle United players and members of staff, were willing to speak on his behalf, he was clearly a troubled soul. Summoned to appear at the Gateshead Magistrates’ Court on 12 June 1957, he sent a message to the Gateshead Coroner, expressing his regret and confessing that he would never forgive himself for causing harm to his son, Mattie. On 11 June, he was seen crying and talking to himself on a footbridge over the London-Edinburgh railway line. He then stepped down from the bridge and killed himself by walking in front of an oncoming express train (McGowan 2009).

According to Andrews and Jackson (2001: 1–2), ‘While the celebrity is usually a complete stranger, and someone we are never likely to meet, nor ever truly know, the virtual intimacy created between celebrity and audience often has very real effects on the manner in which individuals negotiate the experience of their everyday lives’. In small countries, this is even easier given the greater likelihood of knowing the celebrity, knowing someone who knows the celebrity or having a close relationship with the place where the celebrity grew up which is the case with the next discussion.

Throughout almost all of the twentieth century, the print media continued to be a major vehicle for communicating information about leading sports performers. Throughout the UK, this was the era of Saturday evening sports newspapers (the so-called ‘pinks’ and ‘green uns’, including the Edinburgh Evening News and Glasgow’s Evening Times. There was also a growing number of biographies and ghost-written autobiographies which, as Palmer (2016, p. 170) argues, ‘are an important part of a broader project on the production and presentation of the self that focuses many analyses of celebrity culture’. The next celebrities to be discussed are two other footballers – Jim Baxter and George Connelly – who were born and bred in the same part of Scotland as the author. Connelly remembers the area thus,

Where we stayed was right next to the pit – well, about a quarter of a mile away from it and there was a big pit lum [chimney] that used to spew out coal dust like nobody’s business (Connelly and Cooney 2008, p. 21).

Jim Baxter was born in 1939 and died in 2001 after years of ill-health, much of it self-induced as a consequence of his addiction to alcohol. Both he and George Connelly were the sons of West Fife coalminers. Baxter embodied the belief, shared by many of his compatriots, that football is there to be enjoyed. But he also possessed ‘the capacity to self-destruct, which has damaged so many of the nation’s sporting giants’ (Gallacher 2002, p. 5). He was transferred from Raith Rovers to Rangers in 1960 and was immediately thrust into the limelight in which he revelled for the rest of his playing career and even in the years that followed. He surrounded himself with drinkers and gamblers. Consequently, his career was perhaps already in decline when he left Rangers for Sunderland in 1965 but this did not prevent him from playing a starring role in Scotland’s 3–2 win at Wembley in 1967 against the reigning world champions, England.

In the words of one football writer, ‘Those who had not followed football as avidly as others recognised the human tragedy that had been played out over his lifetime in the years that brought him glory, and in the years that he had wasted, and in the sad final years when his excesses caught up with him and Jim Baxter, that weaver of dreams, that icon of Scottish soccer, that legendary Wembley hero, had been brought low and had proved to be as human as the rest of us’ (Gallacher 2002, p. 259).

Others take a different view,

Except, that is not quite how all of those who had been privileged to see him on a regular basis looked at things. For many of them James Curran Baxter was someone very special, someone who had emerged from the dark and grim Fife coalfields, who would never really die as long as memories last and as long as those old and grainy black and white videos of his Wembley games survive (Gallacher 2002, p. 259).

Baxter returned to Rangers in 1969, a shadow of his former self except for the fact that the nickname ‘Slim Jim’ was no longer suited to a man of his girth. In total, he played 359 games for various clubs and won 34 caps for Scotland in an era when far fewer international matches took place than they do today.

Unlike Gallacher and Baxter, Connelly played all of his football in Scotland although it is conceivable that, had his career lasted longer, the economic lure of the English First Division might have been too strong to resist; it might even have saved his career. Connelly was born in 1949 and retired from football officially in 1977, although it can be argued that his career ended a year earlier when he left Celtic Football Club. A precocious talent even as a schoolboy, he joined Celtic in 1968 and played in 1970 European Cup Final which his club lost to Feyenoord. Blessed with enviable skills he could play in virtually any position on the field but showed particularly clear signs that he would become a ball-playing central defender for Celtic and Scotland for many years to come. In fact, he only played 144 club games and was capped twice by his country. In 1976, Connelly walked away from Celtic, from the intense scrutiny to which all Celtic and Rangers players are exposed and, ultimately, from the game upon which he had all too briefly bestowed virtuosity.

Reflecting on Connelly’s conflicted personality, former teammate David Cattenach recalls, ‘Give him a ball and he was magnificent – the best sweeper I ever saw, a man oozing confidence – but, without the ball, it was another story – he could be so introverted, the guy who would sit with his back to the crowd’ (quoted in Connelly and Cooney 2008, p. 53). Connelly’s former captain, Billy McNeill, adds, ‘He wasn’t nasty or troublesome generally but he just couldn’t handle the life of being a professional footballer or the west of Scotland attitude, I suppose’ (quoted in Connelly and Cooney 2008, p. 198). Compare that with Baxter’s reflections on how he had lived his life,

I look on myself as one of the luckiest guys in the world because I came out of the pits and was able to meet so many people and to live, at times, like a millionaire. I may never have been a millionaire but I always wanted to live like one and I’ve done that (quoted in Gallacher 2002, p. 13).

Yet, Baxter too was conflicted, or so media representations and the opinions of his former teammates suggest. As Harold Davis claims,

He was a Jekyll and Hyde character and Mr Hyde arrived when he had had too much to drink and when he had an audience of his cronies egging him on (quoted in Gallacher 2002, p. 33).

Much has been made of Baxter’s west Fife background in this respect. According to former teammate and sometime manager of Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, Baxter’s bad habits had been formed early in life.

It was just a part and parcel of working-class life that when men finished their work – and this was certainly true in the Fife coalfields, I know what Fifers can be like – they went to the social club for a drink … that was the only relaxation they knew and Jim was born into that way of life (quoted in Gallacher 2002, p. 90).

According to his biographer, Jim Baxter ‘remained a Fifer in accent and attitude the whole of his life (Gallacher 2002, p. 136). Nevertheless, for those including the author who grew up in the area in the 1950s and 1960s, George Connelly was arguably the truer West Fifer which is significant in light of a widespread Scottish stereotype of such people as captured in the common saying, “It taks a lang spoon tae sup wi” a Fifer’ (‘It takes a long spoon to drink with a Fifer’), meaning that people from Fife are hard to know.

Like Baxter, Connelly was a drinker but not of the gregarious type. In that respect, he was more like a stereotypical West Fife working-class man than Baxter was. West Fife, in the era when both Connelly and the present author were growing up, was a place which was strong on notional working-class solidarity but far less at ease with sociability, especially amongst its male population. Miners stood apart from each other in pubs, lost in their own thoughts. Conversation was limited and silences were long. When asked how he was keeping, the local miner’s stock answer was, ‘You see it’. Men were uncomfortable with expressing their emotions, football and its spaces providing some of the few available loci for emotional outbursts. While Baxter was inclined towards the latter, Connelly tried to avoid them, eventually by separating himself from the club and the sport that he had graced. Journalist Alan Herron records that the problems had emerged well before he walked out on Celtic,

In his last couple of years at Celtic, when he went missing, people inevitably went looking for him in the Kincardine area. When they asked about his specific whereabouts, they would be pointed to a bar’ (quoted in Connelly and Cooney 2008, p. 2009).

The fact that Baxter and Connelly played for Rangers and Celtic respectively might in other circumstances be used to shed light on a major division within Scotland which the rivalry between the two clubs is often taken to reflect and perhaps even exacerbate (Walker and Gallagher 1990, Devine 2000). However, the religious divide can sometimes be transcended by the deeds of sportsmen such as Baxter and Connelly and, indeed, John Thomson, who transcended it in his own life, because while representing Scotland, particularly against England, they, together with their fans, could negotiate a way out of that liminal space between Scottishness and Britishness, at least temporarily. The religious divide was also transcended throughout much of the twentieth century by the Labour Party which attracted support not only from the descendants of Irish catholic immigrants but also from protestants such as Alex Ferguson, an apprentice in the Clyde shipyards long before he went on to become the most successful Scottish-born manager in the English football. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, it was the dominance of the Labour Party itself that was under threat

In November 1967 Winifred Ewing won Hamilton, the safest Labour-held parliamentary seat in Scotland with 46% of the vote. As Keating and Bleiman (1979, p. 155). commented, ‘Scottish politics were never the same after Hamilton, and the shock to Labour’s confidence cannot be overestimated’. Even though the subsequent rise of the SNP was gradual and, at times fitful, it is arguable that Labour’s confidence has never retired not least voices from the left, such as that of Tom Nairn (1977) were contemplating the break-up of Britain. The liminal space between Scottish and Britishness was becoming a chasm.

This new political landscape has obliged Scottish athletes to take more account of the national question (Whigham and May 2017). This is particularly true for Scottish Olympians, representatives of Team GB, of whom Andy Murray is one of the most notable. Yet, long before he would be awarded that accolade, Murray was simply an ordinary schoolboy who experienced an extraordinary moment in modern Scottish history and went on to play a part in the debate that may yet determine Scotland’s future.

The modern Scottish sports celebrity

In many respects tennis player Andy Murray is a typical sports celebrity, successful, rich and regularly the focus of media attention. In other respects, it will be argued, he is a very Scottish sport celebrity in an era when being Scottish has become a matter of political, and not simply cultural, importance. If people from Fife are difficult to get to know, a similar description could easily have been applied to Andy Murray at different times in his career, perhaps for very understandable reasons.

On 13 March 1996, the year before the referendum which was to lead to the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in May 1999, gunman Thomas Hamilton killed sixteen children and a teacher in the school gym at Dunblane Primary School (North 2000). It was the deadliest mass shooting in British history. Amongst the pupils who survived physically unharmed on that fateful day were Andy Murray, who would become men’s tennis world number one in 2016 and his brother Jamie who would be a member of the number one doubles pairing in the same year.

In 2013, recalling the event, Murray’s mother, Judy, said, ‘Andy’s class were on their way to the gym, his class were the next ones in the gym. His class was stopped when somebody went up, when they heard the noise and discovered what had happened’. Murray himself broke down in tears during a BBC television interview as he remembered what had happened seventeen years earlier. ‘At the time’, he said, ‘You have no idea how tough something like this is, as you start to get older you realise’. Brother Jamie commented, ‘It’s nice that after all the negative publicity the town got after what happened so many years ago, that it’d been able to be shown in a positive light now. I guess that’s a testament to the success that Andy’s had’ (Evening Standard 2013).

There is certainly no denying Andy Murray’s success. Born on 15 May 1987, by the time he had succeeded in becoming the men’s world number one, Murray has won three grand slam titles (US Open in 2012 and Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016). He had also won gold medals in the Olympic Games men’s singles competition in 2012, when he also won the mixed doubles silver medal with Laura Robson, and again in 2016. In 2015, he inspired Great Britain to victory in the Davis Cup. In total, he has played in nine grand slam finals and would almost certainly have won more titles had he not been competing in the same era as three of the greatest ever players – Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Impressive as Murray’s achievements have been, they are magnified by how they contrast with the dearth of success for British men’s tennis since the heyday of Fred Perry. His 2012 US Open triumph was the first grand slam victory for a British player since Perry in 1936. In 2013, he became British first Wimbledon men’s singles winner, again since Perry in 1936, and the first Scot to win any Wimbledon title since Harold Mahoney in 1896. The 2015 Davis Cup win was Britain’s first for seventy nine years. Murray has also won the BBC’s Young Sports Personality of the Year award in 2004 and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Andy Murray is a genuine sport star but is he a typically Scottish sports celebrity? The fact that his success has been achieved without the customary demons getting in the way means that he is perhaps not a candidate for folk hero status. The twist of fate that allowed him to survive the Dunblane shootings is an interesting back story.

More significant, however, in the eyes of many Scots has been his attitude towards England. Murray had grown up in an era in which advocating Scottish independence had entered mainstream political debate far more than in the age Gallacher and later of Baxter and Connelly, let alone that of the Morrises.

In anticipation of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals and in response to teasing that Scotland had failed to qualify, Murray joked that he would ‘support whoever England were playing against’ (Independent 2012). He later expressed his regrets about this comment, admitting that it had cost him the support of some English fans (Independent 2012). The abuse which he received was to be repeated after he tweeted ‘Let’s do this!’ on the morning of the 2014 Referendum on Scottish independence. Murray subsequently admitted that it had not been in character to have done something like that but he added that he had no regrets about declaring his support for independence (Guardian 2014). Between the year of his birth and the year before his second Wimbledon triumph, he had seen the Scottish National Party’s number of seats in the UK parliament increase from three to fifty six and 50% of all votes cast. To that extent, as a supporter of independence, Murray can be regarded as a young Scot of his times.

None of this is to suggest that Murray can be compared with overtly nationalist sports stars from other small nations such as Dražen Petrović who almost immediately after the break-up of Yugoslavia became ‘a Croatian national sports icon’ (Hrstić and Mustapić 2015, p. 153). Nevertheless, as a consequence of his views and his demeanour, Murray has been identified by many in England as someone who is quintessentially Scottish – both anti-English and dour – but who also exists in that liminal space between Scottishness and Britishness and is widely respected as such.

The tendency of many English people to conflate Englishness and Britishness may help to explain why Murray’s Britishness is often ignored (Bowes and Bairner 2018). Yet, not only has he represented Team GB in the Olympics, an arena from which many sport celebrities have emerged (Jackson and Andrews 2012) but, in 2016 in Rio, he led the British team into the stadium at the Opening Ceremony, carrying the Union Flag. Moreover, in addition to inspiring the British team in to victory in 2015 the Davis Cup, a competition in which he made his debut in 2005 at the age of 17, the youngest ever Briton to do so, he has played 39 Davis Cup games (30 singles and 9 doubles) for ‘his country’. Murray also accepted the Order of the British Empire in 2013 and a knighthood awarded in the 2017 New Year’s Honours List. So how can a supporter of Scottish independence also accept that he is British? The answer lies in specific application of the concept of the Caledonian antisyzygy (Smith, 1919) which has exercised the minds of Scots for many generations, in this case the yoking together of Britishness and Scottishness which in recent years has brought many Scots, including Murray, to that place ‘whaur extremes meet’ (Vaczi et al. 2019).

In Scotland, according to McCrone (2019, p. 149), ‘pursuing greater autonomy has become the only show in town which matters, but only if it is a means to policy ends, and not an end in itself’. As Brown et al. (1999, p. 162–3) had argued, ‘Scots are not nationalist for expressive reasons: identity matters less to politics than effective government, But, equally, they are not anti-nationalist either’. Today, it is the quest for a fair and socially just society that has led many former Labour Party supporters to vote for the SNP and for independence. In this respect too, Murray is in tune with the social attitudes of a growing number of young Scots.

Indeed, according to McKenna (2019, p. 46), ‘Scotland’s sense of pride in Andy Murray goes far beyond all that he achieved on the world’s tennis courts’. His announcement in January 2019 that he might retire at the end of that season due to long-standing pain in his right hip, prompted widespread attention that ‘conveyed something much more profound than mere pride in sporting prowess’ (McKenna 2019, p. 46). Here was the boy next door whose technical ability had been accompanied ‘by a large measure of sweat and toil’ (McKenna 2019, p. 46). According to an overall appraisal offered by controversial Australian player, Nick Kyrgios (2019, p. 16),

His tennis gets enough recognition. He was an unbelievable player. He

was one of the toughest people I ever played against. But I don’t think

he gets enough credit for how he was off the court, just as a normal

person. He was so humble, he was so down to earth, he just loved

to have some fun, he loved to have a good time.

The tone is perhaps more in keeping with an obituary and yet Andy Murray had not died. Indeed, at the time of writing his comeback continues, albeit tentatively and intermittently, following successful hip surgery. Murray is now pain-free for the first time in years. Nevertheless, what turned out to be the premature announcement of his retirement provided an ideal opportunity to assess the man, not least in terms of his positions as both a Scot and a Briton.

As Taylor (2019, p. 4) wryly commented, ‘Small, wet, overweight countries should not – and usually do not – produce tennis superstars’. The historically favoured sports had long been golf and football. However, no Scot has won a major golf title since Sandy Lyle, who was actually born in Shrewsbury on the English-Welsh border, won the US Masters in 1988 and the last Scottish victory in the Open Championship was achieved in 1931 by Tommy Armour who went on to become a US citizen in 1942. Meanwhile, Scottish football fans ‘bear the emotional scars of a thousand last-minute heartaches’ (McKenna 2019, p. 46). With so many past failures upon which to reflect, Murray’s achievements were all the more remarkable and nationally important. According to Taylor (2019, p. 4), ‘As only those from other small countries can appreciate – the Swiss and the Jamaicans perhaps – possessing a global sports hero somehow makes your whole nation stand a little taller’. In addition, as McKenna (2019, p. 46) explains, ‘I feel that England has grown to love him too, following a period when it didn’t know quite how to react to him’.

While England’s best tennis players in the modern era, such as Tim Henman, have been marked by their blandness, Murray has never shied away from expressing his opinions not only about Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom.

He spoke out about match-fixing, doping and the hypocrisy of taking

sponsorship from betting companies. He is a forthright feminist, so convinced

in it that it is almost as if he is surprised to find there are

people out there who could still believe in anything else. Which makes

the knuckleheads who disagree with him about, say, equal pay, or the ability of

a woman to work as a man’s coach, look stupid (Bull 2019, p. 3).

Little wonder then that Billie Jean King said of Murray, ‘Your voice for equality will inspire future generations’ (Guardian Sport 2019, p. 5). Further injury problems together with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has had on sport made it difficult for Murray to resurrect his playing career. Defeat by Denis Shapovalov in the third round of the 2021 Wimbledon Championship may well have hastened the day when retirement becomes a reality.

Conclusion

Lamentably, but in no way peculiar to Scotland, there are far more male than female candidates for the role of Scottish sporting celebrity. The nation has produced high-achieving female athletes. In the recent past, for example, the Olympic record of rower Katherine Grainger (silver medals in 2000, 2004 and 2008, with a gold finally secured in 2012 followed by another silver in 2016) attracted growing attention in her native country and beyond but rowing is not a popular sport in Scotland and Grainger’s appointment in 2015 as Chair of UK Sport and regular appearances as an expert contributor to the BBC’s coverage of rowing are unlikely to transform her into a celebrity in the eyes of the public

As mentioned at the outset, with reference to the relevance of cultural relativism to sporting celebrity, much depended not only on gender but also on the games that people play, where they play them and when. Two of the sports discussed at any great length in this essay are golf and football, despite the availability of other credible potential celebrities from athletics, motor racing and, cycling. Not only are they amongst the most popular sports in Scotland but golf has a legitimate claim, for a variety of reasons, to be considered the country’s national sport (Bairner, 2009). Andy Murray’s status is made all the more remarkable, therefore, by the fact that Scotland has little historic connection with his sport and any suggestion that the country could produce the world’s number one male player would have been met with gales of laughter only a few years ago.

While some candidates for the title Scottish sporting celebrity, including Old Tom Morris, qualify by virtue of their sporting excellence alone, others (Young Tom Morris, Hughie Gallacher, Jim Baxter and George Connelly) acquire the status of celebrity in large part as a consequence of personal failings and/or personal tragedy combined with sporting excellence, their private lives often lived out in public making them fallen heroes, but heroes nevertheless (Whannel 2002, Miller 2013). Andy Murray’s story is arguably unique – successful on the tennis court but, at times, controversial, albeit in a particularly Scottish way, off it, and with tragedy in his past.

Lurking in the background to much of the foregoing analysis is England, Scotland’s significant other. As Roy (2013, p. 514) notes, ‘the Britishing of the Scots did not wholly quash a national yearning for something better, or at any rate, different’. This has been reflected in the importance, at least for Scots, of the rivalry between Scotland and England, as evidenced by Jim Baxter’s celebration of the Scottish football team’s triumph in 1967 over the world champions and in Andy Murray’s support for independence and for ‘anyone but England’. While this might be interpreted by outsiders as typical of the cringe mentality so common in small nations confronted by larger and more successful neighbours, in the case of Scotland, however, it might also reflect the fact that, regardless of the size of their nation, Scots continue to have ‘a guid conceit ‘o themselves’.

There have been many significant figures in the history of Scottish sport, some of whom have been granted the status of celebrities albeit for different reasons. Perhaps this is really a story of individuals rather than ideal types. The warning is there in Catriona Macdonald’s comments on Scottish identity – ‘it posited characteristics peculiar to Scots but, for most Scots, their sense of belonging was an intensely personal “thing” which rarely lent itself to explanation, far less generalisation’ (Macdonald 2009, p. 5). It is a point well-made and perhaps celebrities, from whichever society, they emerge are the most individualistic of us all. Nevertheless, the aim of this paper has been to identify at least three categories of Scottish sports celebrities and to argue that, in exemplifying types of celebrity, the athletes examined in the paper primarily reflect the fact that they are, in large part, the products of their nation’s social, cultural and political history. For that reason, the main conclusion of the paper is to argue that, although typologies of sports celebrity can be useful, we should not lose sight of the significance of cultural specificities.

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Alan Bairner

Alan Bairner is Professor of Sport and Social Theory at Loughborough University. His main research interest is in the relationship between sport and politics with a particular emphasis on sport and national identities.