John Terry, former Dad of the Year. Kerry Katona, former Mum of the Year. I bet Ronnie Wood is preparing his acceptance speech for Grandad of the Year as we speak. This is one of the jokes doing the rounds about England’s esteemed captain in the wake of the lifting of the injunction preventing one of Britain’s most reputable newspapers from printing a story about his seedy nocturnal activities. It’s always fun to mix humour and moral outrage, particularly if one is a tabloid journalist, and no better opportunity presents itself than a wayward sporting hero, or in this case John Terry. This isn’t the first time that accusations of this sort have hit the red-top headlines about this particular England ‘star’.
Tiger Woods, he did it too. Quite a bit, by most accounts. Even more by some. And they’re not alone in the roster of sportsmen caught exploiting their celebrity and wealth for sexual advantage. If I had fame and wealth I think that I might at least think about doing something similar. But they are married, they should behave better, perhaps. We expect a lot of celebrity sportsmen because they earn so much money, and because all celebrities occupy a space in the public eye where minor failings are magnified. And because frequently they exploit their position, by which I do not mean to refer to the abovementioned nocturnal activities. I mean that they win ‘Dad of the Year’ awards, or they develop an image as a family man in order to market their brand and earn endorsement deals and so on. This isn’t an issue of sport alone. Note the public outcry over the indiscretions of a certain crevice-faced, foul-mouthed celebrity chef, though one is inclined to suspect that reservations in his restaurants and viewing figures for his programmes and sales of his books will not be significantly impacted because people who eat food, being marginally more rational than people who are sports fans, know that it would take an absurd commitment to an extra-marital affair for that affair to impact on the quality of food or cooking instruction that one can receive. And similarly managers, like Sven or Avram Grant who ‘play away’ do not receive the level of condemnation that sportsmen themselves receive. They do not have the pressure of being ‘role models’.
Ashley Cole was caught doing 104mph in a 50mph zone. When questioned by police as to why he was speeding, he said: "l've just heard JT is parked outside my house!"
But this is a bit different from your standard celebrity extra-marital affair. Far from being some alcohol fuelled incomprehensible error (Ashley Cole) or a series of mistakes with a flotilla of starstruck women (Tiger Woods) this is a sustained affair with a team mate’s significant other, and that might raise questions about trust. As the joke above implies, how can you be happy to have a captain who might sleep with your girlfriend? So for all of the moral relativism and the ex-post justifications about how this needn’t impact on his football, it is a worse situation for a role model to find himself in than is typical, and it might not unreasonably impact on his captaincy.
England manager Fabio Capello phoned Wayne Bridge and said: "John’s lost the captain's armband. Can you do me a favour and have a good look under your bed for it?"
John Terry is a good leader. But he’s a much more divisive figure than the previous incumbent. David Beckham was less of a leader, but he played outside England and seemed like a pretty nice sort of chap, which made him a unifying figure. Even before his affairs, John Terry played for and captained a team that a lot of people really do not like, and he’s the second most angry man on the pitch in the league - behind beetroot-face Jamie Carragher. So perhaps once you add in the fact that if he gets subbed off before the 60 minute mark you should probably cling on to your girlfriend for dear life it would be better if John Terry vacated the captaincy a few months before the World Cup, having led us through qualification, after a drawn out selection process in the first place.
Ok. Maybe not. Perhaps what the players should do is forgive a man his humanity and behave like professionals. We can always hope.
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