Terry shouldn’t appeal, but that doesn’t mean he won’t
Their reporter asked the Chelsea captain: “What’s your one biggest strength?”
Without missing a beat, Terry replied: “My character”.
It’s part of Terry’s charm that he has no idea how ridiculous a statement like that sounds to other people. The more you see of him the clearer it is that he is not overly preoccupied with what goes on in other people’s heads.
Blithe indifference to the reality of other people has certain liberating effects. Take the emotion of shame. If guilt is the unpleasant feeling that comes with the knowledge of having done something wrong, shame is what happens when you know you have done wrong in the eyes of others.
It’s a feeling that may never have occurred to Terry. Throughout his career his instinctive response to shame has been to walk taller, stand prouder, puff out his chest more passionately.
It’s as though the same obliviousness to the feelings of others that has led him into many of his biggest mistakes is also shielding him from the normal psychological consequences.
On Friday, the FA’s independent tribunal published a report saying that Terry’s explanation for the apparent racial insult he directed at Anton Ferdinand was “improbable, implausible and contrived”. While the report was a major embarrassment for Terry, not to mention some of his colleagues at Chelsea, many in the game believed he had been lucky to escape with just a four-match ban.
Instead, there was Terry on Saturday, leading out his team at Stamford Bridge as though nothing had happened. Could he seriously be considering an appeal? Is anyone that shameless?
The world of sport doesn’t have many similar cases, but one turned up last Thursday giving an interview to the triathlon magazine Lava. Appropriately for a man who says he has nothing to hide, Lance Armstrong was wearing nothing more than a pair of Speedos, in which he had just completed the TriFrog triathlon.
Armstrong told Lava he wasn’t bothered by the massive scandal that has engulfed his reputation over the last couple of months. “It’s their drama, not mine... I don’t care. Honestly. And I mean that. I wake up and my mind and my conscience and my view on my life and my world, my future and my kids’ future is perfectly clear.”
Could Armstrong really believe what he is saying? Judging by what he says about his relationship with the past, he might well do. Explaining that his mother had raised him to always look towards the future, Armstrong said: “[Some people] sit around and talk about the past. You always get high-school friends who sit around and talk about “hey remember that time…” and I’m like “why are you asking me about that?” ... Others won’t move on. It’s sad.”
Armstrong does occasionally refer to the past but only the parts of it that support his self-image: his Twitter bio introduces him as a seven-time Tour de France champion, and fails to acknowledge that he has been stripped of the titles. He genuinely seems to believe he is blameless and maybe Terry does too. Immunity to shame gives them the strength to persist with a version of events few others believe.
The problem for people like Terry and Armstrong is that other people do actually exist, and what they think eventually counts for something. Defending Terry has hurt Chelsea’s reputation and made Ashley Cole and club secretary David Barnard look particularly bad.
The more you think about it, the more remarkable it seems that Chelsea went to such lengths to support their captain. Terry is not the player he was and his imminent obsolescence was made plain in May when his team-mates won the Champions League without him. If he tests his employers’ loyalty further by appealing against a sentence widely considered to be lenient, it would be both unwise, and entirely in character.
