Can’t we all just get along?

YOU know things are getting pretty bad when you start quoting Rodney King.

Remember him? He was the motorist dragged from his car by Los Angeles police officers back in 1991 and beaten to a pulp, an incident which raised many questions — was he beaten because he was black? Was he really fleeing the police? And why is the mush of rind and pith left after you eat an orange the unit of measurement for how bad a hammering a person gets?

Anyhow, when the policemen were acquitted in a subsequent trial, the verdict sparked riots in Los Angeles, and Rodney made his famous plea for peace, asking: “Can’t we all just get along?”

We’re invoking Rodney’s spirit this week because all of a sudden, no matter where you look, everyone seems so bloody... cranky.

The Irish soccer team’s vicar on earth, Robbie Keane, outlined the dissatisfaction of his fellow players recently on The Late Late Show — a dissatisfaction aimed, oddly enough, not inwardly at those who struggled to equalise in injury time against Cyprus in Croke Park, but, well, everyone else.

Perhaps for his next visit Robbie could borrow Heather Mills McCartney’s enormous scrapbook, as seen in a similar context earlier this week, and point to all the nasty things people have been saying about him and his colleagues.

By contrast, the eerie pronouncements of Irish rugby players, all back with their provinces, have a “what-me-worry?” quality to them. Everyone’s fine, no problems here, squire; what huge public disappointment and criticism are you referring to?

This despite the World Cup-shaped elephant sitting — sorry, seething — in the corner of the living room.

As yet we haven’t had an outburst along the lines made by Laurence Dallaglio or Mike Catt about Brian Ashton. Can it be far away? November’s a quiet time for the nation’s GAA players. Apart from the threatened strike, of course.

This dispute centres on the €5 million in grant money the Government has made available to intercounty players, with the GPA and the GAA at loggerheads about how it should be distributed.

(A word to the wise: long years of observing the nation’s legislators at close quarters gave this column a rare respect for their ability to... nudge an issue into the next man’s acre. Everyone thinks academic politics/IRFU politics/workplace politics/Cork GAA politics/early Byzantine church politics is tricky, and they all are. So how much trickier do you think politics politics is, not to mention its finest practitioners?).

ANYHOW. Back to the emotion at hand.

A general interest in sporting bad humour came to a head recently when this column came across an interview with Joe Calzaghe, the Welsh boxer. He was talking about preparing for fights, and how he has to lose weight and so on — for a couple of days before a fight, he may have to live on 500 calories a day, which means he tends to wake up angry in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because of his gnawing hunger.

There’s an obvious distinction to be made here. An element of controlled temper can be one of the best assets in most sports. The finest boxer of all time put away some of his 1960s opponents because of a channelled rage at their refusal to use his new name instead of his old handle, Cassius Clay.

By the same token, a nagging sense of unfairness contributed to the decline of one of Muhammad Ali’s opponents in the following decade. By his own admission, George Foreman spent years brooding on the outcome of the Rumble in the Jungle, fixated on the perceived injustice of his defeat and replaying the events in his mind. Only when Foreman acknowledged to himself that the better man had won, and that defeat in those circumstances was no disgrace, did the truth set him free, just like everyone says.

You could maybe read the three big Irish sports as each approaching a different stage in the above process. The soccer team are angry and haven’t come to terms with that anger; the GAA players are angry but realise they may need to get angrier still; and the rugby team aren’t vocally angry yet, though maybe they need to vent that anger before they can move on.

Or maybe they could do what Muhammad Ali did, and draw on that anger, justified or not, and use it constructively. That would help us all get along just fine.

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