Phantoms in Our Known Walks
Tom and Daryl have both written nice posts about Paul Gascoigne, who was arrested and detained as a mental-health risk yesterday after a series of bizarre incidents in English hotels. The collapse of this great player has been covered with admirable sadness and tact by nearly everyone who’s written about it, and I’ll only add one thing, a quote from Lionel Trilling for anyone who thinks that Gazza’s genius on the pitch was fundamentally related to his madness off it: “The expressions of many schizophrenic people have the intense appearance of creativity and an inescapable interest and significance. But they are not works of art, and although Van Gogh may have been a schizophrenic he was in addition an artist.”
Here’s a video of one of Gazza’s greatest moments, the free kick against Arsenal that gave Tottenham the lead in their FA Cup semi-final match in 1991. Spurs went on to win the cup, but Gazza was injured in the final in what now looks like the turning point of his career. This is Paul Gascoigne, to whom we all send our best wishes, and this is your historical goal of the week.
The 14th of April.
St. Hotspur Day.
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages,
What feats he did that day . . .
We really were happy that day, perhaps happier than we have been since, and weren’t that few . . .
One of the greatest speeches ever delivered…by the man who killed Hotspur.
Indeed, it’s amazing what literary perfection can bring one to overlook/forgive.
Alternatively (it will not surprise you that I thought about this at some length when the phrase was first coined), had Henry not killed Harry (or if the latter hadn’t died on the battlefield of rebellion to be precise), the two most likely outcomes would have been that the rebellion was successful or that it never occurred and Hotspur morphed into a old, fat Lord Percy with none of the doing it with style that attracted the Tottenham school boys to the name in the first place. You know, basically a middle-aged life of boring the other side to death (either way, whether King or not).
So we have the rebellion to thank for our glorious name. Tottenham Bedford, Essex or Talbot just wouldn’t have anywhere near the elan of the original.
That’s right, isn’t it? It’s as though when Henry killed Hotspur, he cleared the historical pathway that enabled Spurs to be born.
Ursus, you can call spirits from the vasty deep.
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