Background, for anyone who hasn’t been following this story. Last June, Plymouth goalkeeper Luke McCormick went to the wedding of his friend and former teammate David Norris. Driving home—drunk—early the next morning, he fell asleep at the wheel and caused a car accident in which an eight-year-old boy and a 10-year-old boy were killed. He was arrested, his contract was terminated by Plymouth, and he was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison.
This weekend, David Norris, the friend at whose wedding this began, scored a goal for Ipswich and celebrated by holding his wrists together in what was widely interpreted as a “handcuffs” gesture meant to signify his support for McCormick. The British public and media exploded, not necessarily in that order, and Norris is currently facing a storm of wrath which he’s exacerbated by giving contradictory explanations for the meaning of the gesture.
Let’s assume that the popular interpretation is correct, and that, like Tim Cahill before him, Norris was using the handcuff sign to express solidarity with a criminal. I still don’t think he did anything wrong. In fact, I think the assumptions behind the public outrage are a lot uglier than the handcuffs gesture itself.
The first assumption is that Luke McCormick’s guilt in the deaths of the two young boys makes it morally illegitimate for David Norris to continue to care about him. The second, underlying assumption is that Luke McCormick’s crime has rendered him absolutely unforgivable. The third assumption is that the public nature of goal celebrations obligates footballers to adapt them to public standards of propriety. I think all these assumptions are wrong.
David Norris has the right to care about his friend, even though his friend did something terrible. That’s one of the things we want from friendship, isn’t it? That’s one of the reasons friendship exists? So that even if we find ourselves, rightly or wrongly, punished by and outcast from society, we won’t be utterly alone?
There might be exceptions to that rule, cases in which the wrong is so terrible that it dissolves any bond of human commitment or affection. It would difficult, and possibly immoral, to persist in a friendship with a serial killer, and the media portrayal of Luke McCormick, drawing from all sorts of established narratives about the selfishness and presumptuousness of footballers, essentially depicts him as that sort of monstrous pariah.
But what Luke McCormick did was drive drunk. It was a tragically stupid, morally indefensible thing to do, and in my opinion he deserves every bit of his punishment. But it isn’t the equivalent of deliberate murder, and what it reveals about Luke McCormick is not that he’s irredeemably evil. I have friends who have driven drunk, you have friends who have driven drunk, many of the ruddy moralists currently attacking David Norris have driven drunk. Any one of them could have found themselves responsible for a life-destroying accident like the one Luke McCormick caused. Horrible as that is to contemplate, I don’t believe that they would therefore deserve to be cut off from all human sympathy. Luke McCormick was 24 when he caused the accident and will be 32 when he’s released from prison. I’m not trying to turn him into Raskolnikov, but there’s still a chance that he could do something good with his life.
The third assumption, and the hardest in some ways to refute, is that Norris’s goal celebration violated a standard of public propriety in a way that was unacceptable for the occasion. What bothers me about this idea is that it seems to come into being only at moments when the media sees a chance to froth up its audience. Most questionable goal celebrations get negligible press coverage because they’re old news, but a gesture that plays into the emotional pornography at the heart of tabloid culture—dead children, callous celebrities, the Decline of All We Hold Dear—suddenly qualifies as a shocking breach of public trust. A great deal has been made of the feelings of the relatives of the boys upon seeing Norris’s handcuffs sign. But how aware would they have been, how aware would anyone have been, of a seconds-long incident during an Ipswich-Blackpool game if it hadn’t been blasted into their living room by the roaring guardians of culture?
Norris sent a message to his friend that he supports him despite his crime. He’s been fined by his club, attacked in the press, threatened with suspension by the FA, and subjected to public fury. Enough.
Read More: Football as Philosophy
by Brian Phillips · November 11, 2008
Great article. Shame about the typos in the title.
Took a David to catch it. Thanks for letting me know.
Hey there, love reading your blog as it’s often very insightful but I think you could be wrong on this one.
I wouldn’t say “I’m offended” by Norris’s gesture, I just think it’s bad taste. End of story (unless you have newspapers to sell).
I’m more worried about your dismissive attitude towards drink driving.
There’s 460 deaths per year on the UK roads due to drink driving and 14,480 casualties (2007 figures). Surely the press condemning drink driving and it’s promotion is a good thing?
Joe, I don’t mean to be dismissive of drunk driving at all. It’s a gravely irresponsible and dangerous thing to do. Luke McCormick’s behavior was appalling and, as I said in the post, I think he deserves his prison sentence.
But the press is treating what he did as identical to calculated murder, and tacitly insisting that he deserves to forfeit all claim to human sympathy.
I don’t agree with that. If you looked into a drunk driver’s mind at the moment they got behind the wheel, I don’t think you’d see malice or the desire to hurt anyone. I think you’d see an ugly combination of confusion, selfishness, and terrible judgment.
Millions of people, including some who are currently bloviating about David Norris, have given in to that combination when drunk. And what separates them from a Scott McCormick-like tragedy is essentially just chance.
So I think it’s hypocritical for the media to act as if Scott McCormick is some kind of unique specimen of inhumanity. And I’m not willing to say that he no longer deserves friendship or the hope of personal redemption.
I’m all for using the tragedy he caused as an occasion to publicize the danger of drunk driving. But I don’t think that’s the media’s motivation here. They’re not trying to save lives; they’re trying to profit from a manufactured moral frenzy that people are buying into because it gives them a cathartic feeling of superiority. And I seriously doubt that anyone who indulges that feeling will be less likely to drive drunk in the future.
Thanks for clafifying Brian. It’s interesting to see the press response compared to Cahill’s similar incident too.
It really is. Especially since, thanks to Deadspin, thousands of Americans who wouldn’t otherwise have known about this story now believe that Cahill is “McCormick’s younger brother.”
Thanks for this post. A perhaps related question, regarding moralistic media: I wonder about the coverage of sport stars compared to the coverage of other sorts of stars. Are reporters quicker to make good-and-evil judgments about athletes than they are to make such judgments about, say, actors and singers? Are there different standards? I think I would say yes. But then: does this vary country by country?
I still don’t think that the gesture was appropriate, but this was a typically interesting column. Thanks.
I think you were spot on with everything you said in this article. I have heard lots of people say that “McCormick deserves to rot in prison, go to hell etc” and I really don’t agree, it is like you said, the public are comparing him to that of a serial killer. People forget Lee Hughe’s was also a footballer, he was drunk behind the wheel, drove on the wrong side of the road, caused the death of a man and then proceeded to run away from the scene of the crime. He served 3 years in prison and came out last year, he now plays for Oldham. People seem to have forgotten about this incident, and it did not cause half as much uproar as the McCormick case did. I personally think this is a big tradegy, but McCormick is serving his sentence, and we cannot condemn him forever. I just think people should let it go and let these people do what they have to do!
personally i think he is just showing about his friend is in jail now or something but i dont think its anything like mocking the dead boys saying McCormick wasnt at fault they should b taking this offensively its just a goal celebration to a friend
shouldnt**