RORY MCILROY AND THE CURSE OF NIKE

Rory McIlroy is a famous professional golfer from Hollywood (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West). That's Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, not Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA, (34 degrees North, 118 degrees West). 

Therein lies one of Rory McIlroy's current burdens. He cannot decide if he's British or Irish, which he will have to do (or someone will have to decide for him), if he wants to play golf in the next Olympics.

Golf, like the many sports played across the world, is a particular cultural creation, full of specialist forms and mechanisms, norms and practices. One of the arcane arrangements in Rory McIlroy's sport is that other people – caddies – carry his equipment.

Rory McIlroy is a very wealthy young man, a comfortable context for the burdens he does actually carry.

Recently, he played a major tournament on a golf-course in Scotland, where women cannot be members or enter the clubhouse. Such Taliban-type practice, in a modern liberal democracy, is found irksome by some, though large numbers of people consider it perfectly acceptable. No state or other agency seeks to intervene to overturn the discrimination involved.

Nike is the Greek goddess of victory. As a woman would she get into that clubhouse? She is portrayed with wings, holding a crown of victory above the heads of the conquerors and the conquered. And Nike is a global sports goods corporation, a modern commercial phenomenon, which sells products and dreams in an age when sport is a hugely popular cultural form and money-making engine. Citizens can 'join' Nike, becoming acolytes of this form of the goddess and do what the company's swoosh brand declaims

LIFE IS A SPORT. MAKE IT COUNT

Unfortunately for Rory McIlroy, in seeking to make it count financially, he got into bed with the corporate goddess version of Nike and his playing form collapsed. He is playing at a poor level now, which is embarrassing, given the media hype generated during his pre-Nike success. He is a man cursed by his relationship with Nike. He recently spoke of walking around unconscious. He has the lurgy of corporatism racing in his veins and he can't swing, drive, putt or think.

Is he an innocent debased by the culture of greed with which Nike infects his sport? Or simply greedy himself?

These questions burden the people of Northern Ireland, who are desperate for heroes. Which is yet another burden for Rory McIlroy. How does he carry – or perhaps it is his caddy who is carrying? - this burden for a society struggling with a depressed economy and child poverty figures to make even a corporate accountant blush. Where being British or Irish is worked out across police lines, with petrol bombs, water cannon and rubber bullets flying up and down the fairways of the streets and into the rough of the crowds and the bunkers of peoples' gardens?

The survey found that 43% of children grow up in poverty in West Belfast.

(The Irish Times confirms the curse
http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/golf/money-the-root-cause-of-mcilroy-s-break-up-with-horizon-sports-management-1.1550890)

Who's Who Classical Mythology: book: Michael Grant and John Hazel; JM Dent: London; 1993

http://www.nike.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21506734

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