Smoking out 'bad' habits in sport
Saturday, August 13, 2016 at 13:10 Nice quote from the new Watford manager on the eve of the Premier League season.
Invited to comment on allegations he had smoked in the club's dressing room at half-time during a friendly against Queens Park Rangers, former Italian international Walter Mazzarri said it was a "pure invention"claim, then added:
"But because of the job I do and I think in life sometimes there are moments where small things make you feel better and one of them for me is smoking."
Naturally, having dismissed Watford as near certainties for relegation this season, I now want them to stay up if only because Mazzarri sounds like a decent, well-balanced chap.
I'm no fan of Liverpool but I shall secretly cheer on Jurgen Klopp as well.
Klopp had barely arrived on Merseyside last year when he was photographed having a beer and a cigarette on a night out with his family.
More recently he was pictured smoking at the club's training ground and it has also been reported that he and his assistant Peter Krawietz must be allocated smoking rooms when the team stays overnight in a hotel.
The pressure on managers and coaches to conform to the current no smoking orthodoxy must be enormous. Credit to Klopp and Mazzarri for staying unapologetically true to themselves.
Elsewhere it's time for Arsenal's Jack Wilshere to demonstrate that being an occasional social smoker is no hindrance to having a successful football career (or recovering from an endless series of non-smoking related injuries).
Thankfully he's not our only standard bearer. According to this February 2015 report - Footballers (and their managers) who smoke - Carlo Ancelotti and Gianluca Vialli both smoke while Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney are also known to "like the odd cigarette".
In a cut-throat business Ancelotti and Vialli ooze charm and bonhomie. By all accounts they are among the most likeable people in professional sport.
As player and manager Ancelotti is also one of the most successful. Whether he smokes is irrelevant. It doesn't define him, Mazzarri, Vialli or Klopp. It's the work that matters, and whether they are nice people.
The same should be true for anyone who smokes yet increasingly people are being judged not on normal criteria but on choices and habits that have nothing to do with anyone apart, perhaps, from a person's immediate family.
Vapers meanwhile have their own role model. Paul Pogba, now with Manchester United, was recently spotted using an e-cigarette while on holiday in Miami.
I've no idea if Pogba was a smoker but if it's true that, by and large, only smokers and ex-smokers vape, it's not done the world's most expensive footballer too much harm, football-wise.
Finally the Guardian this week highlighted the handful of football clubs that have had cigarette brands as their shirt sponsor.
None of them were British so what I found more interesting was a passing reference to the fact that in the 1985/86 season West Bromwich Albion wore a 'No Smoking' symbol on their shirts.
I checked what happened to West Brom that season and my suspicion was confirmed.
They got relegated.
Reader Comments (5)
The attacks on smokers designed to further denormalisation must stop. It wasn't too long ago that many athletes smoked. In fact many people of all walks of life smoked before the neo-puritans decided that they must force others to become morally pure and abandon smoking, alcoholic beverages, sugar, and meat. It's time to actively resist and reverse this totalitarian social control.
I seem to remember shocked reports from the Athens Olympics of whole clutches of Olympic athletes sitting around smoking in the Olympic village. It would seem (at least in 2004) that a substantial percentage of the athletes enjoyed winding down with a cigarette.
Michael Phelps apparently is an unapologetic smoker of weed, too. And he's just picked up his 23rd Olympic gold medal.
Sport authorities of all sorts tend to be viscerally anti-smoking, though a lot of sportsmen and athletes have smoked and continue to smoke. Fitness is not necessarily at odds with smoking, though it may be at odds for a lot of folks and this may also depend on the age and the dosage and frequency of the smoking. It is not black and white or good/evil as we are often told.
I used to smoke 1-2 packs of cigarettes until the age of 32. In spite of this I was in top aerobic condition and ran 6-10 km 5-6 days a week. I still remember the day I finished my first half marathon "fun run" in London in 1983. Everybody was drinking water and "energizing" liquids to celebrate, and suddenly when I lit a cigarette everybody reacted with shock and horror (and disgust). I was angrily rejected by a group of runners I wanted to train with. After I switched from cigarettes to smoking cigars/pipes without inhaling, my aerobic fitness improved even more, but still all runners I know and run with have always recommend me to quit my daily cigar/pipe, as something that is so obviously true that only an idiot like me fails to see. I just ignore them. Perhaps I could run a bit faster if I quit, but this would never compensate doing away with something I really cherish and enjoy.
I just came across this recent photo of the Olympic swimming champion, Michael Phelps, complete with cigar.
http://cdn.acidcow.com/pics/20160815/michael_phelps_14.jpg
Over here in the States, the tobacco control cultists are now waging a battle to have smokeless tobacco banned from Major League Baseball. As is their wont, they have been unsatisfied with the victories they've already gained (e.g. minor league ballplayers have been banned from chewing for 20+ years, major leaguers must not have an identifiably tobacco-can-shaped object in their pockets, free cans/pouches of chewing tobacco may not be distributed in MLB clubhouses, etc.).
Unsurprisingly, these efforts have met with fantastic success in my own People's Republic of California, with municipal authorities in San Francisco and Los Angeles passing ordinances prohibiting smokeless use in all public sporting venues, including by the players on the field. The next shoe to drop (and make no mistake, it will drop) is for some police officer to interrupt a game so he can write a player a citation.