Bad-boy Bellamy does good without the fanfare

TIPPING POINT:The Liverpool firebrand seems to confirm the footballer-as-yob stereotype. But who knew about his work for the poor of Sierra Leone, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

WELL, HOW warlike do you feel after that rugby weekend? Are you all hairy, and sweaty, and manly? Even you, girls? Is the mythical mist of yore settling upon your Celtic forehead? Or are you just hungover? After all, that’s pretty rugger too. But you can’t put it in an ad. No, ads have to be more aspirational than getting ratted and ending up in a bedsit in Ranelagh. Ads have to be about the way you’d like to be, the way you choose to see yourself in the mirror, the way you look when you dream.

Judged by the latest ad plugging the Six Nations, rugby has issues way beyond “crouch-touch-engage”. You know the one I’m talking about, the glossy RTÉ clip where a three-ball-voiceover informs us six nations will engage in mortal battle just as their warrior ancestors did back in the mists of time, when instead of scratching the fleas off each other, and cleaving heads with rusty hatchets, they rolled egg-shaped balls between groups of men, thrusting warlike heads between noble thighs, all the time grunting “two-three-four!”

We’re talking seriously homo-erotic here. The film 300 could have been made by Ken Loach in comparison. Any more shiny, ripply and throbbing and Gerard Butler would just slink his Spartan six pack back to Paisley and get stuck into a tray of Special Brew and a fish supper. Ancient Greek fetishism is brutally grainy and realistic in comparison to what it seems rugby “morketing” is prepared to do with Tommy Bowe Co.

It’s crap, of course, but instructive crap. You’d have to hang, draw, and quarter your average junior club prop to admit anything of the sort but behind it all, late at night, when no one’s looking, rugby players probably do see something faintly warlike about what they do; holding the line, representing the people, flying the flag, you know, all that “Muuunnssster” stuff.

It’s not just rugby. The GAA like to look back in time too and probably see echoes of themselves in Cuchulain with his hurley and his purity, all terribly Gaelic. But true Gael stuff. Instead of those Anglo rugby types beating their breasts in oily open combat, Gaels speak the cúpla focal, play handball, set dance and occasionally pick off a Brit from behind a ditch, while all the while leading blameless lives of bucolic peace and never, ever running on to the pitch to deliver a few sly digs to a fellow warrior.

Every sport has its self-image. Take golf, a game once described as a game for middle-aged white men dressed as black pimps. Of course golf clubs types don’t mind such digs, convinced as they are that all such observations are born out of jealousy.

If Rommel had constructed his Normandy defences out of the same material which convinces golfers of their own righteousness, then Private Ryan would still be on the beach.

Golf might be elitist, sexist and irretrievably naff, but it is always honourable. Better a man be convicted of murder and rape than accused of moving his ball. And yes, there is something admirable about a player calling a foul on himself. But my God does golf have to be so pious about it, so self-congratulatory. It’s like Pádraig Harrington isn’t going to retire, he will simply be assumed into the 19th green.

Such images are by definition different, and come from different motivations, but one thing they all have in common is the conviction that even in their most discreditable moments, they’re able to ethically pee down on soccer from a great height.

It doesn’t matter how many eyes are gouged or handbags flung. Tiger could get his freak on with Wozniacki on the 18th green at St Andrews – with Rory taking pictures – and still golfers would look down their upturned noses at footballers.

Far from being the beautiful game, football epitomises what is wrong with modern sport, the definition of what happens when talented but thick-headed young warriors get their hands on too much money. In RTÉ’s mystic rugger department, footballers would probably be the grasping trolls under the bridge as ROG and BOD gallop haughtily over them on their sponsored chariots.

But that’s the thing about image. By definition it isn’t real, just as weighing up the merits of a person on their popular, tabloid, two-dimensional cartoon representation isn’t real.

I don’t know about you, but Craig Bellamy never seemed the kind of guy you’d have round to your auntie’s for Sunday lunch. Bellamy, after all, once famously went for team-mate John Arne Riise with a golf club. He has also had several run-ins with the police, without, it has to be said, ever being convicted. In the court of public opinion though, he has long since been found guilty of feral nastiness.

How then to digest the Bellamy that showed up during the week. Banished to the wilderness of ITV4, Bellamy’s involvement with a charity in Sierra Leone probably won’t make much of a dent in his unfortunate image, which is a pity.

Five years ago, the Liverpool star visited a friend in the north of Sierra Leone and was appalled at the levels of poverty. Instead of getting on a plane and gratefully forgetting about it, Bellamy set up a foundation to help local kids. It’s hung on a football academy, but the focus is on education.

The thing is Bellamy made no fuss about it. Instead he put over a million quid of his own money into it until coming to the conclusion that was unsustainable. Other sources of income are needed, hence the documentary to highlight the project.

There is a danger in going overboard about retrospectively sanctifying former bad-boys. Joey Barton, for all he often articulates what others are thinking, will always be an attention-seeker with only the vaguest sense of self-awareness. And Bellamy hasn’t suddenly turned into some Buddhist paragon of calm. Doubt that and cast your mind back a couple of weeks to when he reportedly goaded Bolton’s Nigel Reo-Coker unmercifully.

But it was a bolt from left-field to see the supposedly quintessential Premiership yob quietly explaining how helping some poor unfortunates thousands of miles away matters, and that they actually have value as human beings. It would be difficult to imagine something more at odds with that infamous Gazza contribution to foreign relations from 20 years ago – “F**k off Norway!”

Football’s self-image isn’t always great, no doubt helped by the reality that the only image many of its greatest stars are concerned about is the one they feature in on the front pages of the red tops. Craig Bellamy can look in the mirror and justifiably feel pretty good about himself. Who’d have thought?