Person of the year? It’s Andy who comes up Trumps

SO Donald Trump is Time magazine’s person of the year and Nigel Farage, also short-listed, is not. I suppose you have to say that is fair enough. One of them contrived to win a US presidential election without a single day’s experience in politics while the other spent 20 years in politics and failed in all five of his attempts even to be elected as an MP.

Face of the Leave campaign? Really? Farage was so clued in to the national zeitgeist he was the first politician to concede defeat when the Brexit polls closed on June 23 – even though his side had won.

No, the unstoppable Mr Trump, who brags about grabbing the crotches of women who are not his wife – ‘when you’re a star they let you do it’ – and still collects the keys to the White House has achieved something in a realm of remarkability well beyond the intermittent leader of Ukip.

Trump, says Time editor Nancy Gibbs, is a man who, in 2016, ‘violated norms’ and ‘defied expectations’. With an appeal which was ‘part hope, part snarl’, his campaign ‘dissolved party lines and dispatched the two reigning dynasties of US politics’, the Clintons and the Bushes.

I am sure she is right. The man’s a veritable wrecking ball in a lovingly comb-overed see-you-Jimmy wig. He frightens me and he makes babies cry.

Raking over the embers of a difficult year almost done, then, I find the international cover star of 2016 too conducive to nightmares about 2017 and propose to resolve this by being more parochial.

Forget Person of the Year. Who is Scot of the Year?

Compelling

For reasons discussed above – and because he is only half Scottish anyway – we dismiss at once the candidacy of Donald J Trump.

Is it, then, our very own norm violator Nicola Sturgeon who struts onto the front cover by dint of her thumping Scottish Parliament election victory and all the Kasparov-esque strategising we have seen her do over IndyRef2? I shouldn’t think so.

A complete shoe-in for 2015 Scot of the Year, Miss Sturgeon’s independence dream has begun to fade as Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson’s case for the 2016 cover has grown more compelling

Follow me if you want to save the Union, she declared unequivocally in her party’s election campaign in the spring – and thousands of Labour and Lib Dem voters did just that. Seven months on, I see little evidence they regret deserting their traditional pastures.

Yes, it is not hard at all to picture Miss Davidson on that front page, baring all those happy gnashers after winning her own Edinburgh seat first past the post and knocking Labour down to an unthinkable third in the Scottish political pecking order.

But she too must step aside for Scotland’s real cover star of 2016 – ahead by a mile.

It may be difficult for people of Andy Murray’s generation to grasp the full extent to which norms have been violated when we consider that a boy from Dunblane is the world’s number one tennis player.

That generation was not yet born when Scotland’s footballers went to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and taught my generation the first of many hard lessons on our nation’s place in world sport.

They travelled with a starryeyed manager and to the strains of Rod Stewart soccer anthems whose optimism I was too young and naïve to distrust.

Children believed it when Rod sang that there was really only one team in it. They took him at his word on the Scotland squad’s silky skills. And they watched their dreams go up in smoke as a country called Peru put three past us in the opening match.

At the time Sweden’s Bjorn Borg – sporting deity in my household – was winning a string of Wimbledons. It took John McEnroe at his most mercurial to defeat him and 17-year-old force of nature Boris Becker to reclaim the initiative for Europe in 1985.

Where was Scotland in all this? Nowhere at all, obviously.

Fatalistic

By the time Andy Murray was born in 1987 my generation’s attitude to our home country’s sporting aspirations was one of fatalistic resignation. I learned my 1978 lesson well and resolved never again to allow chipper commentators or temporarily flattering scorelines to influence the central thesis that the Scots were heading for a stuffing. This spared me much pain and aggravation along the way.

Even in the Murray era, I prepared the ground for the inevitable. Yes, the boy from Dunblane had done well – and good on him for his pluck – but he had found, as we all knew he would, that summiting his sport’s mountain was beyond him. It was too high, too steep. And he was, after all, a Scot. For more than a decade people like me have waited for Andy Murray to remember his and our place in the sporting scheme of things, but he refused to listen.

Year after year, we said Federer, Nadal and Djokovic were in a different class and consoled ourselves that at least the boy Murray would have been a pretty big noise if he were around, say, in Borg’s day.

Even when Murray won Wimbledon in 2013 some of us were far from convinced his name would ever grace the trophy again.

Well, in the year 2016 Andy Murray is as celebrated a sporting deity in my household as Bjorn Borg was in 1978. More so, in fact. Double Wimbledon winner, double Olympic gold winner and now number one tennis player in the world, Andy Murray has defied expectations no less sensationally than Donald Trump did in the US polls.

I kind of like the way he did it, too. Murray tasted defeat after defeat to the biggest guns of his sport, each time dusting himself down and reapplying himself to his goal. Would Mr Trump have been so dogged? Andy Murray: Scot. Winner. Inspiration.