The texts started arriving at around 6PM. At first they were the standard vanilla splattering of any Thursday night spent wearing sweatpants and playing FIFA. People asking me if I wanted to go out (I didn’t). Something about a discount from a pizza company. One from my family asking what I wanted for dinner Sunday.
But then, very quickly, things started to change. “What the fuck have you done?” people were asking me, over text and on Facebook. My Twitter mentions were going nuts. “I didn’t think your article on wit was that bad?”
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What quickly transpired was that I, David Whelan, journalist and frequent VICE writer, was being taunted and abused for the actions of a completely different David Whelan – David Whelan, owner of Wigan Athletic Football Club and – as of last night – self-proclaimed racist.
“I think Jewish people do chase money more than everybody else,” the 77-year-old, multimillionaire, Wigan-owning David Whelan straight-up told the Guardian yesterday, in a misguided defence of his new manager, the shamed racist text-maniac Malky Mackay. “I don’t think that’s offensive at all.”
What sort of person thinks that’s not offensive at all? Well, the kind of person who also goes on to say, in the same interview, with the same journalists who write for what they would no doubt argue is the single biggest liberal news source in the world: “If any Englishman said he has never called a Chinaman a ‘chink’ he is lying. There is nothing bad about doing that. It is like calling the British ‘Brits’, or the Irish ‘Paddies’.”
It was a bad evening. It was a night for introspection, of soul searching: Who is Dave Whelan, really? Who am I? What do I stand for?
Answer: this is me and I don’t stand for racism.
…and this is David Whelan, the guy who owns Wigan and JJB Sports and who does, apparently, stand for racism.
I hope that that clarifies things for the 100-plus people who added me on Twitter last night, filling my mentions with things like “Adolph Whelan”, “keep your mouth shut, cocksucker”, “racist scum1!!!”, “u absolute moran” and a couple of other things about having a “chink in my armour” that I don’t remember exactly.
Tony Incenzo from TalkSPORT even started up a small campaign to get me on a couple of shows to talk about my ordeal. But if there was one thing I knew as I trawled through allegations concerning my mother’s chastity and my favourite pop song (“Safety Dance”, apparently), it was that I wasn’t going to be the guy who went on radio or TV because I had the same name as Dave Whelan.
But you bet your sweet ass I’m going to write about it. And tell everyone about it. And dine out on his racism for years to come. Because that’s what happened next: the consumption of his fame.
I picked up about 100 followers from his comments. Let’s think about that. Someone in Wigan calls Jewish people money-hungry and I, in London, grow. It’s a really weird set up, where my personal clout is directly proportional to Dave Whelan’s bigotry. I kinda felt like the living embodiment of Alex Proud’s perma-fucked under-30, getting shafted by the generations that came before me. There’s Dave Whelan, 77, who is worth something over £100 million, and I’m Dave Whelan, 26, who lives off soup. Karma is a fickle bitch.
I’ve known we’ve shared names for years now, of course. I used to think my parents weren’t to blame. That there was no way they could have known what they were subjecting me to. But then I read Freud, and of course they’re fucking to blame. They’re both from Manchester. Whelan is from Wigan. My father is a keen football fan; Whelan played for Blackburn in the 1960 FA Cup final. My dad must have known who he was.
There is no doubt in my mind that they were naming me after a pretty average full-back who is famous for reaching the peak of domestic competition, losing his head entirely and breaking his own leg. That’s about as Greek tragedy it is possible to get without calling me Oedipus, putting me up for adoption and my mum being, I dunno, Carmen Electra.
This morning, Dave apologised. But I think if there is one message that we have to take away from all this it is: don’t be a fucking bigot, you stupid, stupid cunt.
It’s my life, too.
Follow VICE’s David Whelan on Twitter @MrDavidWhelan. Wigan-owning David Whelan photo by Dan Farrimond.
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