Business of Sport: It seems fitting that 100 hundred years on from that first Bloomsday immortalised by James Joyce in Ulysses, the anti-hero has risen again, and this time in the unlikeliest of places: sport.
While the professional footballers are in the middle of pre-season training, you can be sure Euro 2004 is still fresh in their minds having thrown up the unlikely crowning of Greece as champions of Europe just two years after the World Cup saw the rise and rise of South Korea and Turkey.
Meanwhile, an ordinary Joe, Wayne Rooney, is being hailed as the new darling of football. What will the next season bring? Will we see Charlton Athletic winning the Premiership? Will David Connolly be the new wonder kiwunderkind?
Commentators and journalists, dazed and confused as everything they thought they knew about football is thrown out the window, scramble for answers to explain the debunking of time-honoured certainties.
And so we get the anti-star theory. The backlash against Perfumed, Moisturised Man is a reaffirmation of all things working class and rough-hewn. Out with Beckham. In with Rooney. Welcome to the Age of Anti-Disney.
Or is it? Diamonds in the rough have existed since the dawn of mankind and no better place to find Stone Age Man than in football. Paul Gascoigne, Jimmy Greaves and Tony Adams, all geniuses with a little less subtlety than your average sledgehammer. And forget about the Hollywood good looks.
Or is this all just a neat marketing ploy? A means perhaps of shaping and defining the next brand. Sensing boredom with Beckham chic, perhaps the combined powers of Nike, ProActive and News International have been hatching a return to the "roots" of football? Nike have been doing it for years in the US, since they twigged urban ghettos were the real leaders of street style, which white, middle-class kids would then mimic.
Dee Dee Gordon is a consultant whose job it is to spot the trends ahead of time so companies can tap into the vast potential before the competition.
"It's all about timing," she says. "You follow the trendsetters. You see what they're doing. If you see future technology as a trend - if you see enough trendsetters in enough cities buying things that are ergonomic in design or shoes that are jacked up - that's going to lead you to believe within six months to a year everyone and his grandmother will be into the same thing."
Gordon's company, Look, Look, have 10,000 youngsters they use for research and 500 "correspondents" trained to be their eyes and ears to popular culture. While most us are just sheep following the pack, there are those who stand out and will set trends.
"We look for kids who are ahead of the pack because they're going to influence what all the other kids do. We look for the 20 per cent, the trendsetters," says Gordon.
"This is a kid who looks outside their own backyard for inspiration, who is a leader within their own group. These kids are really difficult to find. So this 'correspondent' goes out and finds and identifies these chart-setting kids.
"They interview them. They get them interested in what we do. They hire them to do work for us. If they're expert in sports, they can report on that."
So maybe somewhere last year a kid starting tearing down his Beckham posters and worshipping Rooney. Perhaps in the process he threw out the moisturiser and the hair gel.
What causes such changes to take place is nearly impossible to pin down, but in his bestseller The Tipping Point, which seeks to explain why some ideas become popular trends, Malcolm Gladwell says at its heart is "a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behaviour or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus".
Nowhere was this more in evidence (admittedly in a non-sporting context ) than when Jeffrey Katzenberg was fired by Disney and went on to co-found Dreamworks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen - though having a billion to finance your project undoubtedly helps. Ten years on, Dreamworks and Katzenberg are basking in the success of Shrek, whose anti-fairytale story has touched people worldwide.
Beckham is Disney and Rooney is Shrek. The analogies may seem facile, but maybe, just maybe, the tipping point for the rise of the anti-hero can really be traced back to cinema. Such is the fantasy world in which much of sport operates that anything is impossible.
It would be nice to be able to ask James Joyce what he thinks of thousands having breakfast on O'Connell St and millions dressing in period costume in an attempt to recapture Bloomsday.
Truth is stranger than fiction but today sport is strangest of all. So says the mirror on the wall.
bizofsport@eircom.net
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ListentoLombardi - "Sometimes it's good to have an obstacle
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