But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Graham had to be hauled off for an emergency sponge bath, but South African hearts, even as they quailed before the spectacle of Big Jonah in full flight, could not help a twinge of pleasure. It was easy to forget that handing off Jeremy Guscott is only slightly more impressive than side-stepping a tackle bag; the pleasure lay entirely in watching someone, well, shoving it down the collective English face.

  It is hard to account for such vehemence of feeling. Perhaps it is the shared shame of having once been ruled by a people who, by all recent evidence, are such a shower of unmitigated losers. There was a newspaper report this week. “English men,” it declared, “are closet pork-pie addicts!”

  Apparently the pasty-faced, pastry-loving Brits secretively scoff their meaty treats before they get home, lest the wife get wind of it. Not bad enough that they are a people whose idea of a good time is a pork pie, but they cannot even stand up and eat them at home with a straight back and chin held high. Is it any wonder that Sad Henry is so troubled? The English are the secret shadow of weakness that lurks within all of us, but that we so forcefully suppress. To lose on Sunday would be to face that unspeakable shadow. Fortunately, we are not going to lose.

  South African sport needs new songs

  BUSINESS DAY, 12 NOVEMBER 1999

  AT A CERTAIN moment during the most recent test match, a number of the regulars down at the Chalk ’n Cue linked arms and raised their voices in song. “Olé!” we sang, “Olé, olé, olé!” Then, fearing that this was not sufficient adequately to express our enthusiasm, we added: “Olé!” and “Olé!” Not to drag out the anecdote, let me say that we repeated this lyric several times. We finished well satisfied, but of course Porky Withers, the local gin-soak, had to pipe up with his usual “Nog ’n Olé!” We ignored him sternly. Porky Withers never knows when enough is enough.

  Later in the match, forgetting that we were supposed to be setting Porky Withers an example, we began singing again. “Olé!” we harmonised, “Olé, olé, o—” An elderly lady tapped me on the shoulder, none too gently. “Excuse me,” she said, in a tone that verged on the brusque, “but don’t you know any other songs?”

  We pondered that, while Karl the barman fetched the next round. South Africans, it dawned on us, are woefully short of stirring anthems to sing during sport. Which is surprising, given that Leon Schuster made enough money out of “Hier Kommie Bokke” to retire to Knysna, a happy event for him, though an unfortunate setback to the Knysna elephant-breeding programme. We gave it a try, but it just didn’t take, somehow. We could get out “Hier Kommie Bokke” just fine, but it always fell apart during the line that goes “Laa-lalalalalala”.

  Someone pointed out that PJ Powers has a career based exclusively around singing at World Cup ceremonies, but some of life’s mysteries are best left unexplored. We settled, finally, on “Shosholoza”, one of the most powerful of the world’s sporting anthems. It cannot but lift the performances of the athletes and indeed the spectators. We need to resurrect “Shosholoza” for our major events, we all agreed, but mostly we need to learn the words properly. Those mumbled lines between the first chorus and the second where we lower our eyes and try to approximate the sounds are simply embarrassing.

  A problem with “Shosholoza” is that it is rather harmonically complex for a sporting song, which is to say, a song intended to be sung while drinking heavily. There is a point where the two vocal lines overlap, and where the pitch of the voice changes, and coordinating that is a lot to expect of the lads in Kings Park, working their way through their second pocket of spiked oranges. If you have ever seen those two sunburnt fools wearing watermelons on their heads trying to start a Mexican wave on the Saturday afternoon of a Newlands cricket test, you will understand the need for simplicity. Watching a grown man trying to stand up and sit down at the same time is not a pretty sight.

  Singability is the key here. Chelsea supporters in the UK are fond of launching into “One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow”, not because of the allusive resonance of the lyrics, but because it is next to impossible to forget the words, no matter how many pints you have inhaled before the match. You also do not have to know when to stop. You never have to stop.

  Most sporting anthems are similarly bereft of meaningful history. Liverpool’s moving “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is simply a song lifted from the cheesy old musical Carousel. It might have been “Memories” from Cats, had history been crueller.

  The Twickenham anthem, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is an old slavery spiritual from the American south. It was first sung at Twickenham not in support of the emancipationist movement, but light-heartedly on the occasion that Chris Oti, a player of Nigerian descent, scored a hat-trick of tries. Appropriately enough for the Twickenham crowd, it is an ode to death relieving the singer of this earthly misery.

  We in South Africa need to bolster our repertoire of drinking songs that are clean enough to sing in public. So go on, enter the Bad Sport, Worse Singer competition. Submit your nominations for potential stadium favourites today. The winner will receive Leon Schuster. That’s right, Leon Schuster. You can have him, really, We don’t want him any more.

  A celebration of cricket

  BUSINESS DAY, 25 NOVEMBER 1999

  HARK! THE DISTANT THWACK of leather on willow! The soft patter like rain on an English summer resort of applause at the start of play! The slow creak and crack and ka-pow of Allan Donald’s ligaments! If you listen closely, you can hear the low rumble of Darryl Cullinan brooding. It can only mean that cricket is here, and if all is not exactly right with the world, then it is at least not all wrong.

  When finally I shuffle off this mortal coil, bury me on a grass embankment – if you can find one at an SA test venue – with a clear view of the scoreboard, in easy range of the man selling the draught beer in the big plastic cups, and know that I will be facing my own private timeless test with a sigh and a smile and lazy howzat. For as long as there are 22 grown men in white flannels (as well as two umpires and a third to watch the television replays) prepared to spend five days in painstaking pursuit of a phantasm, wrapped in a memory, swaddled in a dream, then all is not lost, for I will know there is still place in the world for the fine and the foolish and the noble pursuit of the pointless.

  Cricket is the game that most closely approximates life – it seems long but is deceptively short; it is circular and repetitive but moves to an inexorable end; it is just but not always fair; it follows a system of tightly woven logic, playing itself out in a charmed circle of glorious absurdity.

  Perhaps the highest praise for the game of cricket is that the Americans so thoroughly fail to understand it. For cricket, bless it, is by all reasonable standards an exercise in madness. It is ludicrous, and that is the point, for “ludicrous” literally means “done in sport” or “playing the game”. And playing the game is what we still like to pretend that cricket is all about. This season England returns to South Africa for a tour, and there is a pleasing symmetry that they should return for the centenary of their hitherto most significant tussle with the home team. Even in the midst of bloody warfare, cricket played its role as a measure of civilised madness.

  During the early stages of the Anglo-Boer War, the British in Mafeking were besieged by the Boers (commanded, then as now, by one General Cronjé). In April 1900 Veldkornet Sarel Eloff, a grandson of Paul Kruger, sent a note through the lines to Robert Baden-Powell, commander of the Mafeking garrison:

  I see that your men play cricket on Sundays. If you would allow my men to join in, it would be very agreeable to me. Wishing you a pleasant day, I remain your obliging friend,

  S Eloff

  Baden-Powell, with a wily evasiveness alas unavailable to Nasser Hussain, declined, but you can but sigh for a time when cricket provided such a bond between civilised men. Perhaps it is simply spring fever talking, but I have never looked forward to a summer with keener pleasure. Ah, to be at the Wanderers, now that spring and England are here.

  Sporting s
ex

  BUSINESS DAY, 27 JANUARY 2000

  ALAS, IT IS the way of the world that with each fresh advance of science, there must follow a wave of ethical quibbles hard upon it. So it is with the latest development in sport. Sex before the big match, announced New Scientist magazine late last year, is a good idea.

  Of course, that was not news to me – I always recommend getting sex out of the way before the game starts. Bitter experience has taught me that it is no use trying to squeeze it in, if you will pardon the expression, during the slow-mo replays and beer ads. For that to work, you need a very understanding partner or at least a hand that has not just been holding an icy cold lager. You also need the ability to accelerate from a standing start to the finish line in less time than it takes an Aussie referee to blow a penalty against the Springboks.

  In any case, for the sake of your performance as well as your peace of mind, it is best to discharge your, well, your romantic responsibilities before Hugh Bladen or Trevor Quirk start speaking. Believe me, you do not want to be startled mid-innings by Trevor’s dulcet tones. That way impotence lies.

  Apparently, though, if New Scientist is to be believed, it is also a good idea for the athletes to have an early kick-off. One Emmanuele Jannini of the University of L’Aquilla has released findings that confirm what Ian Botham, James Small and the entire French rugby team have been trying to tell us for years: pre-match sex enhances on-field performance. Evidently orgasm stimulates the production of testosterone, which gives athletes the edge in sports requiring the controlled exercise of aggression.

  There are few players who can have failed to notice that playing well in the match increases your chance of getting lucky afterwards, but having the converse scientifically proven is a startling breakthrough.

  Knowing how scientifically minded the SA cricket team is, it is surely only a matter of time before each player has his own individualised data base, plotting the nookie/runs-scored ratio, or the heavy petting/dot balls coefficient. Just as important as fitness training will be lessons in pick-up lines and attractive hairstyles – once Mornantau Hayward has lost that seven-rand-rentboy puff-and-peroxide look, his strike rate on and off the field can only improve. Derek Crookes? Well, perhaps it would be kinder not to mention Derek Crookes.

  And this is where the question of ethics creeps in. It is one thing knowing how to improve your team’s performance, but quite another to implement official policies. At what stage will local rugby teams be justified in sending out a nationwide call for patriotic lasses and – do not kid yourself – lads to lend a Vaselined hand in preparing the squads for competition? (“Do you give a toss for your country? Come prove it at Newlands, Saturday 2.30pm.”)

  And at what stage will testosterone production become a mandatory training measure? After a slump in form will the management take a player aside, press upon him a stack of saucy magazines and a box of Kleenex and frogmarch him to the nearest empty cubicle? Will wives have to co-sign contracts, guaranteeing their availability and co-operation during the season? Will they submit themselves to refresher courses, fitness training and technique workshops? It is an uncertain future into which science is leading us.

  Finally, and most worrying, if sex before the game is so advantageous, what about sex during the game? I am quite sure that team physiotherapists, currently in charge of rub-downs and heat treatments, will not take kindly to any untoward enlargement of their job descriptions, but the possibilities are distinctly unsettling. I do not care to think too deeply on the prospect of the Springboks trooping off at half-time, 20 points down against the All Blacks, to be greeted by an irate Nick Mallett and Alan Solomons: “Boys, you’re lacking aggression out there. Split up into pairs and do that exercise we demonstrated last week!”

  Tyson 2000

  BUSINESS DAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2000

  HOW STRONG IS Mike Tyson? Why, he is so strong he does not even need to hit you. The wind speed of his gloves windmilling above your head is enough to knock you down.

  The more I watch Tyson’s recent fights, the more convinced I am that I have chosen the wrong career. I am sure with a little training I could last two rounds of not being hit by Mike Tyson. Just last week I was not hit by Larry Holmes, and I cannot begin to count the number of times I have not been hit by George Foreman. And let me tell you, George Foreman does not hit you a whole lot harder than Tyson does not hit you.

  Last Saturday Iron Mike dropped Julius “Dead-weight” Francis five times in five minutes with a series of cuffs and waves and an unprovoked cuddle, leading me to suspect that the chief objection to his fighting in Britain had been raised not by women’s rights activists but by Equity, the British actors’ union.

  Tyson at least knew his lines and had rehearsed his moves; it was such a shamefully ham-fisted performance from Francis that both Tyson and his current overlord Shelley Finkel were scrambling after the fight to insist that Tyson had knocked him out with a body blow. It was a necessary subterfuge. Even Stevie Wonder, seated at ringside behind David “I wear the pants in this house” Beckham, could see that Tyson had missed with the punches to Francis’s head. The fight was the least convincing piece of sporting theatre since the Pakistani cricket team played Kenya, yet there is no denying that when Tyson fights he generates a primal excitement.

  Tyson’s aura was built 15 years ago, based equally on his ferocious fighting ability, and his hype as the baddest man on the planet. In a curious irony, today it is the talent that is over-hyped, whereas my fear is that Tyson may be badder than we realise.

  Tyson has been beaten by every quality boxer he has fought. Even our own Francois Botha, as fearsome as a tub of yoghurt, nearly put him away.

  Like Graham Hick on a flat pitch, Tyson can bully the weak and mediocre, but he folds against quality. He remains a drawcard purely because of his reputation for unpredictability and uncommon violence.

  Tyson, truthfully, is not right in the head. He was not healthy when he went into prison, and if anything he is worse now. It is questionable whether he should be allowed to walk the streets. Listen carefully to one of his interviews – this is not a man feigning badness, but someone in tenuous and decidedly sporadic contact with what you and I call reality.

  It has become a cliché to say that our interest in Tyson is similar to the urge to rubberneck when passing a car crash, but the tragedy of it is that on some level, we do not believe it is real. On some level we believe the blood and the piece of ear and the swearing and baby-talk are all hype and make-believe. We no longer blink when Julius Francis comes over all swagger and strut at the press conference, only to dive like Jacques Cousteau on the night, because we have come to accept that boxing is showbiz. Shows like WWF wrestling and even those poxy Gladiators have blurred the line between sport and play-acting to such an extent that we expect melodrama and plot twists; we almost expect real-life sport to appear scripted.

  The more pantomimish Tyson appears, the more likely we are to accept it. It is a telling fact that Tyson was invited to join the WWF wrestling circus, but was ultimately regarded as not sufficiently stable to be a regular. When it comes to being a psycho, Tyson is too real to pretend, and yet he is too cartoonish for us to truly recognise what we are looking at. Tyson is a symptom of the devaluing of the real, and he may yet be its biggest victim.

  When we finally get bored with Tyson we will switch channels, but Tyson confused, uncontrolled and becoming rapidly more so is stuck with himself. I hope I am wrong, but I have a feeling, with Mike Tyson, the worst is yet to come.

  Clichés, champions and Baby Jake

  BUSINESS DAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2000

  SPORT WRITERS ARE not the sole purveyors of the cliché. The cliché is common wherever people speak without first troubling to think. That is to say, the cliché is very common indeed.

  Sometimes a cliché can be a cliché before it has even been around long enough to become popularly recognised. I recently met an Internet consultant, for instance, who scratched his beard and told me t
hat the secret of his profession is: “I think outside the box.” I did not know exactly what that meant, but I knew I would not be able to sleep nights unless I immediately stamped on his instep and punched him in the throat.

  But sports writers and commentators do appear to swaddle themselves rather more conspicuously than most in the fluffy bathrobe of hackneyed phrase and received wisdom. There are three reasons for this.

  Firstly, sport writers tend to allow themselves to be persuaded that what they write about is unimportant, frivolous, somehow of less value than politics or motor cars. Secondly, there is the mistaken assumption that sports fans are a slow-witted lot, made up of the kind of individual whose idea of international sophistication is drinking a Namibian beer while performing a Mexican wave, who becomes suspicious of writing that does more than tell the score and mention that Bafana Bafana need to guard against conceding an early goal. In such a dusty wasteland, writers and commentators like Andy Capostagno and Mike Haysman and John Robbie and Neil Manthorpe are like desert flowers with the dew still clinging to their petals. If you see what I mean.

  Thirdly, I would suggest that clichés and phrases that say nothing by repeating the overly familiar are actually more noticeable in a sporting context than in any other. Sport, unlike politics or economics, is such a rich and varied field that any attempt to reduce it and fit it into a standard mould is doomed to squirming failure. When Hugh Bladen offers a commentary that could be effectively superimposed over any other game he has ever commented on, it says far more about Hugh Bladen than it does about the game.

  Ordinarily, clichés merely irritate, and at worst muffle the clarity of the action. Occasionally, however, they are downright misleading. In the build-up to last weekend’s “Night of the Legends”, it became popular in the sports pages to say that Hawk Makepula and Baby Jake Matlala were fighting not merely for the world title, but also for the title of people’s champion. Stuff and nonsense. The whole point of being a people’s champion is that it is not transferable with an official title – otherwise you would just call him champion and have done with it.