But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Outside the stadium was the fine aroma of boerewors rolls and ketchup and expectation; inside was the stirring sight of men wearing green wigs and caps with Springbok horns and moustaches dyed with the colours of the South African flag. It was a grand day to be in Pretoria, and when the Springboks ran out, the roar of the Loftus crowd was enough to lift you off your chair and into the air, as though you were an empty chip packet borne aloft by the hot gust of men’s hopes. I had never been to Loftus Versfeld before, and after last Saturday I may never go again. It can only ever be downhill from here.

  I arrived with certain expectations of what a rugby test in Pretoria would be like, but I was surprised. The Loftus crowd is a curious one. Sure enough, as I arrived in the parking lot some beefy fellow in blue rugby shorts was unfurling a large old SA flag from the back of his bakkie. I paused to frown and tut, but as I watched he unfurled an equally large new SA flag, and walked happily toward the stadium with a flag in each hand.

  It was an auspicious beginning. I found my seat on the grandstand and settled down to watch the curtain-raiser. Five rows in front of me, what I can only describe as a tour bus of Japanese rugby fans arrived. There were 17 or 18 of them, all wearing matching sunglasses and Springbok-green golf shirts and fanning themselves with official match programmes. My word – I couldn’t help thinking – they do take these cultural tours literally nowadays. It was an unworthy thought. I felt even worse about thinking it when a mountainous fellow behind me, sipping from a two-litre Coke bottle that had been diluted with some sort of fiery liquor – call me a purveyor of stereotypes, but I am guessing brandy – stood up and called out in Afrikaans: “Excuse me, if you’re looking for the Hong Kong Sevens, I think you may have taken a wrong turn off the N1.”

  The group looked at him blankly, but his friends did not. The mountainous fellow sat down with the contented air of someone expecting applause, but his friends were not amused. A furious war of Afrikaans words broke out behind me.

  “What do you want to go and say something like that for?” demanded one hardly less mountainous friend. “That was just rude, and furthermore Hong Kong is in China, you dummy,” said another. (You will forgive me if my translation from Afrikaans lacks something of the warmth and colour of the original. There were certain words spoken that simply cannot be translated into English. And should not be, even if they could.)

  The first mountainous fellow tried to defend himself. “I was just joking,” he said, “and they don’t even speak the language.”

  But he was getting nowhere. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. It was like having the Drakensberg range suddenly start quarrelling above you while you are out for a pleasant stroll in the country air. But the story had a happy resolution. Half an hour later, as I came staggering back from buying beer, I noticed the original mountainous fellow buying biltong from a vendor. He was shelling out R15 a packet for 17 or 18 packets. As I watched, he winched himself to his feet and trekked down the concrete stairs to the row of rugby fans. He handed them the biltong and made his apologies, then trudged back to his seat, still blushing beneath his whiskers.

  “That’s better,” said one of his friends as he sat down again. “Now we can enjoy the game.” Boy, did we ever.

  Anna vs Amanda

  BUSINESS DAY, 18 OCTOBER 2001

  PERHAPS IT IS the times we live in, but nothing seems truly to surprise me any more. I can watch the SA cricket team swing from world-beaters to hit-and-hope chumps in the space of a week and it no longer strikes me as worthy of comment. I can watch some dope from Big Brother crop up on a sports talk show and it does not even raise my eyebrows. But even I was taken aback by the announcement that Anna Kournikova was being imported to play a series of big-buck exhibition matches against Amanda Coetzer. Now really.

  If I have been following the story correctly, this means one short female tennis player who has never won a grand slam tournament will be playing one taller female tennis player who has never won a grand slam tournament, and millions of rands will be riding on the outcome. Well, count me out. There is something all wrong about this. Even if I were the kind of person to give a flying fulmination for the result of an exhibition event that is stripped of relevance in terms of WTA points and competitive context, I would want to see the local heroine up against the best, not some middle-of-the-range masher whose career highlights are all in her hair.

  But that is the whole point, I suppose. It is not about the tennis. Kournikova has about as much to do with tennis as the WWF has to do with wrestling. The WWF coined a new term to describe their particular brand of populist flim-flam and flummery. They call themselves “sports entertainment”, and that is what Kournikova is: a cheap gimmick using sport as nothing more than a sales window for presenting itself to the world.

  She is like one of those Miss World contestants who have a special talent. (“Miss Uruguay will demonstrate how to juggle with hamsters, Miss Sweden will sing the theme song to Ally McBeal while drinking a glass of water, and the former Miss Moscow will show us that she has a darn decent game of tennis.”)

  Come to think of it, I suppose it is necessary for Anna Kournikova to play exhibition matches. If she were to limit herself to the WTA circuit she would not play sufficient games for her sponsors to get their money’s worth. One game a tournament does not add up to many games over the year.

  Even aside from the obvious insult to the spirit of sport, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. She is a pretty enough girl, but no more so than a zillion other professional models (which is really all she is). What do we think will happen? That she will suddenly decide to play topless? That she will celebrate each point won in a tie-break by making out with a ballboy while we watch? It’s tragic. Ogle if you like, my friends, but when one day a women’s pressure group demands a quota system of good-looking men wearing skimpy shorts in the Springbok tight five, remember you have only yourselves to blame.

  A premier bore

  BUSINESS DAY, 9 MAY 2002

  I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD people who do not understand sport. I occasionally envy them, mind you. Not being passionately involved in the physical and athletic fortunes of more or less random gangs of strangers must ease a great burden on your time, not to mention the state of your nerves and the depth of your emotional reserves. I think it must be a tremendous relief to know that for the next several months your sense of self and your outlook on the world will be determined by factors less impersonal than the bounce of a ball or whether Breyton Paulse gets a chance to run in space.

  Much as I envy those people, though, I have never understood them. I am baffled by men who are capable of ambling through a Saturday afternoon without so much as a thought to the match – who can, indeed, pause at a television and peer politely at the score and make genial conversation like “Ah, good, Monty must have his kicking boots on” or “Tsk, tsk, another bad day at the office” before wandering off to have tea with their wives or wash their cars or whatever the hell these people do when the match is on.

  As much as I sometimes envy them, on other occasions (mainly when SA is winning) I feel profoundly sorry for them. They are missing out on an entire dimension of life – a world of drama and comedy, of pathos and bathos and the incomparable rush of unmediated emotion that is available nowhere else with such regularity and such immediacy. Sport gives you the opportunity to gasp at greatness, to wince at small tragedies, to sigh at dreams achieved and chances let slip, to throb and thrum with larger emotions than are available in the humdrum everyday. Not to have sport in your life strikes me as just as sad as never having read powerful literature, or never having been moved by music to an urge other than to dance, or never having been lost, however briefly, in the deep pleasures of a fine painting.

  And yet there are those who feel these things about me. Because in fact there is one sense in which I am not so far removed from those without sport. It is like this: I do not care about English football. With the best will in the world, last weekend I could not
give a flying bicycle kick through a rolling doughnut for whether Chelsea beat Arsenal or Arsenal beat Chelsea to win the FA Cup. I can barely tell Chelsea from Arsenal. They are both based in London, both fanatically supported by tribes of oiks and yahoos, and both comprised in the main of players who scarcely speak English, let alone hail from the clubs’ traditional geographic precincts.

  Admittedly, I am not a soccer fan at all. Soccer does not move me. I do watch the occasional Bafana Bafana match, and there will certainly be moments during the World Cup when I find myself watching South Korea tangling with Lichtenstein or some similar postage-stamp nation, but that is just another way of saying I am not a soccer fan. Watching World Cups and the occasional international does not qualify you as a fan. But, even if I were a soccer fan, this strange (white) SA passion for the English Premier League leaves me flummoxed.

  I cannot fathom why a friend of mine is plunged into the blue mopes whenever Leeds lose. Whence an allegiance with Leeds? My friend has never so much as been to Leeds (which perhaps explains how he can maintain his enthusiasm for the dump). None of his relatives hail from Leeds (or if they do he wisely does not admit it).

  I know others who will wear scarves and sing songs in praise of such socio-political obscurities as Sheffield Wednesday, Watford and Hull. I listen to their vast and intricate and, to me, entirely empty language of English football fandom, and I can only frown and shrug and take myself off to do something useful.

  And my friends look at me and sigh and they say: “Isn’t it sad? He is missing out on so much.”

  Players without passion are like Danie-less dreams

  BUSINESS DAY, 23 MAY 2002

  IN 1995, IN the week or so before the biggest month of my life so far, I was bothered by a persistent dream. In this dream I am sitting in the locker-room at Newlands, one sock on, the other still in my hand, my boots beside me. From outside I hear an unearthly noise, a rumbling, swelling drone, as though a swarm of bees the size of mastodons were descending.

  But it is not a swarm of bees the size of mastodons. It is the sound of the world in anticipation. It is the sound of the whole of SA leaning forward, rubbing its hands, stamping its feet. I am wearing a Springbok jersey, and as I sit there blinking in the half-light, I realise that I am in the South African team to run out in the opening match of the World Cup.

  In my dream, as I sit there in the locker-room, berating myself for not having kept in shape, cursing that pack of cigarettes last weekend, I am gripped by at least as much excitement as fear. In my dream I know that I am in no condition to play international rugby – I am scarcely in condition to play with a rubber duck in the bath – but I am tingling with the possibility that I will be able to do something, that I will be on hand to take the pass or put my body in the way of Timmy Horan or do something to help us win.

  Danie Gerber is my centre partner. He looks at me appraisingly. “I think you had better go to second centre,” he says.

  “I think you had better hang onto the ball in the backline moves,” I say.

  He nods and pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’ll get through this.” And then we run out of the dim locker-room and into the sudden white light, and that is where I always woke up.

  After the World Cup started and we won the first match, albeit without the help of Danie and me, I stopped having that dream, but to this day I remember the almost unbearable mix of fear and elation when I realised I was about to run out in green and gold in front of my nation. This week Percy Montgomery withdrew from the Springbok set-up in order to go play club rugby in Wales. I know that Percy Montgomery has been a Springbok many times before, and so the feeling is dulled and the novelty has worn off, but I still think he is a pale shadow of a man for turning his back on the Springbok jersey. I understand that money is important. Believe me, I do. But it is still just money and there is no cheque in the world so large and with sufficient zeroes that I would swap it for that feeling I had back in 1995 – even if it was just a feeling in a dream.

  The death of Hansie

  BUSINESS DAY, 5 JUNE 2002

  THE DEATH OF Hansie Cronjé matters. Watching the television tributes – all slow-mo replays and sad strings and freeze frames – I felt my throat tighten and heart sigh. I felt myself remembering my own favourite moments of Hansie.

  I remembered the time he took five wickets in a one-day match against India, when I had drawn his name as my player in our regular drinking game over at Chunko’s house. I had to drink every time Hansie’s name was mentioned by the commentators. Hansie had never really bowled in a one-day match before, so I fancied myself safe. I had to work the next morning. You would be surprised how many times a player gets mentioned by the commentators when he is a non-regular bowler taking a five-for in a one-day international.

  I remembered being at Centurion when he struck the second fastest test 50 ever, to win a match against Sri Lanka that Muttiah Muralitheran seemed to be claiming. I remembered sitting and watching on television as he slogged Shane Warne into cow corner, and turning and saying to Chunko: “Thank god Hansie is South African.”

  I watched the television tributes and I felt profoundly sad. Hansie was one of those public figures who truly are public figures, because he meant something to each of us. He symbolised values and fears and beliefs and points of pride and points of shame. The sadness I felt was in the waste of his legacy. For nearly 10 years he had made me proud to be South African, he had given me faith and hope and belief in something, and he carried a burden of expectation that no human being could ever truly bear. Which is why I was never – and will never be – able to forgive him for falling. The anger and sorrow he caused me was as disproportionate as the pride and joy he had brought.

  As someone who mattered to us, what he did mattered more than what you or I do. It is not fair, but it is what happens to public figures. If they live in our dreams, and our dreams of ourselves, their lives become more than the lives of real people. They become the stuff of drama and tragedy and symbolism, like figures in Greek legend who fly too close to the sun. Hansie fell from his pedestal, and then this week he fell – far too literally – from the sky. Hansie Cronjé was more than a real person, but he was also a real person, and the real person’s life is over. We must mourn that, but we should not forget the full story of Hansie Cronjé. In his failings as well as his successes, he meant something. In death as well as life, he matters.

  A new sports hero

  BUSINESS DAY, 11 JULY 2002

  I HAVE A NEW sports hero. He is, in fact, a hero for the modern times. Not only is he a true all-rounder, participating in an impressive range of events, but he embodies many of the old-fashioned values of sport itself. In these soulless, professional times, such is his love of his craft that he actually pays to participate, and in doing so, he shakes up the sanitised, pre-packaged formulae to which spectator sports have been subjected since the dominance of television programming and modern sponsorship demands.

  His name is Mark Roberts, but you would know him better as that guy who streaked across Centre Court at Wimbledon last Sunday, performed a naked barrel-roll over the net and was bustled away, waving to an appreciative crowd. Mark Roberts was the most entertaining part of the men’s final. And if I were the brains trust behind international men’s tennis I would consider putting him on permanent retainer.

  But Mark Roberts’ sporting talents are too broad to confine him to the tennis tramlines. Mark has risen like a pink spectre at more than 150 sporting events, but he reserves his stand-out performances for the football pitch. He has popped up at the Champions League final (where he apparently dribbled upfield and slipped one past Bayern Leverkusen’s goalie, the perfectly named Hans-Jorg Butt), and also at last year’s FA Cup final, where alas he was denied the opportunity to complete the double by getting one over Nicky Butt. Whether David Seaman was equal to his shooting is unfortunately unrecorded.

  Mark is a dedicated athlete. He is in sufficiently good shape that his
appearances are greeted with a hearty hooray from the crowds, rather than the appalled silence that would follow the unkitted performance of, say, me. More than this, he has apparently paid out more than R30 000 in fines over the years, in pursuit of his athletic ambitions. From the delighted expressions on the faces of the crowd on Sunday, they would have been happy to have a quick whip around and pay this latest fine. You could almost feel the sense of the anticlimax when they had to get back to Lleyton Hewitt and David What’s-his-name.

  I was half hoping for Mark to come freewheeling out in the Tour de France this week, but no such luck. Spokes and bicycle chains, I suppose, are not the streaker’s friends. Not to mention those sudden gear changes.

  I know this sort of thing is not really to be encouraged – and when it is drunk men with moustaches running onto the rugby field while play is in progress, it is to be deplored – but Mark chooses his moments between spells of play, and he is such a consummate professional that I cannot but warm to him. Sometimes it is a relief to find that there is still space in professional sport in which something may happen that has not been planned and approved by the corporates.

  Rugby’s day of shame

  BUSINESS DAY, 15 AUGUST 2002

  PIETER VAN ZYL is on everybody’s lips, if you will pardon the expression. No matter what else happened in the world of sport this past week, the principal topic of conversation was Pieter van Zyl, the man in the tatty jersey who waddled onto the field during the match on Saturday to put the hurt on referee Dave McHugh.

  Pieter van Zyl was too good, or bad, to be true. If the Australian Rugby Union had wanted to hire someone to besmirch the name of South Africa and had sent down to central casting for a likely candidate, they could not have dredged up a more perfect stereotype than Pieter van Zyl. The Australians would have been as pleased with him as the JFK conspirators were when they found Lee Harvey Oswald.