"But I Digress ..." (22 page)

Rugby World Cup 1999: Being a supporter

BUSINESS DAY, 8 OCTOBER 1999

I
DON
'
T KNOW IF
you have noticed, but suddenly there are a lot more Springbok supporters than there were a week ago. I bumped into a colleague on Monday morning. “Hey, hey,” he said, giving me a strange wiggle of the eyebrows, “the Boks are looking good for the finals.”

I looked at him with some confusion. “But weren't you saying on Friday that we have no chance?” I asked.

“Hey, no man, we're on track. Mallett's got the right plan.” He breezed off down the corridor, happy in his own punditry. It was the first of many such conversations this week. It is most peculiar. In recent times a positive word about the team was as rare as a modest word from Geoffrey Boycott, but one decent result in the opening game and all of a sudden the flags are flying again. It is a staggering turnabout; by the time we beat England in the quarter-finals, critics of Nick Mallett will be as rare as former supporters of apartheid.

Last season, when the Springboks were chasing the record for consecutive test victories, everybody was a fan. The expert gentlemen of the press were calling Mallett “Saint Nick”; bars were packed on Saturday afternoons. Then we started losing.

Suddenly Mallett was the worst coach since John Williams; suddenly people started saying, “I'm not going to wake up early for the game” or “I'm playing golf on Saturday.” Frown at them, and they would say, “What's the point? We're going to lose anyway.” The point, of course, is that supporting a team means supporting them through bad times as well as good. It is sharing the bad times that makes us deserve the good times, and makes those good times that much sweeter.

Amid the fluffy memories of face paint and Francois Pienaar and jumbo jets in '95, it is easy to forget that before the opening match against Australia the prevailing mood was one of pessimism at worst, resigned good will at best. Nor is such fickleness confined to the playing field. We were all pleased to share in the warm and fuzzy good times of the '94 elections, all quick to claim Nelson Mandela as our own, happy to paint ourselves as stripes in Desmond Tutu's Rainbow Nation. Then, at the first knock-back, at the first dip of the rand or lurch of the ship, we throw up our hands and whine at dinner parties and talk darkly about leaving for – oh, the irony – New Zealand. We are, I am sorry to say, fair-weather fans.

I am not decrying our right to criticise and complain. One of the great joys of sport is that it is the only arena in which we are every one of us experts. But the right of complaint should be balanced by the duty of commitment. Without commitment we are not supporters, merely fans, and fans are a dime a dozen. Remember all those phantoms who suddenly emerged before the '95 final with enthusiastic opinions about how to stop Jonah Lomu or what position Mark Andrews should be playing? Where were they six months before, when the All Blacks were trampling us in rainy Carisbrooke at 4am?

It is often said (although perhaps only by me) that every rugby nation has the team it deserves. We should give thanks that one of the glories of being South African is that we so frequently have a team so much better than we deserve.

Woman beats man

BUSINESS DAY, 15 OCTOBER 1999

W
HEN I WAS
12
years old, Caron Beasely challenged me to armwrestle. She was a small girl, was Caron Beasely, and sickly. She carried an asthma pump, and in some places her skin was so pale you could see her circulatory system. Taking all these factors into account, plus the fact that she was only 10, I accepted.

When I say that I still wake in the night, my right hand clenched like Mike Lipkin's, blindly screaming Caron Beasely's name, you will gather what the outcome was. From that day, I was firmly of the opinion that in the field of physical sports, men and women should not mix.

I am still of that opinion, though for different reasons. On Saturday night Seattle saw the first officially sanctioned professional boxing match between a man and a woman, and a sorry sight it must have been. Margaret McGregor scored a unanimous points decision over one Loi Chow, a jockey whose two previous experiences of the square ring had left him face-down in the resin with the distant sound of galloping hoofs in his head.

It is reported that when Chow received his first combination of blows to the head, he responded by bouncing away, smiling and doing not much else. In real life that is called chivalry; in the ring it is called maintaining a perfect record of defeats. But Chow's disgrace was in accepting the fight, not in losing it. Afterwards he declared: “I don't think I got whipped. I hit her with a couple of good shots.” That may be the saddest sporting quote you will ever hear outside of a Springbok press conference.

Apparently the occasion was not a commercial success, which means we will be spared the sight of Chow demanding a rematch over 1800m with riding crop and blinkers. Whatever the bout was – and it resembled more strongly a circus sideshow, the bearded lady taking on Tickey the clown for your viewing pleasure – it was not sport. I do not enjoy all-female boxing matches either, incidentally, but that is for reasons of taste and aesthetics and values that are these days disgracefully old-fashioned and (am I allowed to admit this in a national newspaper?) perhaps even sexist.

My objection to this match is very different. The principle of boxing is that it is a violent match-up of equals in a confined space – the purest distillation of the gladiatorial impulse. While this is a principle frequently violated in the raddled world of professional boxing – witness Mike Tyson versus Peter McNeeley – it is at least the sustaining myth. There can never, and in a civilised world could never, be a match-up between a man and a woman equal in expertise and experience. Simply, it would result in a terrible beating. It is a biological truth that in our legalistic society we are quick to forget – being equal does not mean being the same.

This does not preclude mixed participation in non-physical sports, of course, although I can't help noticing that the South African team for the 1999 World Scrabble Championships in Melbourne is an all-male affair. This, I suspect, is attributable more to common sense than strength of intellect. Team member Trevor Hovelmeier was quoted as saying that to play at international level, players need to memorise all 5140 four-letter words that exist in the English language. What intelligent woman is going to spend valuable time acquainting herself with the fact that
kino
is a dark red resin obtained from an Indian leguminous tree, or
xyst
is a training area for Greek athletes? That is the kind of thing that men do. It is no coincidence that trainspotting and batting averages were male inventions.

There is another good reason for discouraging inter-gender athletic contests. Serena Williams, that most uncouth of tennis professionals, recently applied to be wild-carded into a men's tournament. I tell you, it has me worried. There is only one male professional who you can be sure will find a way of losing to a 17-year-old girl, and haven't Wayne Ferreira's friends and family suffered enough already?

Rugby World Cup 1999: Why we dislike the English

BUSINESS DAY, 22 OCTOBER 1999

‘I
F WE LOSE
to England on Sunday,” said Sad Henry, down at the Chalk 'n Cue, “I am going to quit my job and become a full-time alcoholic.” We were not much troubled by this threat. Sad Henry has quit his job in order to become a full-time alcoholic on at least four occasions since 1992, but Sad Henry has expensive taste in alcohol, and it does not take him long to realise that in order to be a full-time alcoholic he needs at least a part-time job. Ideally Sad Henry should have a job that combines the two, but Percy Sonn has already taken it.

Still, we understood Sad Henry's anxiety. Of all possible ways to go out of the World Cup, losing to England ranks even lower than having the entire team expelled for being discovered at a private sauna party jointly hosted by Elton John and George Michael. There is not a country in the world to whom I would less like to lose, not even New Zealand. If we find the All Blacks unpalatable, it is largely because they remind us too much of ourselves. Sometimes New Zealand and South Africa sound like nothing so much as a pair of society matrons who have arrived at a party and discovered that they are both wearing the same dress. But to lose to England is not just infuriating, it is disgraceful.

One of my happiest rugby memories was Danie Gerber's inside swerve past Dusty Hare to score during the 1984 tour by John Scott's Englishmen, but that moment of almost transcendental pleasure was superseded by Jonah Lomu wiping the soil from his studs on Mike “Pussy” Catt's chest at Newlands in 1995. Who does not smile to remember the English cricket team losing to Mashonaland, or being bowled out for something like 24 by Curtley Ambrose on a flat pitch? Who is not, in their heart of hearts, looking forward to the spectacle of the English soccer team lining up to face another penalty shoot-out in a major tournament?

The delight in tormenting the Poms is the common bond uniting the southern superpowers. During the NZ–England pool match in this World Cup, Wayne Graham, a Kiwi commentator who makes Bill Lawry's cricket ravings sound like the measured wisdom of Solomon, took an especial liking to Lomu's try: “Yes! Yes! He's showing them a thing or two! They mispronounce his name over here! Yes, they do! They call him Low-mu! But he's shoving it down the face of the lofty English!”

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

A
T 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.