"But I Digress ..." (23 page)

A celebration of cricket

BUSINESS DAY, 25 NOVEMBER 1999

H
ARK
!
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 sex

BUSINESS DAY, 27 JANUARY 2000

A
LAS, 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

H
OW 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

S
PORT 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 that 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.

Makepula won the fight, and won it well, but the decision was greeted with boos and disbelief. One local journalist wrote, across copy stained and speckled with his tears, that Makepula should not take his triumph as an indicator of his ability. Such are the emotions when a people's champion is defeated.

Makepula – an extraordinarily gifted fighter with remarkable accuracy of punch and a fine sense of the ring – may one day become people's champion in his own right, but for now he has to be content with champion of the world. If he does one day manage to lay the same claim to the hearts of The People (whoever they may be), he will be one of the lucky few South Africans to do so despite being blessed with luminous talent.

Baby Jake is the archetypal South African people's hero – a man cheerfully struggling in the face of adversity, overcoming desperate disadvantages (age; limited talent; being the only man that Martin Locke can pat on the head) and rising above himself through pluck, mental toughness and high work rate. We love our gifted winners, obviously – our Joosts and our Vuyani Bungus and our Penny Heynses – but it is the less gifted winners who claim their place in our myths and our dreams of ourselves.

Baby Jake will never lose his place in the South African psyche. For the greater part of the 1990s he was a parable of ourselves – he seemed to say that with hard work and good PR, the little guy can beat the world. That was what we most needed to hear.