"But I Digress ..." (26 page)

Kelehe's moving victory

BUSINESS DAY, 21 JUNE 2001

A
FTER THE DROUGHT
, a deluge. The sport came thick and fast this weekend. Television-watching muscles that had become soft through weeks of inactivity were made to stretch and ache as we reeled under the accumulative pleasures of having rugby, soccer and the Comrades marathon to digest in the space of two days. Of course, they were not undiluted pleasures. With renewed competition comes the shadow of defeat.

Happily, it was not defeat but the feet of Andrew Kelehe that kicked off the weekend. As stirring as it was to see the small man powering away from the Russians and surging into the stadium with all of SA riding on his shoulders, the moment of real beauty came as he crossed the finish line to be almost bowled over by his tearful wife Rose. Is there any dream that strikes a greater chord in the competitive heart of man than to have completed an epic trial in triumph, to be met with the wordlessly weeping joy and pride of the woman you love? It moved me to the quick.

At a stroke, Andrew Kelehe was Odysseus returning after 10 years on the wide and salty deep, and Rose was his Penelope. Who among us could hear her sobbing testimony without tremors of envy: “He is my husband,” she told Trevor Quirk, “and he keeps doing the impossible. He can do anything.” Is that not, deep down, what we all dream of one day hearing our wives and lovers say about us? I would guess Andrew will not be on washing-up duty in the Kelehe household for some while to come.

As much as I am puzzled and a little frightened by the very idea of longdistance road-running, Comrades is one of those great sporting spectacles. I feel about it the way I feel about test cricket: it is so magnificently pointless, so heroically futile that its very existence reminds us that humankind still gloriously struggles on in its senseless pursuit of happiness. We are odd creatures, thankfully, and Comrades shines like a beacon of oddness. No matter what is happening on the front page of the newspaper, I will be assured that all is still right with the world as long as there are 22 men still prepared to wear white flannels and chase a red leather ball for the better part of a week, or as long as there are pot-bellied men and women adorned with helium balloons who believe running from Durban and Maritzburg is a good idea. This is my article of faith: as long as Bruce Fordyce is still running Comrades, we are all going to be OK.

A day at Loftus

BUSINESS DAY, 2 AUGUST 2001

A
H, AND WHAT
a day it was. The afternoon was warm and bright, the air was so clear you could barely see it, and so thin that if you ran up the stairs to get to your seat, your lungs burnt as though they had been filled with braai-lighter fluid. Not that I attempted anything so foolishly energetic as running up the stairs to get to my seat.

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

P
ERHAPS 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

I
N
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.