The Power of One (55 page)

The boxing matches at these outdoor venues usually started at six, just as the sun was beginning to set, and were over by eight, when it was still light enough on the highveld not to need lights over the ring. It was at another of these outdoor fights that we invented the famous “sunblinder.” The Prince of Wales boxer simply used the ring to face his opponent into the setting sun, which would momentarily blind him. The idea was to work an opponent around and then time a punch just as the hapless boxer moved into the direct line of the late afternoon sun. If a boxer was clever enough on his feet, this simple expedient could be made to work half a dozen times during a fight, often earning the extra points required to get the decision. The gentlemen Christians had no compunction about doing this to their opponents; after all, this was the Boer War and no quarter was given or expected. Morrie got the idea from a movie he had seen which showed how the Battle of Britain Spitfires had come out of the sun to pounce on unsuspecting German aircraft.

The People would watch the fights in silence until it was my turn to fight, and then invariably a soft, almost imperceptible hum would begin, growing in volume and, in the African manner, always in perfect harmony. Then a leader would take up a chant, which might go something like this: “He is the chief who comes in our dream time, the caster of spells and the bringer of wisdom.”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!” the People would chorus in reply.

“He can dance in the dew without leaving footprints and stalk the wind until it howls to be free.”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

“His blows are like the summer thunder and his lightning strikes his foes!”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

“For cunning he matches the thin moon and for wisdom the full, for is he not Lord of the dark and the light, the day and the night?”

“Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

“He will win for the People, he will win for all the people, in all the tribes, the People are all his people!”

“He will win, he will win, he will win for the People, Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!”

Once the fight started, there would be not a sound from the black spectators, and after I had won, the tall black man who had been present at my first fight in the school gym would raise his hand in the fisted salute. “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!” he would shout, and the blacks would silently leave. I was later to hear that the absolute silence during a fight was so they could not be accused of barracking for me and in so doing incur the wrath of my opponent's people and thus be banned from attending. In fact, the absolute silence from the African stands was uncanny and made a contribution to unnerving my opponents.

Morrie was quick to realize the potential of the black audience, and in return for admitting them to the boxing matches at the Prince of Wales School they were required to sing. This was thought no hardship, as most Africans love to sing, and soon a tradition was born. Morrie also persuaded Darby White to move my fight up so that I was higher on the bill. This meant that the black audience would be able to stay to see me fight while still allowing them time to be home by nine o'clock curfew.

Parents and members of the public began to attend these summer evening fights, and the Afrikaans schools were forced to do the same as we to attract white spectators. The fights became popular events, with the African singing a big drawing card, leading, as it did, to what was soon regarded as the feature of the entertainment, the chant that preceded my bout.

It is an indication of the enormous dichotomy between white and black that for the first three years, no white spectator bothered to ask for a translation of what was being said in the chants. People seemed intrigued by the fact that a small white boy had gathered a huge black following, but they simply put this down to my skill as a boxer. The presumption of the white man knows no bounds in Africa. The full story would never come out, but somewhere along the line the words “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi” were translated to mean “Tadpole Angel.”

“Tadpole Angel” quickly became my fighting name among the whites and also, to my extreme mortification, among the kids in the Afrikaans schools. Translated into English, it was a dumb name, and my embarrassment increased when it was further modified by an antifollowing of Afrikaners who referred to me as “little angel” and even sometimes as “Mama's little angel.”

Though it was not large in number, I was conscious of this very vocal group who, like the much larger group of blacks, attended every fight, but who came in the hope that “Mama's little angel,” the kaffir
boetie,
would come to a sticky end at the hands of one of their own kind.

By contrast, the People saw the name in only one light. I was fighting for them against the Boer. The tangible evidence of the enemy in the form of the dissident group of Afrikaners only served to increase their fervor. Their numbers multiplied each week and their chants grew more elaborate and beautiful. In fairness I must add that there were whites who were on my side, adult Afrikaners who loved to see me box and didn't give a damn about my being a
rooinek.

The fact that I hadn't been beaten wasn't as big a deal as it may seem; there were several kids from other schools who also enjoyed unblemished records. It is not unusual for a talented boxer to go unbeaten in as many as 150 fights.

My mind was permanently focused on a single fixed point, the welterweight championship of the world. I thought about it so often, reaffirmed my determination so frequently, that hardly an hour of my life passed when it wasn't in my thoughts. It came to seem that to lose a fight would be a backward step in the pursuit of my goal, a hairline crack in my armor. The only way I was going to lose would be to come up against a boxer who was a helluva lot better than I—not just more talented but also a lot better trained.

I was seldom concerned with winning a particular fight; instead I was cultivating the habit of winning. Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do, so I found I won in other things as well.

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched on a whole heap of other responses a fourteen-year-old can't really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn't think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.

Doc and Mrs. Boxall had taught me to think. Doc's life was a constant preoccupation with minutiae; his eye sought always what lay hidden yet was important. He knew that nature guards her secrets, that acute observation begins with a questioning mind. “Always to ask questions,
ja,
this is so, maybe the answers come slow, but always they are coming if you wait with your head and your eyes.”

Geel Piet had taught me to anticipate the problems likely to occur in any situation and to review the answers to them long before disaster struck. His mind was a network of emergency plans. He expected the worst, and when it happened he had already designed a way to handle it. Small boys are not natural pessimists, yet he had taught me the value of a routine which, like fire drill, when practiced a thousand times, becomes an automatic reaction when crisis occurs.

Over all this lay Hoppie's dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually; emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness that left me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness that could later be used against me. Only Doc was allowed to know all of me with nothing held back.

But then even Doc was lost to me when the lightning of sex struck. Puberty arrived in a surge of lust. The talents my mentors had developed in me, and which I had unknowingly used so effectively to perfect my camouflage, were suddenly useless. Like a fat lady stripped of her girdle, the neatly contained contours of my emotions suddenly bulged. Nothing I had been taught prepared me for the onset of the sexual drive. I found myself more completely a loner than ever, but this time I was trying to keep the lid on an emotional cauldron that threatened to boil over and drown me.

I awoke each morning with a rigid tent pole, and in the school tradition, I took to the showers, using my erection as a hook over which to drape my towel. A boy's dormitory enjoys almost no privacy, and the walk to the showers was simply a part of the morning banter. While I joined in with the general hilarity at those of us who had been struck by sex lightning, I knew I was faking it. Buried deep where I hoped he would never surface lay Pisskop and his hatless snake. While circumcision was too common among the boys at the Prince of Wales to cause embarrassment, I believed my dick was the part of my anatomy that had started all my problems. And now it was behaving in a manner over which I had absolutely no control!

Sex had never been discussed at home. Among the boys in the boxing squad, it was referred to as “doing it.” Snotnose was said to be
almost
doing it to Sophie Smit, Captain Smit's daughter, having given her tits a feel-up in the dark at a Saturday matinee. And, it was hinted, he had felt
down there,
as well. “It smells like fish, you know,” Bokkie de Beer said, waving his index finger under my nose so that I was left in no doubt that Snotnose had experienced the next best thing to actually doing it.

It was quite amazing really, I had returned home for the Christmas holidays to discover that Sophie had sprouted proper tits, which, Bokkie de Beer assured me, wobbled when she ran. We all agreed that this was a certain sign that she was begging for
it
and that we were just the ones to oblige her.

I knew enough about the ways of the Lord to know that if I should find myself in the fortunate position of being able to do it to Sophie, I would be committing a mortal sin. On the strength of Snotnose's feel-up, we'd changed Sophie's name to “Sofa” in anticipation of all the lying on top of her we planned to do.

But in fact, I freely admit, even in my pubescent state, with my brains turned to meat loaf, I was aware that the chances of my achieving a supine Sophie were just about nonexistent. I also knew that the Lord, heavily backed by my mother, wasn't the sort of person who settled for innocence by omission. A sin committed in the mind is no less a sin for having been spun from the gossamer of one's imagination. My case was hopeless. Even for a sinner I was sinning in my head at an alarming daily rate, and not only in my head—also behind a closed toilet door, where I actively fantasized
doing it
to Sophie Smit.

The fact that I wasn't a proper born-again Christian somehow made it more important that I practice restraint. It became a test of character I was failing on a daily, sometimes twice daily, not to mention nightly basis. I tried to keep it down to a minimum, promising myself after each time that I was definitely cured, and this was the last time my fingers would play a tune on the pork flute. Ha, ha . . . some last time! Often, within an hour, I'd be back behind the toilet door. No matter how hard I tried to reform my wicked ways and to concentrate on other things, my tent pole would erect at the most awkward times during the day and I would have to sneak off to seek relief.

The trouble was that Morrie seemed not to have been struck by sex lightning at all. The bolt from the blue, which was driving me to sin daily, as well as making me suffer the most dreadful remorse, seemed not even to have singed him. He talked dirty in the usual schoolboy way, though never in the same explicit terms used by the constantly randy group around him. Not that I was among these big-mouth fantasizers; my sex life was clandestine, a furtive business. But what the others claimed out loud they'd like to do with the Vargas girls in
Esquire
magazine was simply an echo of what I felt myself. Cunning-Spider, Paul Atherton, and Pissy Johnson were also afflicted, though I was certain not as badly as I. Morrie, on the other hand, seemed to be sailing through puberty like a eunuch.

I don't want to go on about it, but it was an awkward time and, because it disrupted the carefully constructed pattern of my existence, it forced me to think about other aspects of my life.

As the pain of puberty passed I realized that my newly maturing body was also affecting the way I thought. Hitherto I had never questioned the motives of the adults around me, nor had I felt any reason to question the conventional wisdom they assumed was correct for me. Now, doubt tugged at my relationships with grownups like a minnow darting at a baited hook. I was beginning to see that the plans for my future were being made largely by other people. That in return for being allowed to dream my boxing dream, I was allowing others to map the road toward that goal, and the road ahead in general for me. I was perceived as a winner—and everyone likes to help a winner.

Doc had taught me the value of being the odd man out: the man who senses that there is an essential collective sanity to humans and who assumes the role of the loner, the thinker, and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was based on the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth, and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power.