But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  There have been other attempts: the gold chain that turned her neck green; the T-shirt that announced “World’s Best Mom”; the fluffy Garfield with suction pads on his paws to attach to the back window of the car. If you were to pile up all the gifts I gave when I was a child, it would look like the props wardrobe for Jerry Springer’s American show. Adult efforts haven’t been much better: the complete collection of potted cactuses of the world; the tickets on a so-called pleasure cruise that turned out to feature Margaret and Ferdinand from Big Brother as special celebrity hosts. Through it all she has reacted with great excitement and gratitude – except, obviously, the cruise that turned out to have Margaret and Ferdinand as special celebrity hosts. After that she said: “Really, dear, all I want is a telephone call. Please.”

  If you are a mom, bless you. Sons are not always good at thank-yous. But thank you. Happy Mother’s Day.

  Somewhere over the rainbow

  CAPE TIMES, 30 MAY 2003

  I HAVE BEEN PLANNING a holiday. Even the most diligent and workaholic columnist needs from time to time to breathe that sweet, sweet air that is not clogged by the miasma of deadlines, and to stretch and yawn and shut his eyes far from the crash and rattle of outraged readers’ letters hitting his doorstep. Why outraged readers can’t just write their letters on regular paper like everyone else, I’ll never know.

  So I have of late been perusing travel brochures. Ah, but the world is pretty in travel brochures. Everywhere at the far end of a long-distance flight, it seems, is nothing but one long, empty palm-lined beach, or an endless succession of noble and ancient ruins, proud and deserted, lit by the gentle golden light of sunset. I would like to live in a travel brochure, or at least travel in one. Nowhere in travel brochures are there queues of unhappy people waiting for a delayed flight; nowhere in travel brochures are there vast Americans with shirts like shower curtains and backsides like an Engen garage, shouldering past you to rub their bellies against the Mona Lisa. In travel brochures the only people you ever see are happy locals, ready to offer you a tasty drink in half a hollow pineapple, or cool strangers in evening dresses with a glint in their eye to suggest passionate assignations behind the curtains at the Vienna Opera House.

  Sometimes I think the best part of travelling is the part before you leave, when you can imagine a perfectly framed world of edited highlights. Of course, the canny traveller knows that this is just a dream. “Travel” and “travail” (meaning “painful or laborious effort”) were in Middle English precisely the same word, with the same meaning. I’m not sure that things have changed all that much.

  Still, it is a beautiful dream. Whose heart is so flinty they didn’t sigh to recently read of one Koichiro Takata, a 22-year-old ophthalmology student from Japan, who was so disappointed by his holiday in Kashmir that he tried to commit suicide? The fact that Mr Takata chose Kashmir for his dream holiday – presumably edging out such rival fun spots as Kabul and Mosul and Khartoum – should probably tell us something about his judgement, but I felt a strong pang of sympathetic recognition when he announced from his Kashmiri hospital bed: “This place does not look like my travel brochures. This is not the Kashmir I read about. I feel hurt.”

  It seems that, upon landing in Kashmir, Mr Takata became anxious about the armed soldiers patrolling the streets, feeling they detracted from the natural beauty of the place. Apparently there were no camouflaged gunmen in any of his travel brochures. Unable to stand the disappointment a second longer, Mr Takata produced a pair of scissors and started stabbing himself in the chest. I myself have at times been tempted to produce a pair of scissors and stab my travel agent, not to mention the person sitting next to me on the flight, but I have always stopped short of turning the clippers on myself. I suppose my sense of personal honour is just not as powerful as Mr Takata’s. The Kashmiri Tourism Authority declined to comment, which is probably sensible.

  Mr Takata has since made a full recovery, and says he will not be dissuaded from future travelling. Bless you, Mr Takata, for continuing to be a dreamer. The world needs dreamers, but if you ever make it to Cape Town, I sincerely hope there isn’t a cloud covering the mountain on the day you arrive.

  Sport

  Losers in sport

  BUSINESS DAY, 1 OCTOBER 1999

  THIS MAY SEEM UNLIKELY, but something Craig Jamieson said recently made me pause to think. Interviewed on television, the former Natal rugby captain reminisced about the province’s famous first-ever Currie Cup final victory in 1990.

  “It was a tight game,” he recalled fondly, “but then Theo van Rensburg missed a tackle and gave us the title.” I winced in sympathy with Theo, who was no doubt at that moment frozen in horror, braai tongs in hand, wors half-turned, his mates all pretending to find something fascinating to read in the newspaper.

  But then an image floated into my head: it is the final minute of a home test against France, South Africa one point behind. Theo steps up to take a kick almost directly in front of the poles. Like a great soggy baguette, the ball wobbles wide. Dizzy from a memory I had successfully repressed for the better part of a decade, I felt my sympathy for Theo van Rensburg evaporate. “Serves the loser bastard right,” I snarled.

  One of the fundamental truths of sport is that, regardless of talent or training, some sportsmen are winners, some are losers, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Indeed, the athletes we take most enthusiastically to our hearts are those who parlay unexceptional gifts into the stuff of greatness. The World Cup squad of 1995 is an obvious case: a modest team with all the flair of a pair of stovepipe jeans, but when it came down to it, Stransky’s drop went through, and Mehrtens’ went wide.

  Consider Gerrie Coetzee, one of the most gifted heavyweights of the post-Larry Holmes era, who contrived to lose first to a drug addict and then to Frank Bruno, himself a confirmed loser and an Englishman to boot. Baby Jake Matlala, by contrast – a man knee-high to Martin Locke, with a punch like a slap from Glenn Hicks – is a multiple world champion. Baby Jake is a winner, Gerrie was a loser.

  The most obvious breed of loser is the Choker. Wayne Ferreira and Elana Meyer are champions in this breed, and they say their prayers to St Zola Budd of the Order of Perpetual Fourth Place. They are classic chokers – extravagantly talented, but blessed with the mental toughness of a punnet of Denny’s button mushrooms. To them BMT is a sandwich with bacon, mayonnaise and tomato. Their careers are as predictable as a Hugh Bladen commentary: when the heat is on, when they are in a position to make that single step to greatness, they wilt like Steve Hofmeyr being handed a condom.

  South African chokers – from Kevin Curren to Okkert Brits – is a favourite topic with my friend Phillip, especially after the fourth beer. His explanation – simple, yet sound – is that so many South Africans choke on the big stage because they had maids making their beds when they were kids. They are soft, pampered, cut off from the consequences of their actions: if they spill Nesquik on the sheets, by the next time they get into bed everything will be smooth and clean and snuggly. There is always an excuse, someone to blame, a reason for not doing the dirty work themselves. You would think that someone with Wayne’s complexion or Elana’s voice would know something about overcoming hardships, but no – they would rather dream up a hamstring injury and hobble off into that hazy, humourless middle distance reserved for sulkers and chokers. They should be struck firmly and frequently with a blunt object – preferably Hugh Bladen – and taken to a training camp for the South African paralympic team to be taught a few hard truths about grit, guts and gratitude.

  There is of course another breed – the Unlucky Loser, whose AGMs are chaired by that Job in cricket flannels, Andrew Hudson. If you are an Unlucky Loser, you can have so much talent and temperament that it is running down your leg onto the pitch, but things still will not go your way. A cover drive will rebound off a passing seagull onto your stumps; an earthquake will trip you up while starting off for a sharp single. Unlucky Losers are nice guys, for the most part, b
ut you would not want to be on an aeroplane with them.

  By contrast, consider Mark Boucher, who is that most glorious sporting treasure – a lucky player. He will drop the straight balls that miss the bat, and snag the impossible catches; his eyes-shut slog six will win the match. We need that sort of luck at least as much as ability. If our team is ever again to reach the World Cup final, it will be due to training and tactics and even talent. If we are ever again to win, however, it will only be because, when it truly matters, we are not Losers.

  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

  WHEN 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

  ‘IF 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 a
lready 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!”