But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  I think a good deal of the embarrassment we felt on Saturday was not as much caused by the pitch invasion as it was by the very sight of Van Zyl being manhandled off the park in his faded Springbok jersey with “Bokke” on the back, hiking up over a belly the size and shape of a volkstaat, his face a pudgy smudge of belligerent incomprehension. The heart sank to see him, the way the hearts of French people must sink to see caricatures of a Frenchman in a stripy shirt and beret, chewing a garlic clove and twirling his moustache and saying “Ooh-la-la”.

  But cliché though he was, and as much as you would hesitate to invent such an obvious character for a novel or a screenplay, it is possible to see Pieter van Zyl as a powerful symbol of the political dilemma of old white SA.

  There is no doubt that Pieter van Zyl was frustrated by the ref. We were all frustrated by the ref. The game was blown with more even-handedness and consistency than any of the other Springbok games during this Tri-Nations tournament, but we were still hamstrung by two McHugh decisions of unparalleled awfulness that brought about a 14-point swing in the result of the match. The All Blacks received no such decisions, nor have the opposing team in any of the Tri-Nations matches involving the Springboks. I wish a South African had not run onto the field to assault a match official, but I cannot honestly say that deep in my heart I am sorry to see pain inflicted on one of these referees. Let them get back some of the pain they have been inflicting on me. Given the right circumstances – mainly, without several hundred thousand witnesses – I would have been sorely tempted to do the same thing. My chief regret is that it was not Stuart Dickinson.

  Still, the forces that pulled Pieter van Zyl onto that field like tectonic plates slowly pulling Madagascar free of Gondawanaland ran deeper than rugby. They were the frustration and bitterness of a decade of waning power, a decade of increasing helplessness and impotence. Pieter van Zyl felt short-changed by history, he has felt short-changed by history for some time now, and on Saturday, damn it all, he was not going to take it any more. There on Saturday, sitting in King’s Park, something inside Pieter van Zyl snapped, and he went waddling into that bright sunlight to wrest back his own destiny from a world lined against him.

  I do not mean to overstate the case, but it is truly said that sport – and especially rugby – is a conduit and a conductor for the powerful emotions that run through us. Pieter van Zyl’s frustrations found a focal point in a game of rugby and in the figure of the referee. There is something inside me that whispers that it is perhaps fortunate that they found the precise outlet they did. It is a shame for rugby, but it may be a good thing for society. If he wasn’t running onto a rugby pitch, he may have been doing something altogether more frightening. There are many Pieter van Zyls in this country. Let us hope they all watch sport.

  With supporters like these, who needs opposition?

  BUSINESS DAY, 22 AUGUST 2002

  I WAS AT THE STADIUM on Saturday, in the open stand, for the Tri-Nations match between South Africa and Australia. It was my first test at Ellis Park, and as the sun sank over the Highveld and Werner Greeff burst through to bring more than 60 000 spectators to their feet, there was nowhere in the world I would rather have been. And yet I will think twice before returning. It is awful to spoil with unhappy thoughts what was such a magical day, but on Saturday I had a glimpse into something that has long puzzled me.

  For some years, and especially this season, I have been wondering why the Australians and New Zealanders dislike us so much. Obviously I am no great fan of your average Aussie or Kiwi, and nothing makes me happier than seeing a pair of slumped shoulders in a gold or black rugby jersey at the final whistle (unless it be a pair of slumped shoulders in an England jersey), but that is really just a jokey rivalry. The antipathy the Antipodeans feel for us seems to be quietly genuine. On Saturday at the stadium I took a look at some of the people around me, and I realised that if these are the South Africans to whom the international rugby fraternity are most frequently exposed, you can scarcely blame them for not liking us. I felt ashamed to be wearing the same colour green as some of those people.

  It is not just the bozos that pelted the Australians with bottles after their third try, and it was not just the cretin who tried to rush the field and tipped head-first into the security moat. It was worse. In places – not everywhere – the air was thick with aggression and violence and the kind of large, florid-faced man who cannot handle his drink. Before the match even started there were scuffles in the crowd around me.

  One man left bleeding from a headbutt. Someone tried to defuse another scrap. “Come on, guys, we’re all on the same side,” he pleaded. I looked at the buffoons hitting each other in front of their wives and children, and wondered if I was happy being on the same side as them.

  Two burly Pieter van Zyls sucking brandy from plastic squeeze bottles amused themselves by standing at intervals during the game and stretching theatrically, sniggering when women asked them to sit, offering to fight the men. Still, the thrill of the game made me forget such people, and I was happy as I poured out of Ellis Park with the crowd. I was not happy for long.

  Two different individuals, wretched with alcohol, entertained their friends by shoulder-charging passers-by and knocking them to the floor. I was walking beside a man about my age, wearing an Australian rugby jersey. We fell into casual conversation. He was complimentary about the Springboks and we shared a laugh. That is what rugby is about. The next minute, three men with red faces and flecks of spittle on their moustaches were in front of us, screaming something Afrikaans in the face of the Australian, and me for associating with him. Things were becoming ugly until an elderly lady remonstrated with the men in Afrikaans. She turned and apologised as they stumbled off to go beat up their wives. “We are not all like that,” she said.

  Thankfully, that is true. The overwhelming majority of the crowd were decent folk who love the game and who spent a happy afternoon with loved ones. But those others – that awful species of South African that is even less fun to be around in victory than in defeat – are a blight on the nation. “Fans like me are what rugby is all about,” Pieter van Zyl said two weeks ago. It is not true. If it were, I would start watching hockey.

  How short can 100 metres get?

  BUSINESS DAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2002

  SOME PART OF the joy of being a sports fan is that sport is not a precise science. You can discuss forever whether these or those tactics should have been used, you can niggle over the nuances of selection and the imponderables of temperament and talent. It is impossible to quantify how good a given team or a given player might be, which allows for additional hours of pleasurably heated debate about whether young Ali would have whipped young Tyson, say, or how the 2001 Australian cricket team would have fared against the 1971 SA team.

  Such arguments are the very stuff of being a sports fan, and the deep pleasure they afford lies in the fact that they can be endlessly recycled and rehashed, picked over and tweaked and wrangled without any real prospect of resolution. In the right hands, such arguments can be as fruitful and creative and intellectually engaging as the most ardent academic dispute over the mechanics of evolution or the wave-particle nature of light. And yet there is another sporting event whose magnetic appeal lies precisely in the fact that it is measurable and quantifiable, and there is no room for dispute or debate. It is not a sport that much arouses the passionate imagination, but it speaks to a primal sporting – which is to say, human – curiosity.

  Almost the sole appeal of the 100m sprint for men is to answer the question: “Who is the fastest man in the world?” Increasingly, that question is inseparable from the question: “Who is the fastest man that has ever lived?” This week Tim Montgomery became the latest man to be the fastest man ever to have lived. His new world record of 9,78 seconds, set in Paris, was the shortest recorded time in which a man has run 100m from a stationary start. Even Ben Johnson, the thick-skulled, drug-cheating Canadian disgrace, only ran 9,79, even with chemical assistance
.

  At the time, before the drug scandal broke, observers were scratching their heads and wondering how it was possible for such a quantum leap forward in human physical achievement. Now the record is hailed, but it has hardly caused jaws to drop and headlines to be written. It is just taken for granted now that human beings are not only capable of continually physically improving, but are expected to do so. When we were little kids, it used to be a favourite topic of conversation to speculate whether there was a point, a kind of invisible golden line running through our communal DNA, that would prove to be the cut-off boundary of human speed. Surely, we speculated, there must be some point beyond which our bodies cannot go and will never go. For instance, no human being will ever be able to run 100m in two seconds, which means there must, somewhere on that timeline, be a time faster than which no human will ever run. Nine seconds? Eight seconds? We could not guess.

  And yet as long as a new sprinter keeps coming along every few years to lower the record by a thousandth of a second, it is hard to imagine the moment when the next wave of athletes, with their training and their nutrition and their genes, is not going to be able to run a thousandth of a second faster than the previous wave. Human beings are faster now than they have ever been before – the world record is always held by a sprinter of the current generation – and there is no reason to assume that trend is going to change. The 100m is more than a sporting event. It is a small showcase of selective human evolution. Where can it all end? I look forward to watching and finding out.

  Martina Navratilova

  BUSINESS DAY, 30 JANUARY 2003

  I AM NOT ORDINARILY someone who admires lesbians. Lesbians and I, historically, do not get along. We struggle, you see, to find common ground. We are often trying to meet the same women, we squabble over the same pool tables and I am always afraid to take off my denim jacket in case a lesbian tries it on. Have you ever tried retrieving a denim jacket from a lesbian? You could lose an arm that way.

  So no – by and large, lesbians and I are like icebergs and cruise liners. We may occasionally share the same waters, but it is usually better for all concerned if we do not bump into each other. And yet there are some notable exceptions. It would be my very great honour to bump into Martina Navratilova. Of course, if I did, I know who would come off second best. She may be 46 years old, but that is one tough old broad.

  Back in the 1980s I was never a Navratilova fan. Chris Evert-Lloyd was my gal. I used to sigh for her little frilly skirts and her slender wrists and I used to lie awake at night gasping with pleasure at the thought of her two-fisted backhand. She was slight and feminine and I could imagine one day when I was older taking her to the matric dance. If Chrissie was the good princess in the morality play of women’s tennis, Martina was the ogre, the beast that kept cropping up to deny virtue its rewards. She stalked the courts like a panther stalking Bambi. “It is not fair!” we used to cry. “Martina’s too muscular and fast! She must be cheating. Real women are just not built that way!”

  Martina today is as strong and muscular as she has ever been, but when she steps on court in the presence of today’s lady tennis players – Davenport, the Williams, the other Williams – she looks as Chrissie once did. She looks like a girl playing men. And who would have predicted, 20 years ago, that it would be Martina who staked the lasting claim in the affections of those who follow, however peripherally, the world of tennis? Yet it was Martina who turned out to have the personality, the charm, the intelligence. And it is Martina who is still winning tournaments.

  Last weekend, at the age of 46 years and three months, Martina Navaratilova won the Australian Open mixed doubles title, playing with Leander Paes. That is 29 years – 29 years! – after her first Grand Slam mixed doubles crown, and provided her with the final title in her collection. She has now won the singles, doubles and mixed doubles titles at every single Grand Slam tournament. It is scarcely credible. And despite having returned to competitive doubles tennis “for the fun of it”, and despite having found a full and active life outside the game, she is as fiery, focused and competitive as ever in her long career. It is inspiring to watch.

  Martina is one of those rare, life-affirming stories that the soulless world of professional sport still manages to produce, despite itself. Like George Foreman in the 1990s, or Steve Redgrave’s heroics for the English rowing team, or Roger Milla playing for Cameroon, or Courtney Walsh almost single-handedly carrying the West Indies through their lowest ebb, Martina is a parable of commitment and intensity that defies the youthist propaganda of a commercial world that all too easily forgets its real heroes. Martina reminds us of the days when the money meant less than the winning.

  A World Cup protest

  BUSINESS DAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2003

  YOU MAY NOT have noticed, sitting so far away, as you are, but I am writing this with no clothes on. Yes, you heard me – no clothes on. Naked, in other words. This is not just because I made a number of unwise decisions at the J&B Met last Saturday, not least the decision to carry on betting even after the seventeenth complimentary glass of the sponsor’s product in the sponsor’s marquee. The last I remember is yelling, “I’ll put everything I have on The Badger in Race 10. See! Even my shoes!”

  But no, it is not just for reasons of poverty that I sit here writing all draughtily, feeling very thankful that modern technology allows me the safety of the personal computer, rather than the perilous keys of the old-fashioned typewriter. No, indeed, I am naked because I have gotten political. I am making a protest, damn it all.

  I was inspired by the footage on the television news this week of a gang of flabby lady journalists who apparently whipped off their kit and lay down on a deserted patch of Cape Town to protest against Bush going to war. Now, there are too many obvious jokes to be made at this point, so I shall constrain myself to saying that once I had stopped laughing, my own political conscience was pricked. I too believe there is a pressing issue worth protesting, and so I am.

  I shall remain in my pristine naked state as a statement against the commercial branding of cricket and sport and everything I hold dear. I do not mind the sportsmen themselves selling their faces and their names and spaces on their bats to large companies, but I most vehemently object to the principle of being told by the ICC what I may or may not wear to the ground during this year’s Cricket World Cup. All you good businessmen reading this column can tell me all you like how the money generated by exclusive rights is necessary so that we can afford all the fireworks and the giant cardboard zebras at the opening ceremony, and so that Ali Bacher can buy a nice houseboat when he retires, but I do not care. It is a matter of personal freedom.

  If, after I have paid the better part of two grand to a scalper to watch the opening game on Sunday, I choose to go to the ground dressed like that clown from McDonald’s, bouncing on a giant inflatable waving a banner saying “I only drink Fanta Grape”, I should be able to, dagnabbit. And then, of course, the guys on the bank behind me should have the right to smack me around a bit for obstructing their view.

  But I should most certainly be able to eat and drink whatever I please. For years now it has been almost mandatory to bring your own tasty treats to Newlands, otherwise you end up having to buy your sustenance from Anil’s Fine Boerie Rolls, or some such similar house of pain. No longer. Now, the only takeaway you are allowed to bring into the ground is apparently “a litre-bottle of unbranded water”. Vodka, in other words. Security is certainly going to be a thing to behold. If you get caught sneaking in a pipe bomb, you will be summarily ejected. If you get caught sneaking in a box of Nando’s flame-grilled chicken, you will get roughed up and then summarily ejected. Heaven help you if you get caught with a pipe bomb inside a box of Nando’s flame-grilled chicken.

  Well, I will not stand for it. In two days the World Cup begins, and I shall not be a stooge of the multinationals. When the anthem plays I shall be at home, naked, standing to attention, one hand over my heart, the other hand clutching any item of f
ast food it feels like clutching. I will not be branded, I tell you. I will not be herded. I will stay home and clutch my freedom. Plus, I do not have tickets to any of the games.

  World Cup opening ceremony

  CAPE TIMES, 10 FEBRUARY 2003

  PERHAPS YOU HAD to be there. I have spoken to a number of people who were at Newlands for the opening ceremony of the Cricket World Cup, and most seemed amiably impressed. “It was colourful,” said my friend Dan, “and, you know, loud.” He paused. “And there was a good feeling in the stadium.”

  I was glad to hear that, because there was not an especially good feeling in my living room. The ceremony on television was underwhelming. It was so underwhelming it would have had to borrow platform shoes and stand on tippy-toes just to reach the whelming mark.

  The problem was that it suffered by comparison – not with the Sydney Olympics, but with the 1995 Rugby World Cup. In 1995 we were less determined to produce a two-hour musical infomercial about why tourists should come to South Africa. The 1995 opening was not an extravaganza – there were speeches, PJ Powers, some people running around clutching lengths of crinkle-paper, but then there was that single, simple image that lives forever in the imagination: the airliner passing low over the stadium and stirring, shaking, moving everyone who experienced it.

  Memorable ceremonies need a defining image: the archers lighting the flame in Barcelona; a trembling Muhammad Ali bearing the torch in Atlanta. Saturday’s ceremony had no such moment, and for all the rah and razz about Africa, it had no real identity. It was a bafflement of people in leotards and plywood costumes, a fussy, jumbly, interminable medley of local music, and the longest, pushiest, most expensive travel brochure ever produced. It was as if the budget had been taken from the Cape Tourism Authority, and they were determined to get their money’s worth. Look! We have a mountain! And the sea! And a fashion industry! And … and animals! And the first heart transplant! And we invented the Rooivalk helicopter! Come visit us! Bring dollars!