"But I Digress ..." (25 page)

Paralympics

BUSINESS DAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2000

I
AM NOT SURE
what it says about us as a sporting nation that over the past four years our Olympic performance has subsided while our Paralympians have improved their medal haul by about 30 per cent. I am not sure that I want to think too deeply on the matter, although I do know that it will make me far less likely to curse and hurl unmerited threats at absent polio sufferers the next time I screech into a vacant parking bay, only to discover that taunting yellow wheelchair painted on the tarmac.

Ooh, they infuriate me, those yellow-painted wheelchairs, but I suppose it is all in a good cause. Walking an extra 500m with an armful of shopping is a small price to pay for an additional gold medal or two.

For the Paralympians to train and qualify and compete at the games is indeed a fine achievement and an example in endurance and fortitude to those of us who are too quick to grumble and whimper when we misplace the remote control and have to get up off the couch to change channels manually, but the coverage of the games provided the keen observer with other more profound lessons about human nature.

For a certain lazy kind of writer, it has been easy to eulogise the men and women of the Paralympics as models of moral rectitude, shining examples of all that we could or should be. The ideal of Olympic sportsmanship is long dead, and the sentimental tendency is to transfer that idealism onto the Paralympics.

If you are a one-legged shot-putter, or an armless butterfly swimmer, the suggestion goes, you are somehow necessarily lit by a purer and more noble flame. You are different in fundamental ways from a two-legged putter of the shot: you are more morally admirable. This is, of course, a patronising nonsense.

As the Paralympians themselves would be first to remind us, a human being with a physical disability is still a human being, subject to the same weaknesses and temptations as the rest of us. If anything, the Paralympics were riven with even more scandals and squabbles than the Olympics. The power-lifters demonstrated that theirs is a sport that, across the spectrum of physical challenges, attracts the kind of dimwit who cannot figure out how far in advance of the competition to stop taking performance-enhancing drugs. Similarly, scarcely an event went by without protests and accusations that this or that medallist was not quite as disabled as he or she was officially registered as being. There are subtle gradations of disability invisible to the naked eye, but evident to the partially sighted one.

My favourite cheating wheeze, though, is the practice of “boosting”, in which, if newspapers are to be believed, athletes put their nether regions to excruciating torture in order that the body's release of adrenaline will boost their performances. This is obviously only feasible if one has no sensation below the waist, but some of the more grisly practices included nailing one's genitals to the wheelchair, twisting elastic bands around the testicles and blocking off catheters so that the bladder fills to capacity. Not the sort of thing you would expect to find Stephen Hawking doing while mulling over an especially tricky equation.

I found it all weirdly comforting. It reinforced what we all should already know: a person in a wheelchair is not a different kind of person from you or me; it is you or me in a wheelchair, just as courageous, cowardly and sneaky as we are, just as weak and strong as everyone else. Congratulations for the medals, Amakrokokroko. You made us proud.

Keep in character

BUSINESS DAY, 12 APRIL 2001

S
OME YEARS AGO
, when George Foreman came rumbling back from the gloom and darkness of sporting middle-age to become the oldest man to win the heavyweight boxing title, twenty-odd years after his Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali, he discovered that the world of sports was entirely changed.

As late as the 1970s, a sportsman's involvement in marketing and commerce seldom extended beyond wearing a particular sweatband, or perhaps posing for a still photograph for a magazine advertisement. Ali bent those rules, as he bent so many others, but even he was really only ever marketing himself. In the 1970s Foreman had the same dark, frightening charisma that Sonny Liston had a decade before. It was a charisma based on violence coupled with silence.

To read Norman Mailer's account, for instance, of the weeks leading up to the Rumble in the Jungle, or to watch
When We Were Kings
, the outstanding documentary of the fight, is to see the same picture: Ali dancing and clowning and preening in the foreground, like a parakeet or a poppinjay, trying to distract our attention and probably his own from the brooding shadow of Foreman, stalking the background like a muscular jungle panther. In the film there is a dazzling montage of the two training in Kinshasa. Ali is skipping, smiling, chattering, chanting rhymes, philosophising about the nature of prettiness. There are beaming people standing around; some are sipping what seems to be champagne.

This is intercut with Foreman standing alone before a heavy bag in a dimly lit room, feet apart and rooted to the ground. He looks neither up nor down, swinging body blow after body blow into the bag, blows that cause the fundament to shudder, like a man chopping down a redwood. Each punch, Mailer tells us in his book, could stave the hull of a whaleship.

Watching today, knowing what happened, I still cannot imagine how Foreman could lose, how he did not kill Muhammad Ali. Such was the power of Foreman's enigma, the force of his silence. He allowed us to invest him with our darkest fears and fantasies. He was like a principle of nature.

Then, when he returned, he discovered that sportsmen could make even more money out of the ring than in it. He became Smiling George, the cheeseburger spokesman. He appeared on chat shows and music videos. I had the misfortune to watch him star in his very own infomercial for George Foreman's patented fat-free cooking skillets, or some such. A grinning Foreman cracked jokes and demonstrated how to fry a steak that tastes good without making you worry at the weigh-in. It was a depressing turn of events. It always is when this fantasy world of sport, in which we invest so much of our human desire for archetypes, for grand narratives, for good and evil, for epic tales and truths and mythic characters, is revealed to be made up of nothing more than people with sporting ability.

I was reminded of George Foreman while watching a recent cricket test match from Antigua. One of the commentators was Sir Vivian Richards who, in his own way, was a Foreman of the cricket pitch. He swaggered out to bat with an arrogance that was hostile. He owned the ground, he bullied and brutalised anyone who lined themselves against him. You feared for the safety or at least the mental well-being of his opponents. He was like a man apart, not quite bound by mortal rules.

Yet there he was, chatting away with Mike Haysman, yapping sweet pleasantries, making silly jokes and giggling like a small girl. At one point he took time out to promote an Antiguan movie in which his brother is acting – some Caribbean blockbuster titled
The Sweetest Mango
. He was, it must be said, utterly charming, but this was not the force of nature I had grown up fearing. This was not the concentrated essence of cricketing thunder. I liked him, but another sporting archetype quietly crumbled away. Say what you like about Geoff Boycott, but at least he is always in character.

Persecution complex

BUSINESS DAY, 19 APRIL 2001

E
VERY SO OFTEN
I have occasion to find myself in the small hamlet of Parys. The small hamlet of Parys, while being neither as large nor as cosmopolitan as its namesake in France, and lacking such other typically French features as swanky restaurants and the Eiffel Tower, has many things going for it that the real Paris does not. For instance, there are almost no Frenchmen in Parys, and that is an advantage not to be sniffed at. Or indeed, to use a more typically Parisian response, sneered at, sniffed and spat at.

Whenever I am in Parys I visit a local watering hole rejoicing in the name of Heinie's. I have not met the eponymous Heinie, and if I am careful and lucky, I may never do so. Heinie's is a good place to absorb local colour and also to absorb beer.

This weekend I was there, watching the Bulls play the Reds. Ordinarily I avoid watching the Bulls play. I am not one of those fair-weather SA sports fans who only support a winning team, but watching the Bulls goes beyond the call of duty. Even Bulls fans do not watch Bulls games any more. It is too depressing. In medieval times, the equivalent would have been watching the village idiot beat himself repeatedly over the head with a stick. But there I was, and I am glad I was. It was worth watching if only for Joost van der Westhuizen, who is still in my book the best scrumhalf in SA and possibly the universe. He is as hard, predatory and downright miraculous as ever he was. Without him, the Bulls would have lost by 370 points.

It was also worth watching the game in order to be gifted a glimpse into the inner life of a hidden South Africa. A man sat himself down beside me. He wore large glasses and a wig he must have found in a Parys second-hand store. I think it had once been a lampshade, but the gent had trimmed it to resemble those limp, lank hairstyles favoured by European soccer players in the 1970s. The game began. It seemed clear to me, and I would have assumed to every sentient creature watching, that the Bulls were once more busily going about the business of beating themselves. More than that – they beat themselves mechanically, efficiently, like self-cleaning carpets of the future. As passes were spilt and players fell the wrong way in tackles, I groaned and buried my face in my hands. So did the gent with the wig, but gradually I realised that his lamentations were directed not at the quality of play, but the referee.

The worse the Bulls played, the more forceful he became. “The referee hates us,” he spluttered in Afrikaans. “They sit in Australia and they say to their referees:
Whatever you do, don't let those boerseuns win
.”

I have always considered myself as enthusiastic a ref-basher as the next man, but now I realise that is only true if the next man is not sitting next to me in Heinie's bar. I do not know what psychic debt it would have cost that man and his pals to admit that a South African rugby team might simply not be good enough, but it was more than they were equipped to pay. It must be exhausting to have the unflagging conviction that every foreigner out there, every other person in the entire world, is engaged in a ceaseless conspiracy to make your life an individual misery. It is a burden that must make the shoulders sag.

Still, there are upsides. We watched the Stormers game that followed, and while my heart sang with the joy of it, my happiness had nothing on the man with the wig. He turned to me at the final whistle, a strange light glowing in his eyes. “They all try to beat us,” he yelled, “but they can't. We are kings. There is nothing we can't do!”

Then he adjusted the lampshade on his head and went to the bar with shoulders held square.

Comrade Porky

BUSINESS DAY, 7 JUNE 2001

P
ORKY WITHERS IS
in training for the Comrades marathon. You must understand the magnitude of that statement: the last time Porky Withers was seen moving at any pace faster than a contented stagger was when Big Bob Plummer accidentally zipped up Porky's tie in his briefcase and walked out the door.

But it's true: he has given up ordering a chaser with his breakfast beer, and Sad Henry caught a glimpse of Porky in tracksuit and running shoes just this morning, doing his warm-up stretches. “He was touching his knees,” said Sad Henry with an impressed sort of voice.

Every afternoon we sit in the Chalk 'n Cue and watch Porky Withers come sagging past the plate-glass window. Every 40 minutes or so he reappears, looking yet purpler in the face, his knees buckling further, his torso dragging closer to the ground, his sweat band slipping lower and lower over his eyes. It takes him two hours to complete four laps. Do not imagine that Porky Withers is running around the neighbourhood – nay, not even around the block. He is running around the Chalk 'n Cue.

Getting fit will kill Porky Withers, we all agree as we watch Leon the barman carry Porky inside, lay him down on the bar and pour gin into his mouth, using a rolled-up newspaper as a funnel. Some people are just not fit to be fit.

The rest of us know our limitations: we are in training to be Comrades marathon tele-refs. To be a tele-ref is surely a passion smouldering in every SA sport watcher's bosom. We are all experts in our fields – being able to yell insults at the referee is almost a prerequisite to qualifying as an SA sport watcher. I once became an expert in curling, a peculiar northern hemisphere sport involving ice and flat weights with handles, after just four minutes of watching the Nagano Winter Olympics. You have not seen a sad sporting sight until you have seen a South African in grubby vest and white boxer shorts yelling advice at a bunch of Scandinavians in furry parkas on the other side of the world.

Most of us would reluctantly admit that we are probably not up to the rigours of actually running from one side of a rugby field to another or standing all day in the Calcutta sun and still being able to monitor every nuance of the tackle-ball rule or every infringement of the front-foot no-ball. Being a tele-ref, though, is a job that causes our very DNA to cry out in happy recognition. “Hell, yes! I can watch a slow-mo replay and tell you that the ball bounced this side of the line! That's a job I can do!”

The latest tele-ref is to monitor the Comrades marathon. It was announced this week that some highly trained individual will sit in front of a television set, no doubt keeping himself hydrated and with a dedicated team to massage his thighs, and watch 11 hours of coverage, keeping a crafty eye peeled for suspicious behaviour during the race. The object is obviously to try to nab the legion of dedicated Comrades cheats, although I suspect the definition of “suspicious behaviour” may have to be more clearly defined. In my book, running for 11 hours dressed up like a rhinoceros is sufficiently suspicious to be grounds for thorough psychiatric investigation, and you can imagine how delighted I was one year to recognise my investment broker trotting along in baby's diaper and bonnet, sucking on a dummy.

There will be other mobile referees on motorbikes, zooming between the runners and inspecting them for signs of being someone else, but I would guess that the tele-ref has the hardest job. If recent years are anything to go by, he or she will have to brave 11 hours of the commentary of Lindsay Waite – not a commitment to be undertaken lightly. Whoever the tele-ref may be, I hope they are up to the task. I wish all competitors well in the run-in to the big run-out, but always remember: there's more to life than health.