"But I Digress ..." (27 page)

The death of Hansie

BUSINESS DAY, 5 JUNE 2002

T
HE DEATH OF
Hansie Cronjé matters. Watching the television tributes – all slow-mo replays and sad strings and freeze frames – I felt my throat tighten and heart sigh. I felt myself remembering my own favourite moments of Hansie.

I remembered the time he took five wickets in a one-day match against India, when I had drawn his name as my player in our regular drinking game over at Chunko's house. I had to drink every time Hansie's name was mentioned by the commentators. Hansie had never really bowled in a one-day match before, so I fancied myself safe. I had to work the next morning. You would be surprised how many times a player gets mentioned by the commentators when he is a non-regular bowler taking a five-for in a one-day international.

I remembered being at Centurion when he struck the second fastest test 50 ever, to win a match against Sri Lanka that Muttiah Muralitheran seemed to be claiming. I remembered sitting and watching on television as he slogged Shane Warne into cow corner, and turning and saying to Chunko: “Thank god Hansie is South African.”

I watched the television tributes and I felt profoundly sad. Hansie was one of those public figures who truly are public figures, because he
meant
something to each of us. He symbolised values and fears and beliefs and points of pride and points of shame. The sadness I felt was in the waste of his legacy. For nearly 10 years he had made me proud to be South African, he had given me faith and hope and belief in something, and he carried a burden of expectation that no human being could ever truly bear. Which is why I was never – and will never be – able to forgive him for falling. The anger and sorrow he caused me was as disproportionate as the pride and joy he had brought.

As someone who mattered to us, what he did mattered more than what you or I do. It is not fair, but it is what happens to public figures. If they live in our dreams, and our dreams of ourselves, their lives become more than the lives of real people. They become the stuff of drama and tragedy and symbolism, like figures in Greek legend who fly too close to the sun. Hansie fell from his pedestal, and then this week he fell – far too literally – from the sky. Hansie Cronjé was more than a real person, but he was also a real person, and the real person's life is over. We must mourn that, but we should not forget the full story of Hansie Cronjé. In his failings as well as his successes, he meant something. In death as well as life, he matters.

A new sports hero

BUSINESS DAY, 11 JULY 2002

I
HAVE A NEW
sports hero. He is, in fact, a hero for the modern times. Not only is he a true all-rounder, participating in an impressive range of events, but he embodies many of the old-fashioned values of sport itself. In these soulless, professional times, such is his love of his craft that he actually pays to participate, and in doing so, he shakes up the sanitised, pre-packaged formulae to which spectator sports have been subjected since the dominance of television programming and modern sponsorship demands.

His name is Mark Roberts, but you would know him better as that guy who streaked across Centre Court at Wimbledon last Sunday, performed a naked barrel-roll over the net and was bustled away, waving to an appreciative crowd. Mark Roberts was the most entertaining part of the men's final. And if I were the brains trust behind international men's tennis I would consider putting him on permanent retainer.

But Mark Roberts' sporting talents are too broad to confine him to the tennis tramlines. Mark has risen like a pink spectre at more than 150 sporting events, but he reserves his stand-out performances for the football pitch. He has popped up at the Champions League final (where he apparently dribbled upfield and slipped one past Bayern Leverkusen's goalie, the perfectly named Hans-Jorg Butt), and also at last year's FA Cup final, where alas he was denied the opportunity to complete the double by getting one over Nicky Butt. Whether David Seaman was equal to his shooting is unfortunately unrecorded.

Mark is a dedicated athlete. He is in sufficiently good shape that his appearances are greeted with a hearty hooray from the crowds, rather than the appalled silence that would follow the unkitted performance of, say, me. More than this, he has apparently paid out more than R30 000 in fines over the years, in pursuit of his athletic ambitions. From the delighted expressions on the faces of the crowd on Sunday, they would have been happy to have a quick whip around and pay this latest fine. You could almost feel the sense of the anticlimax when they had to get back to Lleyton Hewitt and David What's-his-name.

I was half hoping for Mark to come freewheeling out in the Tour de France this week, but no such luck. Spokes and bicycle chains, I suppose, are not the streaker's friends. Not to mention those sudden gear changes.

I know this sort of thing is not really to be encouraged – and when it is drunk men with moustaches running onto the rugby field while play is in progress, it is to be deplored – but Mark chooses his moments between spells of play, and he is such a consummate professional that I cannot but warm to him. Sometimes it is a relief to find that there is still space in professional sport in which something may happen that has not been planned and approved by the corporates.

Rugby's day of shame

BUSINESS DAY, 15 AUGUST 2002

P
IETER VAN ZYL
is on everybody's lips, if you will pardon the expression. No matter what else happened in the world of sport this past week, the principal topic of conversation was Pieter van Zyl, the man in the tatty jersey who waddled onto the field during the match on Saturday to put the hurt on referee Dave McHugh.

Pieter van Zyl was too good, or bad, to be true. If the Australian Rugby Union had wanted to hire someone to besmirch the name of South Africa and had sent down to central casting for a likely candidate, they could not have dredged up a more perfect stereotype than Pieter van Zyl. The Australians would have been as pleased with him as the JFK conspirators were when they found Lee Harvey Oswald.

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

S
OME 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.