"But I Digress ..." (29 page)

Cricket World Cup 2003: Saluting the winners

BUSINESS DAY, 27 MARCH 2003

I
WANTED INDIA TO WIN
the World Cup final. I wanted them to win for a number of reasons, but mostly because of Mershen and his son. I met Mershen as we shuffled along with the crush of people trying to enter the ground on Sunday morning. He and his son were both wearing the powder-blue Indian replica kit, and they had driven down from Zimbabwe for the final. Mershen's son was 10, and he hopped from one foot to the other, tugging at his father's shirt, fair bursting with excitement. As we edged closer to the security check, a roar from the stadium told us that the game had started. Mershen's son was beside himself with dread that India might be batting first, and that he might miss Sachin Tendulkar.

“He hasn't been able to sleep properly for three days,” Mershen whispered to me. “He can't believe he is going to see Sachin bat. All he can talk about is Sachin this and Sachin that and how many runs do I think Sachin will make and will Sachin hit a six?”

A man with a transistor radio turned and said that Australia were batting first. Mershen's son looked up with shining eyes. “Daddy!” he said. “We're going to see Sachin bat!” Mershen ruffled his son's hair and put one hand on his shoulder. Behind my sunglasses my eyes suddenly blurred and I felt deeply happy for this man and his son. That small boy will remember for all his life the day he came to Johannesburg and queued with his father at the Wanderers under clear blue skies to watch the World Cup final. I hoped against hope that Sachin would score a century for them.

I was not alone. As I sat in the Mondi Paper suite later that day, looking down on the impressionistic watercolour of the great green oval surrounded by swirls of clustered yellow and powder-blue shirts, I felt profoundly thankful that I was not Sachin Tendulkar, walking out to bat, bearing the dreams of a billion people. My heart leapt as he pulled the fourth ball of the innings to the boundary. The very earth shuddered, as though every Indian in the world had jumped at exactly the same time.

Then he skied the next ball and there was a low, breathless gasp from the stadium. It felt like some enormous punch to the crowd's collective gut. There are many stories of the unearthly sums of money that Sachin Tendulkar makes from endorsements, but as he walked slowly back to the pavilion, shoulders slumped, a man irredeemably alone and accompanied by the unheard howls of a continent, it occurred to me that he works hard for every cent.

And so Australia won, as they were always going to win. I have always loathed the Australians – from principled bad sportsmanship as much as anything else – but on that Sunday afternoon I finally surrendered. After a certain point, you simply cannot begrudge them victory. They win because they deserve to win. They win – over and above their talent – because they do everything right. They have the right back-up staff, the right philosophy, the right minds working behind the scenes. And they win because they have the right attitude. I have made much of how refreshing it has been to watch the enthusiasm and the passion of the Kenyans in this year's tournament, but it finally dawned on me, watching the Australians celebrating their wickets, watching them rush around Ricky Ponting at the end of the match in a spontaneous overflow of joy, that Australia is at least their match.

Where every other major team in the world seems to be stricken with in-fighting or personality clashes or the flatness of its jaded senior players, the Australians are a model of unity and mateship and enthusiasm. Cynics will say that it is easier to stay fresh and enthusiastic when you are winning. Perhaps, but after seeing the inexorable rise of the Aussies these past four years, it rather seems the other way round. I never thought I would hear myself say this, but my congratulations to Australia. We all have a lot to learn from you.

Henry Olonga and courage

BUSINESS DAY, 3 APRIL 2003

I
T IS EASY
to forget, sometimes, that sport stars are people. They inhabit a realm that is, for most of us, a realm of dreams, a theatre of the imagination. They are just the figures – tiny on the pitch or somewhat larger but equally distant on our televisions – that act out the roiling dramas that seem to spring whole from our own hearts. Sport, for most of us, fills a need that goes beyond support for this team or that team. It is more than just a way to pass a couple of hours on a Saturday. The attachment to sport is an attachment to a world within a world, a world of dramas and myths and archetypes that speaks to deeper parts of us than simply the parts that calculate who has won. Sport is as necessary to the soul as dreams or stories are, which is why we sometimes forget that sportsmen are not figures in dreams or characters from fiction.

That is why the public reacts with shock when their sport stars reveal themselves to be human beings – when they fix matches or refuse autographs or when you see them in a mall and they are like everyone else and do not much feel like discussing last weekend's match. It is an enormous burden that sport stars assume. When they step away from the sport arena and say or do something that has nothing to do with sport, the result is almost inevitably disappointment and disillusion, as though someone has turned on the house lights while the magician is doing his show, and suddenly you can see the hidden wires and trapdoors and false bottoms.

But every so often a sportsman does something to assert that he is a human being as well as a sportsman, and the result is relief and gratitude and admiration. That is how I felt as I watched Henry Olonga being interviewed on
Carte Blanche
this weekend. The world has been scandalously silent about the courage of Henry Olonga and Andy Flower. What they did – at the beginning of the World Cup – with their black armbands and their dignified statement about the death of Zimbabwean democracy encourages me as a human being.

Unbelievably, there are still the crabbed and inward voices of those who complain, with that desperately tired old argument, that Olonga and Flower were wrong to “bring politics into sport”. What Olonga and Flower did was to remind us all that we are human beings first, before we are sportsmen or sports fans, and that human beings have a responsibility to their own conscience and their sense of what is right.

It has become clear in the past month how much courage Henry Olonga's action demanded. Unlike Andy Flower, he was not poised to jet off to play county cricket in England and then state cricket in Australia. His principled stand saw him stripped of his place in Zimbabwean cricket, and then stripped of his home. Now he hides in Johannesburg, afraid to return to the place where a madman tramples on a nation.

While the English cricket team disregarded issues of morality and made their decision not to play in Zimbabwe simply a matter of safety, Henry Olonga explicitly disregarded his safety, and made his stand as a moral imperative. Against the unedifying backdrop of administrators and the media complaining that the situation in Zimbabwe might erode World Cup profits or tarnish the lustre of the tournament, men such as Henry Olonga and Andy Flower and Errol Stewart (who refused to tour with the A-team on the grounds of moral conscience) have given me faith that human beings still can cling to beliefs and values that surpass profit and revenue and the narrow description of their jobs.

I am used to being inspired by sportsmen on the field. I am used to being transported by sport into a place of heroes and villains, of courage and determination and action such as you only find in movies or old books. Flower and Olonga and Stewart remind us that these qualities can exist inside all of us. They deserve our gratitude.

Potchefstroom Olympic bid

BUSINESS DAY, 17 APRIL 2003

T
ODAY IS A
mighty day, my friends. Today we stand on the threshold of a bright new beginning for world sport, and the good readers of this column are the first to know about it. This very evening Cape Town sees the launch of “Potch 2012” – the official Potchefstroom Olympic Bid. No, I am not joking. I know whereof I speak, because I am one of the directors of Potch 2012, and already an army marches behind us.

The bid is to be launched tonight with the support of the mayor and people of Potchefstroom and with a glittering cast of sport and entertainment celebrities. Should we win the South African nomination and then the actual bid itself, we promise a new beginning in the sordid history of world sport.

The Potch games are being dubbed the “Back to Basics Games”. The idea arose from a thoroughgoing disgruntlement with the commercialised, professionalised, degraded nature of sport today. For years we have watched in sorrow as the Olympics pay lip service to the noble ideals of sport while painting it with the harlot's colours of branding and sponsorship. The Cricket World Cup in our own country was nearly unseated by wrangles with sponsors; the cricket itself belonged not to the players or to the crowds or even the people watching at home, but to the companies that offered most money.

For decades the ideals of sportsmanship have tarnished under the pressure of money. Sport has always been a business, but increasingly it is
only
a business, and that is draining away our enthusiasm and the simple pleasure of play. If we are successful with our bid, we will use the Games as a moral renaissance. Potchefstroom will be the first sporting event in two thousand years at which absolutely no one will make, lose or misplace money.

There will be no prize money at Potch 2012, and the Games will not be sponsored. We will ask television companies to defray the basic costs of broadcasting facilities, but thereafter we shall ask not one cent for rights. Everyone is welcome to screen the Potch Olympics, from the richest to the poorest, from NBC to e.tv. This expanded media coverage should off-set any disappointment about the availability of stadium seating. There will not be much stadium seating, as the stadium is not very big. There will be no admission fees and attendance is on a first-come, first-seated basis.

The Games will be marshalled by the same volunteers who did yeomen service at the Cricket World Cup. For this reason, purple is the official colour of Potch 2012. There will be no athletes' village at the Games. As a gesture of old-fashioned South African hospitality we are calling upon the people of Potchefstroom to open their homes to the world's athletes and make a room available for a visiting sportsperson for the duration of the Games. If you do not have a room, a sofa in the lounge will do. If you do not have a sofa, then God bless you.

Residents will obviously not be asked to house sports administrators or Australians. Sports administrators will not in fact be invited to Potch 2012. No one has ever, in the history of sport, said: “That was a nice event, but it would have been so much better if there had been more administrators.” Anyway they eat too much. While the Australians will probably be allowed to attend the Games, it would not be fair to the people of Potchefstroom to expect them to welcome an Aussie in their own home, where their family sleeps.

We want no money from these Games. We do not believe that sport needs money and we do not believe that money adds to our enjoyment of sport. Potch 2012 will be an exercise in international sporting spiritual renewal, a moral rebirth for the spirit of competition. So get behind us, good people of South Africa, sign up at the official website, and chant with us the official motto: “Potch – it could be worse”.

There is no place like home

BUSINESS DAY, 5 JUNE 2003

I
AM PLEASED TO
be back in the country. I have been away this last week and more, inspecting the sporting environs of England and Ireland, and I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it is to be back in a place where people understand the importance of sport.

While I was over in the so-called First World I could not for the life of me find information, let alone coverage, of the series between Australia and the West Indies. While the West Indians were running up three consecutive victories over Ponting and his pack, I was pacing the streets of London, flipping fruitlessly through the newspapers, wondering just what these people do for information. England is just about as parochial as America when it comes to sport. Unless it is soccer or an English team is involved, it simply has not happened.

While I was there the English newspapers were reacting with dazed incomprehension at the revelation that David Beckham is not especially well known in New York. He is over there working the talk-show circuits with the Spice Girl formerly known as Posh, but discovering that no one actually knows who he is. The English papers, even the posh ones, could hardly digest this news. To make up for it, England turned its TV news shows over to David Beckham's wrist.

I watched the match last week between Bafana Bafana and England – the match in which, as the news organs of the kingdom kept reminding us, Beckham broke a bone in his wrist – from a pub in Ireland, so I was spared the full assault of English parochialism. The Irish were politely uninterested. They could not give a flying O'Flanagan about any English sporting team, with the exception of Manchester United, and to them South Africa is just a place to go on holiday. The lads I was sitting with in Gleason's public house in Clonmel did briefly rouse themselves to ask me why, if this match was launching our World Cup bid, we were playing it on a pitch that looked like it had recently been used for the running of the Grand National, but they did not press the point.

Then we all drifted off to gentle slumber as Bafana Bafana, a goal down and the world to play for, pushed the ball around at the back, helpfully proving that their disastrous tactics in the last minutes of our last match in the last soccer World Cup were not in fact the result of miscommunication – they were just our tactics. The Irish crowd in Gleason's did briefly come to life when Beckham was injured and taken off, but we soon settled back to our Guinnesses. It was only when I arrived in England that I understood the magnitude of what had happened.

For two days and more the evening news led with interviews with Beckham's doctor, people who knew Beckham's doctor, people who hoped one day to be Beckham's doctor. There were 3-D computer-generated reconstructions of Beckham's wrist, there were painstaking slow-mo replays of the incident, complete with arrows and figures to indicate areas of pressure and force and wind speed. There were vox pops and financial forecasts, there was even a special feature explaining the medical technology involved in making David Beckham's wrist better. What was the thrillingly high-tech technology? Setting the wrist in plaster. Blair and Bush and the Middle East could not get a look-in. It was all D. Beckham's wrist.

While this blizzard of nonsense was going on, there was literally nothing with which to soothe the starving sporting soul. We do not appreciate how good we have it here when it comes to global sports. When there are developments in Australian or Scottish or New Zealand sports teams, our newspapers bring it to us. When almost any match is being played anywhere in the world, we can watch it on television or read the results the next day. As Martin Tyler declared ruefully during the Bafana match: “They are incredibly knowledgeable about their sport in South Africa. Do you know, they receive coverage of more Premiership matches than we do!”

Whatever else England has going for it – the fabulous weather, the friendly and attractive people – it cannot touch us for sport. Ah, it is good to be back.