Hazel Friedman
Benni McCarthy acquired his soccer prowess by ducking and diving from the gangs who ruled his home turf. Well, that’s how the “against-all-odds” theorists would like to write the rag-to-riches story of 20-year- old soccer superstar Benedict McCarthy.
Surveying the terrain where McCarthy grew up, it is miraculous that he not only resisted the pressures of poverty-related crime and gangsterism to which many of his peers succumbed, but that he has proved to be the one in a million whose dreams of sporting fame and fortune actually do come true.
But the miracle lies not in the more sensational chapters of a story that is really still in the prologue stage. It is located in more mundane realms, in a place where the ordinary, the solid and the stable are more the exception than the rule.
“Miles and miles of fokkol” is how John Peterson, a resident of Hanover Park, Cape Town, describes the place where McCarthy has spent most of his life.
Like much of the Cape Flats, it is a pretty desolate landscape, peppered with sub- economic council houses, low-rise tenement- style blocks of flats and pondokkies. And of course, several school buildings – those drab, monolithic monuments to apartheid- style education that still resemble concentration camps, rather than places of learning.
Like its neighbours, Mannenburg, Bonteheuwel and Mitchells Plain, Hanover Park is smothered by the smog of gangsterism. So ubiquitous is its presence that is has assumed the aura of normality. And it is in the “Park”-notorious for its gangs, druglords and the rest of life’s underbelly – that McCarthy played soccer and became a positive role model without succumbing to the gangsta rap.
“Benni was always a good boy,” says a teacher at Groenvlei Senior Secondary School where McCarthy was a student until he was snapped up by the First Division team Seven Stars in 1995. “Academically, he wasn’t a rocket scientist. But his eye was always on the ball, literally.”
Blame it on his dad, Dudley, who was known to kick a mean one himself in his day. “Many people liken me to my father, saying we have similar playing styles,” McCarthy said in a 1997 interview. “Yet I never saw him play.”
But it is his mother Dora to whom McCarthy feels most connected.
“Benni is very much like his mom in temperament. Like her, he’s humble, shy but with a quiet confidence and natural exuberance,” says Rob Moore, McCarthy’s manager and mentor. Moore spotted McCarthy in 1994 and was impressed not only by his soccer prowess but by his level-headedness and singular dedication to the sport.
“He’s a normal young man in every respect, but he has an incredibly solid sense of self and stable set of values. He hasn’t forgotten where he comes from and knows where he wants to go,” Moore said.
McCarthy always seemed to know who his friends were, too. “Unlike some of the other guys, he stayed away from the gangs and the drugs. He wouldn’t even drink alcohol. We always used to call him ‘family man’ because he had this real close connection to his family.”
Older brother Jerome (22) has also carved an illustrious soccer career for himself and younger brother Mark (8) is already pretty soccer-smart.
Looking at where McCarthy started out, a cramped, dark flat near the school, it is understandable that one of the first things he did when he signed up with Ajax in Holland was to get his folks into a new double-storey house in Diep River.
After all, ordinariness in the midst of an angry and anarchic environment is the most extraordinary achievement of all.