For all the gory mud and compacted fractures, sport is fantasy, and a peculiar one at that. Why does Corné Krige continue to hurl himself under the cleats of galloping Antipodeans while blood seeps from all his original orifices and some new ones, too?
Why does Graeme Smith refuse to cash in his chips on reaching 100, choosing, instead, six more hours of frigid English sunshine and the odour of suspicious pork pies wafting across the field like mustard-gas across Flanders?
Because they believe they are the last line of defence between
civilisation and Armageddon. How else can one survive 13 hours of chirping from a wicketkeeper for whom the apex of wit is a whoopee cushion and whose notions of human intercourse were formed during brisk floggings with damp towels in prep school?
Sports psychologists refer to ‘visualisation” and ‘getting into the bubble”. In another age this was called ‘hallucination” and ‘getting locked inside a padded room”.
When these artificial heroics of sport stir us, making us forget these 90-minute acts of self-sacrifice are being rewarded with a million bucks a year and contracts to endorse underarm deodorants, we rejoice. But when the mind of the sportsman (soundly asleep in a little chamber of his brain) causes him to break the bounds of fair play, we are appalled.
How could Robbie Kempson and Bakkies Botha have molested those Wallaby innocents so cruelly? Did they honestly believe they’d get away with it? Well, duh.
Kempson and Botha are the sporting equivalent of those oily cads in Ohio, Queensland and other centres of suburban misery who call the police in floods of theatrical tears. ‘My wife has been murdered,” they howl, trying to muffle the giggles of Bambi, their 19-year-old secretary, sipping champagne over the corpse of the late Missis. A few spritzes of Luminol, a couple of forensic audits later and it emerges that Mr Ladykiller took out a huge life-insurance policy on wifey the day before she accidentally shot herself seven times in the back.
It’s the dark side of reality-denial, a desperately stupid belief that everybody will ignore the mountain of evidence, the smoking gun, the video replay of a beefy, green arm going around a stringy, gold neck.
Perhaps it’s a male problem. Men in general tend to live in a fantasy world in which women regard sagging bellies and blonde jokes as sublime aphrodisiacs, in which the pay cheque is merely a financial substitute for a longship full of captured cattle and Vestal Virgins. For instance, it is safe to assume that Paul Adams thinks his new beard looks dangerous and exotic, despite everyone else mista-king it for a piece of liquorice stuck to his face. Colombian drag lord Juan Pablo Montoya clearly believes he is defending his fifth formula one world title, if his hissy fit aimed at Jacques Villeneuve in Germany last week was any indication.
In reality, all Montoya has won so far is the title of World’s Stupidest Road User, when he was clocked at 204kph on a French road recently (4km over the French speed limit). But is it the fault of sportsmen if they sometimes slip off the same page as the rest of us?
A third of Britons now want David Beckham on their banknotes, ahead of also-rans like William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. The first invented much of Western culture, the second saved its life, and Beckham would be entirely forgiven for believing he and his coif are the pinnacle of 1 000 years of English history and, indeed, the cornerstone of civilisation as we know it. Hastings, Agincourt, the Somme, Dunkirk — all part of God’s intricate plan to put Manchester United on the map.
If he doesn’t believe this, he is either a saint or more deeply asleep than we originally suspected, and since he seems to be a diluted com-bination of the two, one must blame his fans rather than him for having jumped ship in the Sea of Reality.
Reality and sport don’t mix, and one must pity Kempson and Botha as they sit staring blankly at replays, desperately trying to figure out what is real and what is not. Fortunately their sanity will not teeter on the brink for very long — a couple of months and they’ll be back at work, being told to imagine ripping the heads off Australians.