I’m not an expert on sport. But being locked up in a foreign hotel room often makes you feel like you are. Sport, sport, sport, you realise, is all you are about to be served — unless you feel like following another aimless coming-of-age film on the movie channel, or submitting your soul to the suicidal power of various gospel choirs dotted around the southern hemisphere, all given a slot on Sundays on SABC1 for lack of better programming ideas.
Sport keeps you awake like matchsticks between your eyelids. It kind of teaches you something about the state of the world, which you had been ignoring for all this time, thinking that reality actually unfolded in Parliament and along the devious corridors of the United Nations and so on.
Forget Jacob Zuma and Kofi Annan. Forget Osama bin Laden, even. Keep your eye on the ball at Centre Court, Wimbledon, or at the precarious, shifting wicket at Headingley in Yorkshire, England. England — the world’s real dramas are unfolding there.
Perhaps it was an exceptional week. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that I was trapped in my hotel room on the same weekend that Serena Williams was destined to lose her Wimbledon crown to a 17-year-old upstart from Russia, and the West Indies had to suffer another crushing defeat at the hands of the English.
It was a bad day for the race (and, as John Dos Pasos neatly side-stepped it some years ago, we will answer the question: ‘Which race?” with the answer: ‘Why, the human race, of course”).
Yep, Maria Sharapova, that cute, white Russian chick with the upturned nose, carefully nurtured against all the odds in Jeb Bush’s Florida, produced a bionic performance that had the baobab-solid reigning champion, Serena, stumped.
My cousin called from the Congo to ask if the whole thing hadn’t been rigged, and to persuade me to put my weight behind a demand for a recount on principle. I had to tell her that Serena (who was definitely playing below par — distracted perhaps by the lure of Hollywood and the rag trade in London and Rome) was soundly licked by the more focused challenger from the Urals, via Florida.
And the West Indies, of course, have had the marrow sucked out of them since colonial cricket was gazumped by the lure of the dollar, as represented by professional baseball and basketball — all generally emanating out of Florida, and the United States in general, as well.
So, no, cousin. There is no obvious, post-colonial, post-Cold War, post-9/11 agenda going on here to get paranoid about. Venus and Serena have simply passed their sell-by dates. Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd and Sir Garfield Sobers were passing (if phenomenal) flashes in the pan, and the world is now back to looking the way it was supposed to.
That is the way my Congo cousin would like to rationalise it, anyway.
But for myself, watching these supposedly sporting dramas play out from the safety of my hotel room, I can’t help musing on the rising stakes in the world of sport, and how they somehow mirror the rising stakes in the one-sided game of globalisation.
Hoo. Then comes another day and another disaster. Mozambique’s flying sensation, Maria Mutola, is now beaten on the red shale track in her preferred race for the first time in two years by yet another Russian, who has the predictable name of Svetlana Something-or-the-Other. Generally speaking, it all makes you start to smell some kind of rat.
Why are darkies, especially women darkies, suddenly falling by the wayside in favour of the new elite of athletic stars from the former Soviet Union and its satellite states? The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics having done its bit to put our rising stars on their feet, so to speak, why is it that there is no longer a friendly voice and face to keep Africa and its diaspora streaking into the sunset with flying colours? Should we be paranoid, after all? Is the new, enlarged European Union and all that flows behind it (along with its cronies across the Atlantic) a bad omen for the world’s darker races revisited?
If not, how to explain this inescapable representation of the new face of globalisation — where the West, or those who look like they belong in the West, always wins?
My cousin from the Congo is even more bitter than I am. I try to calm her down, and tell her that sport is sport (not that I know much about sport one way or the other — all I know is what I see on TV).
But there is always, we have to admit, a little frisson of excitement every time one of the sisters or brothers strides up to the finishing line and carries away the ultimate prize. Such as when ‘Kip” Keino ran away with the 5 000m Olympic title, or Viv Richards knocked the English for one-six after another throughout the 1970s, or Arthur Ashe and even semi-Aboriginal dynamo Yvonne Goolagong held sway briefly over the Centre Court at Wimbledon, before disappearing down the plughole of history, like all flesh.
And then, of course, there were the late, great Williams sisters.
So what’s the story? Why is the new, sanitised, de-communised Mother Russia on the ascendant, and post-colonial Africa and its endless, inconclusive diaspora on the decline? What does Sharapova have that Serena doesn’t? Or is it all just a matter of the luck of the draw?
We salute the achievements of Venus and Serena, and their strong-willed father who bit his tongue, under God knows what conditions of ignominious defeat, and made it his life’s mission to see them get where no black, female athlete had got to before in this particularly competitive arena. We equally salute the talent, skill and bravery of Sharapova.
But we also pay tribute to the uphill battle of Mutola, the Williams sisters and so many others like them, while acknowledging that, with any luck, their struggle has not been in vain.