Sports fans who don’t understand sport are like Labradors that won’t stop humping your leg. Try as you might, you can’t shake them off, and people around you start producing pinched little smiles and sidewise glances that imply you’re doing something provocative.
Stop flirting with the pooch, they seem to say. Of course, those with no feeling for games tend to thrust themselves less at one’s thighs than one’s ears, but the sense of being molested by something bestial — and, more importantly, by something that can never achieve the satisfaction it so desperately seeks — remains.
To the white sports fan, knee still unencumbered by canine suitors and so entirely free to jerk spasmodically at fresh news of quotas and political intervention, Butana Komphela must have seemed like the worst kind of mongrel gigolo after his pronouncements last week.
Indeed, it was not only quotas on the agenda of the chairperson of Parliament’s sport portfolio committee, but compulsory, universal, jackbooted quotas.
According to Komphela, teams not fielding a fully representative mix would be nailed, with punishments including withdrawing the right to use the South African flag.
“When they are not reflective of the democracy of our country, they can’t take anything South African,” he said.
But reactionary barbs about politics and sport not mixing are unfounded here. The African National Congress politicians calling for transformation and quotas are not doing so out of Schadenfreude or a perverse desire to see apartheid emblems like the Springbok dragged through the mud.
They don’t sit around at night stroking Fu Manchu beards, plotting new ways to irritate the white bourgeoisie. They have given this plenty of thought, negotiated conflicting and mutually exclusive positions, and made a tough executive decision that they believed to be in the best interests of South Africa.
Because that’s what nationalists do, especially those weaned on poverty, socialism and Marxism. They honestly don’t know that sport isn’t the Marshall Plan, that it is a wretchedly thin foundation for social engineering. And somewhere they’ve forgotten that sport represents everything liberation struggles try to destroy.
Sport is elitist. Anyone who wants to argue that toss needs to go two rounds with a pro fighter, and then we’ll see if fuzzy notions of universal brotherhood persist.
Sport tolerates no affirmative action. Those who are up to its challenges are affirmed; the rest are crushed like the no-hopers and also-rans they always were.
It defies and denies intellectualism and theorising. It idolises class hierarchy, as nimble backline toffs with clean jerseys keep upwind of forelock-tugging forwards with webbed toes.
But most of all, it serves no utilitarian purpose. You get fitter filling sandbags or digging mass graves. There’s more fun to be had in sex or cow tipping. As a nation-building tool it comes a very distant third behind war and explicit propaganda.
But let’s play the representivity game. Let’s be “reflective of the democracy of our country”. Are we to include six women in every cricket team? Should we reflect that between 10% and 25% of the country is HIV-positive; that one in three South African men is obese? And let’s not forget that 40% of the population is under 18.
Are we looking at a Springbok team containing various permutations of six teenagers, five blobs, and two cases of HIV infection?
Of course not, because the politicians aren’t talking about true representivity. Theirs is a grander vision, of sport as social force. If social engineering is what South Africa needs, then all power to them. If this will raise the majority from poverty, and instil in them a sense of self-worth, then legislated transformation is worth a try.
But first let’s pause to bid farewell to the games we knew. And let’s be clear about whose best interests we have at heart.