“Soccer runs in our family’s veins,” says proud dad Ozzie Liebestein. And sometimes outside his family’s veins, too, by the looks of things: five minutes into the interview the nasty gash to his forehead is still oozing. Most fathers might have had a few sharp words to say to their sons had they too been felled by a roundhouse kick to the mandible, but Ozzie will hear none of it.
‘It was my fault for … for … getting in the way of the cleat,” he says, blacking out briefly from the pain. ‘Ari’s got quite a temper on him, and I should have seen it coming. Not so, boy?”
But little Ari, eight years old and already able to spit a full 10 yards, is busy pouring salt on snails in the flowerbed. ‘Bless his little scowl,” grins his dad, while mum Kerryn arrives with a photo album.
‘That’s Ari at three, head-butting Sarah Winterbottom at the crèche,” she reminisces. ‘And that’s him at five, making pee-pee off the roof of the kindergarten. And here’s his hamster, Pooface … no, there, that black lump under the dishtowel. Ari set him on fire. It was a really great learning experience for him.”
Learning is what Ari does best, says his father, which is why he and Kerryn have enrolled their protégé in a football clinic in Manchester next month. Spotted at an under-10 provincial match, in which he was red-carded for defecating on the referee’s boot, it has been a meteoric rise for the Sandton star; and mum and dad have been there every step of the way.
‘He’s going to be the best there ever was,” says Ozzie, whose own football career was cut cruelly short weeks before his 11th birthday when his father urged him to bench-press twice his own bodyweight. ‘Do you see how he’s scratching the back of his neck and face like that? Tik. We got him hooked about two months ago …”
Kerryn cuts in. ‘Three months, honey. It was early October. Remember we got the broken lightbulb from Doreen’s maid.”
‘That’s right,” says dad. ‘So the tik’s been making him really aggressive and sullen, and we’re thinking of adding liquor into the mix quite soon.”
Kerryn smiles dotingly at Ari, who is chasing the puppy with a nailgun. ‘If everything goes okay, he’ll hit his first girlfriend at 15 or 16, and get someone pregnant at 18. Just before his 21st it’ll all become too much, and he’ll be busted for cooking the crack …”
‘It’s just ‘crack’, darling,” corrects Ozzie. ‘Not ‘the crack.’ And I think one freeboots and mainlines crack rather than cooking it. But yes, so he’ll be photographed by The Sun with a needle in his arm, an unconscious naked model between his legs, and from there he’ll hit the skids, and emerge thinner, meaner, and a lot more focused on his game.”
‘It’s going to be too wonderful,” coos mum, before telling Ari to get ready for Bling practice. He gives her the finger and throws half a brick through the windscreen of the SUV.
‘It’s once a week at Sandton City,” says dad. ‘The kids love it, and it gives the women a chance to bond with their children over jewellery. Ari’s got his eye on a big gold chain with a medallion on it that reads ‘Say my name, bitch.’”
There is a scuffle over the wearing of the seatbelt, but Kerryn’s nose soon stops bleeding, and Ari is off, into a future so bright, he’s going to need shades. Besides, he’s just thrown his current pair out of the window and is screaming at a beggar.—