/ 21 July 2006

Of big whoppers and football

Burger King’s claim to be ”the home of the Whopper” has been challenged by Johannesburg in the past couple of weeks. Although the United States fast-food chain’s advertising slogan refers to its trademark huge hamburger, Egoli’s bid for the title is based on a different meaning of ”whopper”: that of a great big fib.

The Italian match-fixing scandal and the furore surrounding ”simulation” at the recently completed World Cup in Germany prove that football and integrity are not always comfortable bedfellows, but three instances from tours by British clubs to South Africa take economy with the truth from little-white-lies territory to the home of the whopper.

Jomo Sono set the ball rolling at a media conference last week to promote his side’s games against two Scottish clubs. He arrived an hour late at Emperors Palace — rather bad form for the host of the event — and begged his guests’ forbearance as his daughter was in ICU at a local hospital and her condition had taken a turn for the worse.

Aberdeen coach Jimmy Calderwood, who was struggling to stay awake having rushed directly from the airport to the conference after the team’s flight from Britain, might have been less sympathetic in his comments had he known that Sono’s daughter had been ill recently but was recovering fine at home.

Alex Ferguson warmed to the theme on Wednesday night. After making a pre-dinner speech at a gala banquet in Sandton hosted by Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa, the Manchester United manager rushed off to ”be with an old friend who has taken ill”, as MC Robert Morewa told the black-tie function.

Several of his 1 000-plus ”old friends” at the dinner at Turffontein racecourse that Ferguson subsequently attended, including former coach turned TV pundit Eddie Lewis, might have been feeling a little the worse for wear on Thursday, but the Mail & Guardian’s sources at the event failed to spot the particularly sickly individual who had prompted Ferguson’s mercy dash across the city.

At the Ferguson-less Sandton event, guests were encouraged to bid for a copy of the Manchester United Opus, a half-metre square, 30kg limited edition about the club, which had been launched earlier in the day by British publishers Kraken.

The person who bid R200 000 to ”take home this collector’s item” (as Morewa cheerfully told his audience) would have been less than pleased to discover that most of the contents of the huge book are as mythical as the beast after which the publishers are named.

Problems in making the launch date (chosen to get lots of mileage out of donating a copy to Nelson Mandela on his birthday) meant that most of the pages in the tome being carted around South Africa have not yet been printed. Now that’s a whopper of a whopper.