/ 21 December 2006

A year of booming mediocrity

Under normal circumstances, a review of a nation’s sporting progress would be inclined to be critical of failures. Losses would be analysed, disasters decried. But normal circumstances in modern South African sport imply failure, and thus hardened to sporting infamy, the armchair critic must refrain from launching unfairly pointed or excessively accurate barbs at the large, flabby buttocks of our nation’s booming mediocrity in 2006.

Instead, one should embrace the spirit of ubuntu, and use it as selectively and cynically as those in power who have claimed it as a mantra. We are who we are because of others, it tells us. Which must mean that the Proteas’ top order must be unable to hit the broad side of a barn because we are unable to hit the broad side of barn.

It is not the fault of Bafana Bafana that they languish in Fifa’s rankings below countries whose national crests are dominated by bananas: it is our fault, for we have not been working on our dribbling and passing enough. And it is certainly not the fault of Retief ”The Goose” Goosen that he holed a stomach-churning sextuple-bogey 11 on a par-5 in December’s South African Open.

No, on second thoughts, that was entirely his fault; and by the end of the hole — a curiously macabre live action-replay stuck on repeat — one felt the sort of vindictive jubilation usually reserved for those inhabitants of mobile homes who film themselves trying to launch themselves on home-made rockets and who end in the offices of giggling proctologists.

It’s not that one wished any malice on poor Goosen, standard-bearer for the gated-community set that he is. But having been lectured to for so long by corporate meatheads and their media toadies about the almost superhuman qualities of the top golfer, it was delicious to see one crash and burn.

For our civilisation, busily demolishing everything it is built on while adopting an intellectual approach that favours conch shells and pushing fat boys off cliffs, golf has replaced genuine achievement; and for all those who still think that splitting the atom or painting the Sistine Chapel is fractionally more worthwhile than sinking a 30-footer, Goosen’s implosion was a thing of beauty.

But such admissions tread dangerously close to Schadenfreude, which has no place in ubuntu. Let us therefore return to more traditional judgements, and simply demand that Goosen, the Proteas, and all the other misfiring misfits who donned the green and gold in 2006 pay us each five cows, which seems to be the going rate for instant redemption.

Of course, for some sins five cows just won’t cut it. Not even six cows, pre-basted, would have appeased the outraged patriot who took cricketer Jacques Kallis to task in the Sunday Times for not singing the national anthem before games.

At the time of writing, investigations into Kallis’s reactionary tone-deafness were ongoing, but strong evidence has emerged that he has been dancing naked in the moonlight, has made at least three poppets in the likeness of Indian bowlers, and has been disporting himself with a married elder.

At this point it seems increasingly likely that he will be hanged for devil worship some time in January. Or else someone will explain to the incensed correspondent, lowing like the cattle he rejected, that democracy implies the freedom to keep one’s politics and patriotism private. Moo.

Having brought up the issue of bovine lumps, protesting lugubriously while all trampling about in the same direction, it seems an appropriate moment to consider those slabs of beef who made headlines by waving the old South African flag at Twickenham.

Naturally much was made of these chops, these middle-class refugees and paper-shunters, making their brave little statement about the Neverland they grew up in, a country where Elsie ironed one’s rugby shorts every Saturday morning and Phineas held up the rake to serve as a cross-bar for last-minute drop-kick practice, and where criminals were behind bars. On Robben Island.

The outrage was understandable; but perhaps pity would have been more appropriate. Those who waved the flag and let nostalgia flow through them like Klippies and Coke through a pile of ice-blocks have contributed one item of value to our culture, and perhaps now is the time to give that item back to them.

It is the phrase ”Ag shame”, and we offer it with deepest sympathies. Ag shame, guys. It must be very kak having a brain made of Cremora. Then again, it’s neither inside nor on top, so perhaps they simply have Redro between the ears.

If the media are to be believed, brains are also a rare commodity in that series of denials and appeals to patriotism that we shall laughingly refer to as the build-up towards the 2010 World Cup.

Naturally, one doesn’t believe a word of the pessimism: prediction is the only valid currency of sports writers and political commentators, and only pessimism and doubt offer any chance of lucking out by buying into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Still, one can’t help worrying that in all the excitement over Cape Town being barred from the events — and Table Mountain being digitally erased from every DVD hawked by Tourism South Africa — the national football team has been overlooked. Indeed, if 2006 was anything to go by, Bafana Bafana have been cancelled due to lack of interest.

The good news for the 15-million South Africans who will continue to starve while the event takes places (presumably they’ll starve just a little more vibrantly and patriotically than usual), state spending on 2010 was capped this year at a modest R15-billion.

You know, the way spending on the arms deal was capped at R30-billion and R40-billion and R50-billion. Still, one shouldn’t carp: at least we’ll have some never-used Saab fighter planes to sell for scrap in 2009 to pay for those tricky last-minute jobs that need expensive consultants, dirty little details like building stadiums and laying railways lines.

But every cloud does have a silver lining, just as every footballer’s wife has a rice-cake stomach-lining.

The 2006 World Cup marked the beginning of the end of David Beckham’s career; and while his legion of fans will grieve, one person is jubilant; for the end of Beckham’s public career will surely bring the end of his wife’s. And while Victoria may not know very much about very much, she does know one thing: once the cameras switch off, and the lights die down, she can, for the first time in a decade, eat a sandwich. Or five cows. Who’s counting?