An official silence blanketed Cricket South Africa on Wednesday afternoon as media liaison Gordon Templeton politely played bouncer: no statements would be made until the International Cricket Council had finished its disciplinary machinations.
Tony Irish, chief executive of the South African Cricketers’ Association, would no doubt have been slightly more talkative, had one been able to get a question in edgeways; but his line was engaged solidly as he presumably dealt with an avalanche of words triggered by the handful from his client, Herschelle Gibbs.
Initially one felt reassured by the wall of silence put up around the naïvely hangdog Gibbs. It implied industrious decency; a small army of benevolent clerks engaged in sorting out a mess.
But as the media fretted, and Herman Gibbs steamed, and the Proteas made nervous, muzzled noises about understanding but not condoning, one couldn’t help but see the whole affair for what it was: yet more proof of the infantilised condition of sport and politics in the corporate century.
Swaddled in a protective media blanket, lest he further soil the nappy of public sentiment, the baby Gibbs has broken the golden rule of the nanny corporation. He has failed to lie prettily in his assigned cot and gurgle on cue, instead depositing a nasty smell.
Once, in the time when teenagers captained warships and people had lives rather than lifestyles, the squabble down at fine leg at Centurion might have been settled with clever or fierce words, probably fists, perhaps even steel. Someone would have said something decisive, or done something brave, and that would have been that. Today we have hair-pulling and aggrieved, petulant little toy-throwers.
The trouble with the hue and cry, an understandable response in the post-colonial world where racism is sniffed, is that it can disguise the motives of all involved.
This current fracas may have been framed as a racist outrage, but in reality we are straight back to the King Commission and match-fixing. The scandal now, as then, is not that Gibbs did something stinky and ugly on a cricket field, but that he got caught doing it. After all, his first and therefore more heartfelt defence was that his words were meant for his team’s ears only. No denials, no retractions.
Herman Gibbs has defended his son in the media, insisting that it is ludicrous to brand him a racist; but he is missing the point.
Gibbs is a racist, or at least a racialist, as are we all, with our collections of lazy, affable epithets about why whites do this and blacks do that and Jews and Muslims do the other thing. The only difference between Gibbs’s snarled snipe and our comfortable Sunday afternoon musings about why Chinese children are so jolly good at playing the violin, is that we aren’t talking into stump microphones.
The self-righteous and pious tone of the outing of Gibbs is again strangely familiar; and once again we are in King Commission territory: make an example of one, and you needn’t pursue the rest. And why not pursue the rest? Because it’s too hard, and it’s too banal in the end, because they’re all doing it or thinking it; because they’re all so depressingly ordinary under the slow-mo patriotism. And that doesn’t play well on the highlights reels.
Had Gibbs stopped at ”animals” or ”hyenas”, he might have been guilty of nothing more than a melodramatic retort, rather like an actor stopping in mid-oration to blast someone in the front row whose cellphone has rung. But then he stumbled into advice about returning home to Pakistan, and the link between animals and Pakistanis was made. It was racist, and it was stupid.
However, it is important, both for cricket and for the fight against much more dangerous and sophisticated racism, to consider that this was not grand racism. This was not the Klan’s slow-burning hate, or the medieval psychopaths who believe every paragraph of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This was petty, sordid and dull, and utterly universal. Indeed, it was fascinating to read the outraged Asian critiques of the incident, in which many aggrieved pots called kettles black, launching into sweeping statements about ”South Africans” being racist, hostile, hypocritical, and so on. Makhaya Ntini will no doubt be surprised to learn that he is genetically inclined to hate people with dark skin by virtue of playing in a team apparently rotten to the core.
What a pity that in this squalid nursery scene there is no room to admire other newborns — Paul Harris, for one, who has transformed the Proteas attack — or the temporary rebirth of Gibbs the responsible batsman, or of the imminent arrival of Mohammed Yousuf. If only they’d shut up and play…
Umpire Darrrell Hair’s return to official duties this week was delayed by a luggage mix-up, reports Xan Rice in the Guardian.
The controversial Australian, whose decision to penalise Pakistan five runs for ball-tampering at the Oval in London in August precipitated the first forfeiture in Test history, has been appointed to stand in a triangular tournament in Kenya.
But his return to the middle was delayed after his suitcases went missing en route from Dubai.
The tournament, featuring Kenya, Canada and Scotland, involves only International Cricket Council (ICC) associate members, who do not play Test cricket. The ICC said that because none of the participants was a full member, Hair’s appointment did not contradict its decision to suspend him from umpiring in international matches until his contract expires in March next year.