The air is prickly with tension. The tail end of a sentence, barked by a souped-up coach, gets muffled as it ricochets down the length of a carpeted hallway. New gusto to the old pre-match pep-talk. Across the way the other team meditates, some heads drooped under towels. One or two athletes stretch their quads and glutes. Both teams are ready — Lycra leotards stretched over lean, sinuous bodies; cheeks ruddy with rouge; hair taut and pinned; satin shoes bound in place; tutus puffed out, flirting and audacious.
An ocean of cheering surges through the changing rooms, punctuated by the mournful bleats of vuvuzelas honking out of sync. England versus South Africa; the Tulips versus the Sunbirds. It’s a clash that’s been four years in the making and the crowd is explosive. You’d better believe it: we’re backstage at the Ballet World Cup final.
Long-standing rivals are about to take each other down to the orchestral score of Swan Lake. A rhythmic tap-tap-tap as a lone ballerina does a last-minute equipment check on her pointe shoes.
FFFRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! The ref’s whistle shrieks across the opera house — and it’s game on.
Can’t quite imagine it, can you? Bars the country over thronged with men who’ve slipped out of work early (”Sorry, boss, I’ve got gippo guts”). The sky fills with smoke pillars as the nation fires up its braais. Lagers in the cooler, flags flying out of car windows, chests puffed out under the team colours, plastic tiaras blinking distantly through a thickening cloud of cigarette exhaust.
This would be a welcome alternative reality to the one I’m being subjected to this week, where all I have to watch on telly, every night on SABC3 from 8.30pm onwards, is Euro 2008 soccer. I realise I’m going to be tarred as the mother of all Grundies for this one (I wonder, should I be writing this under a pen name?), but I must grumble my protest at the assumption behind this programming line-up. Who at our national broadcaster presumes that the entire SABC3 audience wants to spend its downtime watching footie?
I appreciate there are great herds of XYs out there who truly believe it is the most beautiful game. Some XXs do too. Even I will grudgingly concede that it has an elegance that makes it almost more ballet-like than its Neanderthal cousin, rugby.
I don’t ask much of my national broadcaster in exchange for the sacrificial offering of my TV licence. But I do want an assurance that my Tuesday evening date with Law and Order will not be scuppered by a bloody soccer match played under spotlights half a world away between teams that are of little consequence to us. But to have six nights of Euro-soccer in a row, in one week, is pushing the boat way out into unsafe waters.
Viewers get the same treatment whenever there’s a major tournament or series on, whether it’s cricket, rugby or soccer. Prime and sub-prime-time viewing is given over to hours of dreary game.
The truth is that it’s a mark of how our society has constructed itself. If we weren’t a male-dominated culture, sport wouldn’t fill so much of our leisure space and sportsmen wouldn’t earn salaries that are disproportionately large relative to their real contribution to society.
Men, on the whole, earn significantly more than women, so they have more spending power. Their appeal to advertisers gets a fuel injection by their greater wealth and so gives them more unwitting sway over television content. Compare how much ad spend, and hence column inches and airtime, goes to sport, versus how much goes to the arts or lifestyle. The local peddler of satellite TV offers 12 — yes, 12 — sports channels, which is almost as many as its news channels. But it has only one cooking channel, two style or fashion channels, another for travel and one for ”home”, bringing the bundle of lifestyle channels to a whopping five.
Is there really enough time in the day to watch that much sport?
How different things might have been if the past few hundred years of history had hoisted women into society’s top earners and power-mongers. Communal leisure time might involve more cookouts than line-outs. We’d have more dinner clubs and fewer sports bars; maybe even more poetry readings than training camps; more moisturisers, fewer steroids; more soft, less hard; more circle, less square.
And the national sport might actually be something as gracefully strenuous as ballet. Our sporting colours might have more pinks and powder blues than oranges and greens. And the stadiums where our titans clash might be opera houses and theatre stages rather than grass pitches and Astroturf. Ah, indeed, it would be a most beautiful game.