Clichés, champions and Baby Jake

BUSINESS DAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2000

SPORT WRITERS ARE not the sole purveyors of the cliché. The cliché is common wherever people speak without first troubling to think. That is to say, the cliché is very common indeed.

Sometimes a cliché can be a cliché before it has even been around long enough to become popularly recognised. I recently met an Internet consultant, for instance, who scratched his beard and told me that the secret of his profession is: “I think outside the box.” I did not know exactly what that meant, but I knew I would not be able to sleep nights unless I immediately stamped on his instep and punched him in the throat.

But sports writers and commentators do appear to swaddle themselves rather more conspicuously than most in the fluffy bathrobe of hackneyed phrase and received wisdom. There are three reasons for this.

Firstly, sport writers tend to allow themselves to be persuaded that what they write about is unimportant, frivolous, somehow of less value than politics or motor cars. Secondly, there is the mistaken assumption that sports fans are a slow-witted lot, made up of the kind of individual whose idea of international sophistication is drinking a Namibian beer while performing a Mexican wave, who becomes suspicious of writing that does more than tell the score and mention that Bafana Bafana need to guard against conceding an early goal. In such a dusty wasteland, writers and commentators like Andy Capostagno and Mike Haysman and John Robbie and Neil Manthorpe are like desert flowers with the dew still clinging to their petals. If you see what I mean.

Thirdly, I would suggest that clichés and phrases that say nothing by repeating the overly familiar are actually more noticeable in a sporting context than in any other. Sport, unlike politics or economics, is such a rich and varied field that any attempt to reduce it and fit it into a standard mould is doomed to squirming failure. When Hugh Bladen offers a commentary that could be effectively superimposed over any other game he has ever commented on, it says far more about Hugh Bladen than it does about the game.

Ordinarily, clichés merely irritate, and at worst muffle the clarity of the action. Occasionally, however, they are downright misleading. In the build-up to last weekend’s “Night of the Legends”, it became popular in the sports pages to say that Hawk Makepula and Baby Jake Matlala were fighting not merely for the world title, but also for the title of people’s champion. Stuff and nonsense. The whole point of being a people’s champion is that it is not transferable with an official title – otherwise you would just call him champion and have done with it.

Makepula won the fight, and won it well, but the decision was greeted with boos and disbelief. One local journalist wrote, across copy stained and speckled with his tears, that Makepula should not take his triumph as an indicator of his ability. Such are the emotions when a people’s champion is defeated.

Makepula – an extraordinarily gifted fighter with remarkable accuracy of punch and a fine sense of the ring – may one day become people’s champion in his own right, but for now he has to be content with champion of the world. If he does one day manage to lay the same claim to the hearts of The People (whoever they may be), he will be one of the lucky few South Africans to do so despite being blessed with luminous talent.

Baby Jake is the archetypal South African people’s hero – a man cheerfully struggling in the face of adversity, overcoming desperate disadvantages (age; limited talent; being the only man that Martin Locke can pat on the head) and rising above himself through pluck, mental toughness and high work rate. We love our gifted winners, obviously – our Joosts and our Vuyani Bungus and our Penny Heynses – but it is the less gifted winners who claim their place in our myths and our dreams of ourselves.

Baby Jake will never lose his place in the South African psyche. For the greater part of the 1990s he was a parable of ourselves – he seemed to say that with hard work and good PR, the little guy can beat the world. That was what we most needed to hear.