Persecution complex

BUSINESS DAY, 19 APRIL 2001

EVERY SO OFTEN I have occasion to find myself in the small hamlet of Parys. The small hamlet of Parys, while being neither as large nor as cosmopolitan as its namesake in France, and lacking such other typically French features as swanky restaurants and the Eiffel Tower, has many things going for it that the real Paris does not. For instance, there are almost no Frenchmen in Parys, and that is an advantage not to be sniffed at. Or indeed, to use a more typically Parisian response, sneered at, sniffed and spat at.

Whenever I am in Parys I visit a local watering hole rejoicing in the name of Heinie’s. I have not met the eponymous Heinie, and if I am careful and lucky, I may never do so. Heinie’s is a good place to absorb local colour and also to absorb beer.

This weekend I was there, watching the Bulls play the Reds. Ordinarily I avoid watching the Bulls play. I am not one of those fair-weather SA sports fans who only support a winning team, but watching the Bulls goes beyond the call of duty. Even Bulls fans do not watch Bulls games any more. It is too depressing. In medieval times, the equivalent would have been watching the village idiot beat himself repeatedly over the head with a stick. But there I was, and I am glad I was. It was worth watching if only for Joost van der Westhuizen, who is still in my book the best scrumhalf in SA and possibly the universe. He is as hard, predatory and downright miraculous as ever he was. Without him, the Bulls would have lost by 370 points.

It was also worth watching the game in order to be gifted a glimpse into the inner life of a hidden South Africa. A man sat himself down beside me. He wore large glasses and a wig he must have found in a Parys second-hand store. I think it had once been a lampshade, but the gent had trimmed it to resemble those limp, lank hairstyles favoured by European soccer players in the 1970s. The game began. It seemed clear to me, and I would have assumed to every sentient creature watching, that the Bulls were once more busily going about the business of beating themselves. More than that – they beat themselves mechanically, efficiently, like self-cleaning carpets of the future. As passes were spilt and players fell the wrong way in tackles, I groaned and buried my face in my hands. So did the gent with the wig, but gradually I realised that his lamentations were directed not at the quality of play, but the referee.

The worse the Bulls played, the more forceful he became. “The referee hates us,” he spluttered in Afrikaans. “They sit in Australia and they say to their referees: Whatever you do, don’t let those boerseuns win.”

I have always considered myself as enthusiastic a ref-basher as the next man, but now I realise that is only true if the next man is not sitting next to me in Heinie’s bar. I do not know what psychic debt it would have cost that man and his pals to admit that a South African rugby team might simply not be good enough, but it was more than they were equipped to pay. It must be exhausting to have the unflagging conviction that every foreigner out there, every other person in the entire world, is engaged in a ceaseless conspiracy to make your life an individual misery. It is a burden that must make the shoulders sag.

Still, there are upsides. We watched the Stormers game that followed, and while my heart sang with the joy of it, my happiness had nothing on the man with the wig. He turned to me at the final whistle, a strange light glowing in his eyes. “They all try to beat us,” he yelled, “but they can’t. We are kings. There is nothing we can’t do!”

Then he adjusted the lampshade on his head and went to the bar with shoulders held square.