Jay was in a foul mood because Liverpool hadn’t managed to win the Champions League like the year before (though they won the FA Cup) and the football season was now officially over. Television had spoilt us so much that we weren’t interested in local soccer, which wasn’t half as good as the northern hemisphere’s, even though African players were infiltrating Europe very effectively on that score, thank you very much. Local soccer was as boring as the government’s machinations, and the reason for that as far as I was concerned was because it was equally corrupt. So come winter – and it was here in all its hard, dry Highveld beauty – we would switch to local rugby instead of footy. But that had become increasingly tedious too. The game had become a dull, kick-and-chase affair in which the front row often became spectators as much as we did, except when it came to doing the hard work.
Jay was loyal to the Sharks because that’s where he’d met Veron, who shouted for Province because that’s where people thought she came from and to give Jay a bit of opposition. I was supposed to shout for the Blue Bulls because I’d been born in Pretoria, but I’d been allergic to that place from the start and I’d fallen in love with the calming Free State flats on my way to the educated east of the country, so that’s who I “shouted” for. Later I’d discovered that the old man’s father had been born in that province’s Bethlehem, which I might have sensed, but there were good dry jokes by and about the Free Staters, too, so that was that. In matters of rugby, I was a Free State man.
As usual we carried on with our office-sex talk and Jay, of course, had picked up that there was something “happening” between me and Kay, whom I’d agreed to meet at my house much later. I told him that we were merely flirting, so far.
“Nice,” he said.
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“I think she’s dangerous, bruh.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So why are you carrying on with it?”
“You know …”
“Pass the fucking ball!”
One of the Sharks’ wingers had run the ball dead again, which really got on Jay’s tits.
“Just be careful.”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense – Jesus! Can you believe it? – mind your back.”
“Is there something you’re hearing in the office?”
Jay, who got really excited when his team messed up, held the palm of his hand parallel with the floor and wriggled it, meaning there were murmurings in the office.
“Are you going to tell me or not?”
“No, but you of all people should know better than to get involved with a colleague.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Do I look happy?”
“You’re still married.”
“I’ve got children, okay.”
“Fair enough.”
We carried on drinking once the game was over and started preparing for our ritualised braai and much later I said if only the country could be run like our cricket instead of our soccer.
“Are you saying darkies can’t organise themselves?” Veron said, heading towards her late-night, alcohol-fuelled aggression, the girls having been sent off to bed.
“I’m saying we’ve got world-class cricket, but crap soccer. The first has taken a gradualist approach, the latter has taken an absolutist approach. The government wants representative cricket, but doesn’t give a toss that soccer isn’t. That smacks to me of arrogance, if not downright reverse racism. All the money the soccer bosses get for youth development, which is key, goes into some very aged back pockets. The result is there for all to see: shit football.”
“There is another way of looking at all of this,” she said.
“I know,” I said, equally drunk and obstreperous. “Start all over. Scrap everything. Fire all the European coaches you get across Africa for their alleged managerial skills. Get rid of all other whites and Indian entrepreneurs while you’re about it too. And to hell with the so-called Coloureds, as usual. Start from ground zero. Who cares if it takes a generation or two before Africa is purely black and African again? Africa is patient, and who says it can’t one day produce an all-black team with all-black coaching staff to win the World Cup?”
“Well, by then the English team will be completely black too,” Jay slurred.
“This is not what I meant by another way of looking at things,” Veron said.
I asked what she did mean.
“I was thinking more along the lines of banning all fucken sport,” she concluded.
She had a point. The older I got the less reason I saw to watch men (and, increasingly, women) chasing balls of different shapes and sizes. Why would someone feel such loyalty to a team so far away that they would, as in one case in Kenya, hang themselves when their favourite European team lost? Then again, Jay would say, anyone stupid enough to shout for Arsenal deserved what they got.
Sometimes these teams’ managers became as famous as their wards. If a team lost too often the manager would get the chop, but if it won and made a lot of money for its club he’d become almost as wealthy as his charges in the short term, but he could work into his seventies if he maintained his winning ways. They were usually ex-players and others became commentators, models, film stars or drugged-out nutcases after their relatively short spells of glory. But things were slightly different in South Africa. If your team lost you were fired and, if your team won something as piddling as the Rugby World Cup, you were fired too. It was such a constructive, generous culture.
Even less understandable was why anyone would be happy that their golfing or tennis heroes had just made more money in one tournament than they would make in a lifetime. Was it a kind of sublimated desire in which the sporting god fulfils your failed dreams for you? Did people not want to be their own heroes? Obviously it was all the media’s fault. Occasionally there’d be a moment of aesthetic beauty, usually in a five-day cricket match, for which no one had any time anymore, or thanks to Barcelona FC’s chess-like cool, but most of the time it was just a slog and I watched because I liked socialising with Jay and Veron.
“Why do you support Barca anyway?” Jay had slurred.
“Because I once knew someone from Barcelona, and his name wasn’t Manuel.”
“Ja?” Jay said, shit-faced.
“He was a good mate and I was cruel to him and he died.”
“What did he die of?”
“AIDS,” I said.
“How were you cruel to him?”
“I told him he’d been looking for it.”
“Eish.”
“So I believe you’re fucking Kay Greenwood,” Veron, ever the diplomat, said.
“Where did you hear that,” I asked as I remembered that terrible silence at the other end of the telephone.
“Reliable sources,” she replied in a go-and-get-stuffed kind of way, at which point my cell started ringing.
“Talk of the devil,” I said.
“Guess what,” Kay said, breathy with excitement.
“Are you at the airport?” I said, hearing familiar background noises.
“No, I’m at a hotel with Herman Sebogodi and Jack Schwartz.”
Sebogodi was the chief of human resources and Schwartz, as already mentioned, his suck-up.
“Okay. What are you doing there?”
“Guess.”
“You’re having a ménage a trois,” I said jokily.
“No,” she said, too excited or ignorant to get the dig, “I’ve just been offered a promotion. So I can’t come over.”
“You’ve just been offered a promotion,” I said, for my drunk hosts’ sake.
“Yes,” she laughed.
“To what? Senior political commentator?”
“No. Management.”