In sport and politics, respect may be earned by excellence

Seriously, how loose does the end you’re at have to be for you to take yourself off to the nearest international airport to welcome back a returning national sports team?

The question arises out of the crowd that went to OR Tambo International in (actually way out of) Johannesburg to greet the national football team, Bafana Bafana, on its return from the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in Ivory Coast. The team had come third, its best performance there in almost 20 years.

“Why were there no white people to welcome back our boys,” asked a thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times. “Why are we not stronger? We clearly are not together yet.”

I remember Julius Malema asking much the same question years ago when athlete Caster Semenya returned from yet another international triumph.

The question is not frivolous, though part of me wonders why it should matter who turns up at an airport welcome. Who has the time? And it wasn’t as if Bafana had shot the lights out, even though hardly anyone had expected them to get very far.

I watched the SA’s semifinal against Nigeria and while my soccer knowledge is almost nonexistent, I thought they were miles better than we were.

But there is probably a more serious answer. It’s cultural, as are most of our problems here. By and large, white schools didn’t offer soccer as a sport when I was a boy. We boys played rugby and cricket and the girls played hockey and netball. And there were sports days and swimming galas. I think there might have been some soccer when my sons went to school 30 years later, but it was never a major white school sport.

And if a sport is not in your blood by the time you’re 10 it’ll never really be. I know it’s fashionable among whites now to have a “favourite” local and an international team. I do, but the truth is I’ve never watched a full match featuring either team. I get the skill but I am quickly bored. I don’t know the players and I wouldn’t even try to spell the names of the Tottenham Hotspur or Orlando Pirates coaches as they come and go.

Also, while soccer is wildly popular, I can’t get excited about the teams here. None even owns a stadium and many team owners seem to make their money trading in talent. The games I fleetingly see on my TV are poorly attended. For me, in my 70s, it’s too late.

But there are still questions to be answered. Black people follow “my” sport, rugby, with a passion that brings tears to my eyes. I was astounded by film clips of huge crowds in deep rural areas, huddled in blankets, watching the Springboks win their second Rugby World Cup in a row in France last year. It was inspiring beyond measure.

How did this happen? I watched the 1974 British & Irish Lions thrash the Springboks at the Boet Erasmus stadium in PE with my dad. The black spectators, forced to sit behind the posts at the southern end of the field, roared for the visitors as police with dogs patrolled below.

Partly, it must be the fact that under Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus black players are now often the stars of the games the Springboks win. They are pin-ups and magnificent rugby players. Erasmus’s ability to field a winning, racially representative team in just one generation since the end of apartheid is borderline miraculous.

Surely that they are winners matters? In this country, where so much fails, we hunger for signs that we contain within us the seeds of greatness. In cricket the decline is distressing even as black players rise through the ranks and excite us. In rugby the difference is that we often win. And it needn’t stop. We have more people here playing rugby, or available to play, than anywhere else in the world.

Sport is intoxicating because it has a purity about it that other aspects of our lives don’t. On the field there is no place to hide. In politics you can lie, fill stadiums and promise the earth, but the game never ends. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s greatest opponent, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in prison last Thursday, possibly at the same time as President Cyril Ramaphosa was challenging an audience at the Cape Town Press Club to show — in the wake of his strong support for the Palestinian cause as Israel bombards Gaza — where SA’s pursuit of human rights might be inconsistent.

It is in Russia, for a start. SA has uttered not one word of actual criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two years ago. The fact is we have become a Russian ally. In response to news of Navalny’s death, our international relations department put out a statement saying that we “note with concern the news of the death of Alexei Navalny and hope that the circumstances of his death will be thoroughly investigated by the Russian authorities”.

Like hell it will. Imagine what the ANC’s response would have been to a statement of “concern” and hopes for a “thorough investigation” from, say, the British government to the death in police detention 46 years ago of Steve Biko? Kidney failure, said the apartheid regime. Blood clot, said the Russians. Liars both.

So yes, we’re a divided bunch down here. Not together yet. But I think our successes in rugby have been important. They do actually bring us together a bit. And more successes will do it again. I’ve no doubt soccer can do this too. I have no idea how, but what singleminded, properly funded and dispassionately managed process would be required to get us from our 58th position in the Fifa rankings into the top 10 by 2030?

Write down the answer and start doing it tomorrow. If you keep your eye on just one prize you’d be amazed what might happen. But I still don’t think you’d get a lot of people, white or black, to the airport. We’d have had the required heart attacks watching the game on TV though, and we’d line the streets and lean out of our office windows to cheer the victory parade.

WE HUNGER FOR SIGNS WE CONTAIN WITHIN US THE SEEDS OF GREATNESS