Sport Versus Art: A South African Contest

A
SOUTH
AFRICAN
CONTEST
SPORT VERSUS ART EDITED BY

CHRIS THURMAN
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SPORTVERSUS ART
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A
SOUTH
AFRICAN
CONTEST
SPORT VERSUS ART EDITED BY

CHRIS THURMAN
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Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Selection and Introduction: Copyright © Christopher Thurman 2010

Chapters: Copyright © Individual Authors 2010
First published 2010
ISBN 978-1-86814-512-6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher,
except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
The editor and authors would like to thank Absa for supporting
the writing of this book. The views published in Sport versus Art
are, however, those of the individual writers and Absa does not
assume any responsibility for the content published in this book,
nor does it accept liability for any inconvenience or damages
caused by the publication.
Project managed by Monica Seeber

Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty) Ltd.
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For Jude Comley and Vanilla Nurse
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn ...
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This book would not have been possible without the enthusiasm,
eloquence and intellectual engagement of its various contributors;
I am sincerely indebted to them.
I am especially grateful to Veronica Klipp and Julie Miller, who
endorsed the idea behind the book before a word had been written,
and whose encouragement throughout has been greatly appreciated.
Monica Seeber offered invaluable advice on the manuscript at various
stages and saw the project through to its completion with aplomb (she
is also a charming tea-time companion).
It has been a pleasure to work with Desiree Pooe and her
colleagues at Absa, whose financial contribution to and promotion
of the book has been infused with a respect for the project’s intel-
lectual integrity and autonomy.
Finally, I offer humble thanks to my parents and sisters, who
nurtured my sporting and artistic inclinations; to my wife, Ciska,
who continually supports my indulgence in both; and to all those
friends and colleagues who have proved to me over the years that
these interests need not be mutually exclusive.
Chris Thurman
March 2010
Note: Quotations that are not attributed to a particular author or publication

have been taken from interviews conducted by the contributors in person
or via correspondence. As for published work, the list of references at the
end of the book has been provided in lieu of footnotes or in-text citations.
Page numbers have not been given for quotations from books, but these can
be obtained from the publisher on request.
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Contents
FOREWORD ix
KICKING OFF
Poor Relations? p1
Chris Thurman
Passing Passions, Enduring Love p34

Patrick Cairns
Why Sport Matters p40

Dan Nicholl
The Fine Line between Fanaticism and Obsession p49

Mninawa Ntloko
MEDIA, MONEY AND POLITICS
Sing When You’re Winning: p55

Representations of Sport and Culture in the Media
Simon van Schalkwyk
Cricket, Bollywood and Business: p65

Indian Art and Sport in South Africa
Firdose Moonda
From Non-racial Sport to the FIFA World Cup: p74

A Tale of Politics, Big Business and Hope Betrayed
Christopher Merrett
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The ‘Eighth Muse’: p83

Sport and Film, Sport on Film
Jyoti Mistry
Where are the Champions? p93

Football, Funding and South Africa-in-Africa
Lucky Sindane
The City of Theatre and Spectacle p101

Ashwin Desai
Artless Sport and Sportless Art: p112

Democracy’s Dilemmas of Representation
Gavin Sourgen
ART/SPORT?
The Bellowing Bull and the Thing That is Not Round: p123
Jazz and the Hidden History of Black Rugby
Gwen Ansell
Sporty Nerds and Arty Jocks: p131

How South Africans see Themselves
Stuart Theobald
“Playing to Win is not Really Playing”: p141

Artists’ Sporting Interventions
Anthea Buys
Ballet is a Sport: Part One p148

Edward Griffiths
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Ballet is a Sport: Part Two p152

Fiona Budd, Iain Macdonald and Samantha Saevitzon
‘Us’ and ‘Them’: p157

Dance, Sport, Gender and Politics
Adrienne Sichel
The Art of Sport p173

Angus Powers
SPORT, ART AND ME: MEMORY, NOSTALGIA, REGRET
Cricket, Loss and Life (and Song) Must Go On p181

Toast Coetzer
No Normal Art ...? p191

Mike van Graan
Pining for a Return to a Golden Era p199

Victor Dlamini
Cricket, Gender and Intimations of Mortality p211

Helen Moffet
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Sponsor’s Foreword
We at Absa realise the integral and important role that art and sport
play in any society. They can bring people together and encourage an
unspoken patriotism and ‘togetherness’ that might not ordinarily exist
in a diverse society such as ours. Each of us is involved in some way in
one or both arenas – either by participating or as a spectator – and
this translates into a form of support that often transcends time, age
and race.
Likewise, these arenas have equally rich and colourful histories in
South Africa that have been passed on from generation to generation.
Two outstanding examples are the much talked-about Absa Currie
Cup rugby competition and the Absa L’Atelier art awards, both of
which are celebrating their 25-year anniversary in 2010. This is
definitely no mean feat.
The Absa Group’s commitment to and sponsorship contribution
towards various artistic and sporting initiatives has grown significantly
over the last decade. In recent months, the Group has taken on a more
integrated approach, which has resulted in communities across the
country benefiting – either directly or indirectly – economically and
otherwise from our sponsorships.
As bankers, we are always on the lookout for investments that yield
long-term, sustainable results. One example is our sponsorship of
Bafana Bafana, the national soccer team; another example is the Absa
KKNK (Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees). The KKNK continues to
spearhead the crucial role of the arts industry in the celebration and
appreciation of a developing South African culture. Our long-term
commitment to the Festival not only confirms our investment in the
growth of arts and culture, but also demonstrates our support, as a
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xiii
responsible corporate citizen, for the economic well-being of the

region. According to recent research, the total economic impact of the
Absa KKNK in 2009 was estimated at R112 million.
Absa’s overall investment in both sport and the arts makes a
remarkable difference in the lives of South Africans. We are proud to
be associated with such initiatives and view our role as more than just
involvement in the preservation of culture – it is a contribution to the
overall growth and evolution of individual communities and of our
society more broadly.
In future initiatives, Absa will endeavour to forge sound partner-
ships that will have a positive impact on our country!
Happy Ntshingila
Absa Group Executive, Marketing and Communication
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KICKING OFF
Poor Relations?
Chris Thurman
In a sense, the appearance of this book immediately prior to the 2010

FIFA Football World Cup is unfortunate. To some it may smack of
‘2010 opportunism’, while to others it may simply form part of the
broad backdrop that the World Cup has provided for the lives of mil-
lions of South Africans in recent years – and will in all likelihood con-
tinue to provide for some time. As I hope this introductory essay will
indicate, the conflict (and potential concord) between sport and the
arts has long been a preoccupation of mine.
Yet it is telling that this preoccupation – evidently one shared by the
contributors to Sport versus Art and, I am confident, by many of its read-
ers – should culminate in publication just before the much-anticipated
kick off. As a watershed event, the Cup’s advent (along with the political
and economic changes that have occurred in South Africa since 2008)
has served to sharpen and foreground debates about various national
issues as the international gaze has intensified its focus on this country.
While not as critical as those of health, housing, crime, unemployment
or education, one such issue is the series of lost opportunities to establish
some form of symbiosis between sport and the arts – the most recent of
which is the disappearance of R150 million that was pledged by the
2 SPORT versus ART • KICKING OFF
Department of Arts and Culture in 2009 for arts ventures related to the
World Cup. At the time of writing, Minister Lulu Xingwana, having dis-
solved a task team previously established to assess funding proposals,
has yet to confirm whether or not institutions such as the Market Theatre
and the National Arts Festival will receive the monies promised to them,
while an internal forensic audit is under way, suggesting government
financial mismanagement or, worse, corruption. South Africa’s arts prac-
titioners can ill afford such squandering.
Unfortunately, as J. Brookes Spector has emphasised, “This 2010 mess
is simply a microcosm of the larger picture. There is little or no long-
term [government] commitment to artistic excellence in South Africa.”
In an eloquent but gloomy account of the parlous state of arts funding in
this country, Spector points to the slashing of the National Arts Council’s
budget – he calculates that it now amounts to about 30 cents per citizen!
– and the limited disbursement of funds for arts projects by the Lottery
Distribution Trust (as a result of “bureaucratic complexities”, the Trust
has been giving out “less than a third of its available funds”).
One of the titles originally considered for this book was Poor
Relations – a phrase that I have had in mind, when thinking about the
relationship between sport and the arts, since an interview with Janice
Honeyman in 2007. Honeyman, a well-known South African director
and theatre personality, reminded me of “the truism that cultural activ-
ity in this country has always been a poor relation to sport”. She was
referring not only to the broader public interest in sport as a form of
entertainment and the perceived neglect of artistic, aesthetic and intel-
lectual pursuits, but also to the elevated financial status enjoyed by
sport – in terms of state support, corporate sponsorship capital and
ticket revenues – compared to its literally poor cousin. Later that year,
at a press function in Grahamstown at the National Arts Festival, a
senior Festival board member echoed Honeyman’s sentiments, empha-
sising the paucity of big-name arts sponsors: “I challenge our large
Poor Relations? 3
companies to spend more on the arts. How much, for instance, do our
cellphone giants and banks spend on sport? We are asking, what about
art? If our rugby and cricket and soccer leagues can be worth billions
of rands, why can’t the arts industry be the same?”
Towards the end of 2009, another highly respected figure in South
African theatre, James Ngcobo, reinforced these anxieties: “What worries
me is that, while the government is … giving money to theatre compa-
nies, things are difficult for individuals who don’t have the backing of
a theatre. One just feels that we need to get the corporate world to
understand theatre, to have the CFOs and CEOs of companies coming
to watch our shows.” Of course, there are plenty of business executives
who do watch theatre, invest in fine art or patronise musicians. Studies
commissioned by Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) have con-
firmed that corporate arts funding has grown substantially over the
past ten years. As BASA chief Michelle Constant has complained, how-
ever, limited media coverage of sponsored arts projects – compared to
media coverage of sponsored sports events – is a deterrent to potential
new arts sponsors or to those companies that might otherwise wish to
grow their arts sponsorship portfolios.
Print and online news editors, as well as radio and TV producers,
may have something to answer for on this score. After all, the dictum
that ‘no news is good news’ is applied to arts journalism as well.
Consider the furore that erupted when it was reported (six months after
the fact) that Minister Xingwana had walked out of an exhibition con-
taining photographs by Zanele Muholi that she deemed “immoral” and
“offensive” – an exhibition that was sponsored by her Department and
that she was due to open officially. It is right that such ministerial follies
are made public (not least because Xingwana’s comments bring her
competence as an arts industry leader into question and, more menac-
ingly, invoke the shadow of state censorship of the arts), but if the media
coverage her bungling received were balanced by accounts of positive
state support for the arts, this would also be to the benefit of artists.
(Anecdotally, I may mention here that British-South African producer
and publisher Eric Abraham, who has invested millions of rands into
the new Fugard Theatre in Cape Town’s District Six, confided to me
his bemusement at the fact that the attendance of various political VIPs
at the opening of the theatre was largely ignored by the media.)
Following his comment about CEOs as theatre patrons, Ngcobo
went on to suggest that arts funding is as important as sports funding
because “it’s a lovely thing when a human being can watch a football
match between Chiefs and Pirates, can watch cricket or rugby, but can
also go to a play and to the ballet – someone who can enjoy diversity
in life.” Sport and the arts may compete for sponsors and for public
interest, but do they necessarily stand in opposition to one another?
Why do they seem to have such a poor relationship? Is what happens
on the sports field fundamentally different to what happens on the
stage or in the studio, or have we drawn a false dichotomy between
the two? What do we make of arts practitioners, academics or intel-
lectuals who are passionate about sport? Or sports buffs who take a
keen interest in literature, music, theatre, dance and the visual arts?
As a schoolboy, I did not find it difficult to integrate these interests.

My mother patiently shuttled me from soccer practices to music lessons,
or packed extra sandwiches for snacks between afternoon cricket
matches and evening play rehearsals. This was all made easier, no
doubt, by the fact that the headmaster at my high school (who also
happened to be my father) believed in the classical credo mens sana in
corpore sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body – to the extent that
he made the First XV rugby team join the chorus in whatever musical
was being staged as the school’s major production each year.
Poor Relations? 5
Looking back, however, I can discern the traces of conflict even in this
comparatively open-minded school environment. Inevitably, we absorbed
some of the assumptions that were widely held outside the school gates;
assumptions about, for instance, a national hierarchy of sports. As sports
scientist Ross Tucker has noted, the dominance of soccer, rugby and
cricket in South Africa means that “smaller sports – sometimes patron-
isingly called ‘Cinderella sports’ – are forced to make do with few
resources. For them, there is often no Cinderella story, only ‘poverty’ and
survival.” (This would imply that, in financial terms at least, the minor
sports relate to the major sports in the same way as the arts do.)
Tucker’s point is an economic one, but there are underlying ideological
causes for the promotion of some sports and the debasement of others,
as there are for the priority sport is given over the arts. I am ashamed
to recall that my rugby teammates and I merrily referred to hockey as
‘mof-stok’. Worse, as a pre-teen primary school kid whose ‘nerdy’ interests
were forgiven by his sports-mad friends because he could also throw or
kick a ball, I was one of those who sniggered at a boy who attended
ballet lessons after school instead of joining the on-field fracas. These
were fairly minor manifestations of a phenomenon that has had, and
continues to have, far more serious repercussions in South African society
– the dubious patriarchal alliance of sport and masculinity.
There is a brand of chauvinism, common to both township sports
clubs and elite private schools, that measures virility according to sport-
ing ability. It is arguably part of a broader male pathology in our country
that results in nauseatingly high rates of violence against women – the
same pathology, it could be said, that aggravates the strain of homo-
phobia betraying a conservative national consensus and running counter
to the tenets of our liberal constitution. Some of the contributors to this
book, Helen Moffett and Adrienne Sichel in particular, address questions
of gender as they pertain to sport (and to the arts). Related issues, which
have been more fully explored elsewhere, are the sexual objectification
of many female athletes across the world and, conversely, the stigmati-
sation of those who don’t fit into neat gender categories, as was demon-
strated throughout the Caster Semenya saga.
Many readers will remember Springbok rugby coach Peter de
Villiers’s widely reported press conference blunder of 2009: after
numerous incidents of foul play in that year’s British Lions series, he
facetiously compared rugby and dancing as “contact sports”. He had
forgotten, I’m sure, that not too long ago the Golden Lions Rugby
Union invited dancer-choreographer Gladys Agulhas to run training
workshops with rugby referees, or that former international rugby play-
ers and other athletes regularly appear as contestants on the TV show
Strictly Come Dancing. Members of the South African Ballet Theatre
(SABT) responded to Div’s disparaging remarks about ballet dancers
and tutus by reiterating a previous challenge to the national rugby
team’s players to compete in a fitness test with SABT’s male principal
dancers. The Springboks declined the invitation. (It should perhaps be
mentioned that former Bok hooker James Dalton, known as a ruffian
both on and off the rugby field, did take up the challenge – just as he
was game enough to participate in a season of Strictly Come Dancing.)
A number of comments from readers of online articles reporting on
the challenge betray the widespread idiocy that a macho sporting cul-
ture promotes: “Let the ballet dancers do a practice game against the
Bokke ... Can you imagine Bakkies taking out ballet dancers at the
ruck or the Beast upfront in the scrum against one of these guys?”;
“Good one Bokke, let the poofters do ballet and you play rugby!”; “I
think the ballet dancers would love to play a game of rugby ... men in
tights grabbing each other around the neck or picking them up while
firmly placing their hands on their **** could probably be referred to
as a contact sport ... maybe the dancers can’t wait to get hold of some
good S.A. Prime Cuts”; “Arrogante klomp poofters. Die Bokke moet
gaan ballet doen vir een hele dag en laat die dansertjies dan ’n 40 minute
Poor Relations? 7
koppestamp sessie deurwerk. Dan sien ons wie bly staande”; “Put
those poofters on the field and smash them! They should go and jump
on a different bandwagon, one that’s filled with pink tutus, tights and
heaven knows what else their crowd is into.” And so on.
Fortunately, there are contributions in the present volume that
replace such vitriol with more nuanced approaches to the connections
between ballet and rugby: from sportswriter and administrator Edward
Griffiths, and from members of the SABT itself (Fiona Budd, Iain
MacDonald and Samantha Saevitzon). Renowned dance critic Adrienne
Sichel also uses De Villiers’s comments as a starting point for her
account but, in contrast to the preceding pieces, she addresses the ‘us’
and ‘them’ divisions that exist in South Africa between proponents of
different dance forms, as much as between dancers and sportspeople.
Some would consider the association of dancing with femininity as
largely a ‘white’ or ‘Western’ prejudice. Zulu traditional martial dances,
and gumboot dances (to choose two prominent examples, although for
foreign visitors these have become the stuff of touristic cliché), are proof
that dance in this country has traditionally been a means to express mas-
culine energy and physical strength. One might say, then, that it is only
the European dance form of ballet that invokes such prejudice. But this
conclusion is not satisfactory either. As the ballet dancers who contribute
to this book justifiably claim, ballet need not be categorised as ‘foreign’
or ‘elite’. Moreover, as leading black male contemporary dancers such
as Sello Pesa, Gregory Maqoma or Thabo Rapoo can attest, the stigma
attached to male dancers crosses divisions of race and culture.
It ought to be self-evident in post-apartheid South Africa that the
terms ‘African’ and ‘European’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, cannot be used as
simplistic binaries but relate to one another in complex ways. Yet those
who wish to read this book through a racial lens may discern, in the
various contributions, an example-in-microcosm of what a colleague
has dubbed the ‘gulf’ between black and white that still seems to apply
to the support of different sporting codes in South Africa. Despite a

slow process of integration, can we deny that there remains a chasm
between sports fans of different races? It is what my colleague calls
“the Caster Semenya syndrome”, according to which it is understood
that – as some were quick to point out when the troubled young athlete
returned home with her 800m gold medal and a suitcase full of con-
troversy from the IAAF World Championships in Berlin – white people
go to the airport to greet ‘their’ sportspeople (rugby and cricket teams)
and black people go to the airport to greet ‘their’ sportspeople (soccer
and athletics teams). A similar though less marked gap is perceived to
exist in the arts, notes my colleague, according to which whites read
crime novels, blacks read poetry; whites like rock, blacks like gospel.
It remains a moot point as to whether such ‘cultural chauvinism’ causes
sporting codes and artistic disciplines to undermine the project of
national reconciliation as much as they contribute towards it.
Either way, one thing is certain: we have yet to attain a sophisticated
understanding of the interplay between sport and the arts.
If some sections of the sports-fanatic public utterly misconstrue the

performing arts, it must also be said that artists, writers and intellectuals
can unfairly categorise sporting endeavour – and sportspeople – as
inherently ‘unintelligent’, narrow-minded or even fundamentally
reactionary. In this sense, sport is demeaned as an intellectually or
aesthetically ‘poor’ relation of the arts (I am indebted to Gavin Sourgen,
also a contributor to this volume, for referring me to West Indian writer
C.L.R. James’s declaration in defence of his favourite sport: “Cricket is
an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the com-
munity”). As Sourgen and Stuart Theobald both point out in their pieces,
the separation of sport and art on intellectual or aesthetic grounds is
Poor Relations? 9
echoed in artificial sub-divisions between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, or ‘elite’
art and ‘popular’ art, and Jyoti Mistry notes that art forms such as film
are constantly forced into one or the other of these categories.
Then there are those artists and intellectuals who have no real
grudge against what happens on the field, but do – and often rightly
so – take issue with the way in which sporting events bring to the fore,
or are manifestations of, wider socio-political problems. Consider, for
instance, J.M. Coetzee’s seminal essay on the 1995 Rugby World Cup,
which makes many astute observations about what he calls “a month-
long orgy of chauvinism and mime-show of war among nations”. The
article comments not so much on the tournament itself as on the way
in which the opening and closing ceremonies were obvious products
of “an industry dedicated to the manufacture and recycling of the
exotic, to the construction of varieties of rainbowness”. As one might
expect of Coetzee, he offers a shrewd counter to “the inherent intel-
lectual muddle of the Rainbow Project” (here the Nobel laureate was
ahead of most of his compatriots, who have taken another decade to
start questioning the over-simplification of ‘nation building’ as it was
envisioned in the 1990s):
Part of the experience of being colonised is having images of yourself

made up by outsiders stuffed down your throat. Today’s image-makers
and image-marketers have no interest in complex realities, or indeed in
anything that cannot be expounded in fifteen seconds. The truth is,
their trade is not in reality at all: it is in what they call perceptions. In
this respect they are continuous with the people behind the South
African government of the 1980s, the ideas men and academic advisors
who saw the war their patrons were engaged in as a theatre of images
in which they were losing because the world audience had a perception
of them as racists lording it over a subject population and a perception
of their opponents as a liberation movement. Their advice to their
clients was to mount campaigns to reverse these perceptions, not to

change their hearts and mend their ways (such advice would have
seemed to them simply inappropriate, outside their assignment). In this
banal sense, they were beyond good and evil. Those concerned with
the real future of South Africa, starting with the State President [Nelson
Mandela] and the good Archbishop [Desmond Tutu], would do well
to keep a firm distance between themselves and these shadow-players.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about what Coetzee would
make of Invictus, the widely-publicised film version of John Carlin’s book
Playing the Enemy, in which Matt Damon (as Francois Pienaar) and
Morgan Freeman (as Madiba himself) recreate the symbolic significance
– in one sense profound, in one sense inadequate – of Mandela’s involve-
ment in the victorious Springbok campaign. In the present volume, a
number of contributors refer to the seminal events of 1995, as well as to
their depiction on the page and on screen. Some affirm the association of
sport (and the rugby-Mandela-Pienaar trifecta in particular) with ‘nation
building’, while others reject it as superficial and even cynical.
Irrespective of what one makes of Invictus’ portrayal of a certain
historical moment, for many rugby enthusiasts – players and fans alike
– the film fails in its depiction of the on-field action: broadly, insofar
as it is unable to capture what it actually looks and feels like to be
involved in a game of rugby and, more specifically, because insufficient
attention has been given to recreating the nuances of the actual
matches played by the Springboks prior to and during the 1995 World
Cup (supporting actors are poorly cast, crucial details neglected). These
particular shortcomings are evident to all those who are both
consciously and subliminally familiar with the intricacies of camera
angles, soundbites, lighting and colour in the iconic footage that was
broadcast live on TV and has since been replayed in countless
documentaries, retrospectives and adverts.
Poor Relations? 11
The re-enactments in a film like Hansie inevitably fall short for the
same reason. Over the years, South African cricket fans have revisited,
with alternating delight and masochistic gloom, images of famous
encounters against Australia (before the ‘438 game’): Shane Warne
being smacked out of the park at the Wanderers in 1994, Alan Donald
and Lance Klusener getting their signals mixed during that run-out off
the penultimate ball in the 1999 World Cup semi-final. There is simply
no way that a filmic recreation could ever match the visual drama
inscribed in the collective memory of the cricket-loving public. If, in
some future time, a footballing film-maker decides to shoot a feature
on the African Cup of Nations win in 1996 or – who knows? – a 2010
triumph for Bafana Bafana, he or she will be doomed to produce the
same anti-climactic effect.
Whether we like it or not, every time we follow the travails of our
sporting heroes (unless we’re fortunate enough to have tickets for the
game), as sports fans we are first and foremost media consumers. A few
generations ago the media consumed were newspapers and radio broad-
casts – then, it was still possible to recreate sporting magic onscreen with-
out inducing disappointment or even bathos in the viewer. Now, however,
the artistry entailed in turning real-life sporting contests into an audiovisual
dramatic performance belongs to the producer or editor of a TV broad-
cast, as he or she cuts between cameras and gives us instant slow-motion
replays. Film directors and actors must seek their material elsewhere.
*
So much for 1995. With the prospect of hosting the 2010 FIFA
Football World Cup imminent, there has again been conjecture over
how the South African nation will be projected into the global imagi-
nation or, to borrow a phrase, how South Africa’s identity will continue
to be constructed in the ‘global imaginary’ through the pageantry of
the opening and closing ceremonies. The use of Charlize Theron as
‘lovely assistant’ to FIFA Secretary-General Jérôme Valcke at the

celebrity-heavy ceremony put on for the World Cup draw in December
2009, along with performances by Johnny Clegg, the Soweto Gospel
Choir and the cast of the musical Umoja, gives us some idea of what
current “image-makers and image-marketers” (as Coetzee calls them)
expect the world to expect from South Africa.
The influx of visitors to the country for the World Cup (and a
brighter international media spotlight on various aspects of ‘life in
South Africa’) presents an opportunity for local artists to promote their
work to a global audience. This potential symbiosis between sport and
art in 2010 has, however, already proved fractious. Sean O’Toole, one
of South Africa’s leading fine arts journalists, has expressed disillusion-
ment regarding what he sees, not as opportunity, but as opportunism:
Football is the beautiful game. It is also a professionalised ball sport

that allows us to marvel at the innate prowess of young men (and
increasingly women) in their physical prime. Art, conversely, is not a
game, even if its best practitioners possess all the audacity and grace
of Cristiano Ronaldo running at a centre back.
Art is a finely tuned balance of craft and thought, the mental
reverie it involves now increasingly viewed as the defining element
in the equation. Let me simplify. Artists, unlike the masterful foot-
ballers Fernando Torres or Samuel Eto’o, are not defined by their
prowess of making anymore, not singularly. They can subcontract
the physical labour of sweating. This is a magic act not even
Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola could hope to conjure.
To summarise then: art is not soccer, and soccer is not art.
Whether you’re a fan of Orlando Pirates or Club Atlético River Plate,
this potentially tautological piece of wisdom is pretty much self-
evident. Undeterred ... artists, curators, entrepreneurs and plain old
hucksters are readying themselves for the first whistle of the 2010
FIFA World Cup.
Poor Relations? 13
O’Toole mentions uninspiring photographic essays about football on

the African continent and the Artists of Africa Exhibition opening at
Johannesburg’s Museum Africa in May 2010, along with other instances
of artists “jockeying for position around the pigskin [football]” while
making a “panicked hunt for a quick buck”; he singles out art dealer
Craig Mark, who has obtained a licence from FIFA to supply official
‘art products’ through the 2010 Fine Art collection. Others, such as Mark
himself and artist-critic Thembinkosi Goniwe (appointed as curator of
the Museum Africa exhibition), have defended the support of state
institutions and of organisations such as FIFA for 2010-related arts
initiatives. It remains to be seen which camp will be vindicated.
J.M. Coetzee’s point about contriving and marketing a national
identity is well taken, but the Rugby World Cup was only one example
among many attempts to build unity on the rainbow model. There is,
perhaps, a defence to be made of campaigns aiming to bring South
Africa’s different racial, cultural and linguistic groups under a single
‘umbrella’ identity. At the very least, one should bear in mind the
apartheid-era insistence of the late Guy Butler (another writer and scholar
who admitted he wasn’t much good at sport) that, once the politico-legal
segregation of apartheid was dismantled, it would require a conscious
effort of the imagination if “flowers of synthesis” were to grow amongst
South Africa’s disparate peoples. A common national identity can,
indeed, be created – all nations are, as Benedict Anderson would have it,
“imagined communities” – and perhaps this is a necessary counterbalance
to the artificial identities manufactured through racial segregation.
Alternatively, one may argue that, precisely because the support of
sport has traditionally been linked to local, regional or national affilia-
tions (and given that such parochial loyalties can lead to, or perpetuate,
or aggravate conflict), the globalising impetus of professional sport is
slowly starting to undermine petty nationalist and cultural-ethnic rival-
ries. The club-swapping superstars of the European football leagues,
the big budget auctions for international players in the hyperbolical

cricketing entertainment of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the osmosis
of rugby players across the northern hemisphere/southern hemisphere
divide – all of these make it increasingly difficult for sports fans to
resort to simple-minded jingoism or patriotic fervour when they’re
cheering on their heroes. Or do they? Successful sportspeople are
appropriated as national figures irrespective of their provenance; as
British journalist Rob Steen has noted, no-one in England seems to
mind that four of the current stars of the English cricket team are South
African born and raised (and that, hypothetically, England could field
a team of eleven composed entirely of expat South Africans).
There are, of course, many people in South Africa who do mind,
people who no doubt share Toast Coetzer’s belief, as expressed in his
contribution to this book, that there is nothing worse than seeing a
South African sports team lose to England. Dan Nicholl, in his enter-
taining recollection of great sporting moments, alludes wryly to another
national rivalry – perhaps antagonism is a better word – between South
Africa and Australia; yet it was anti-English sentiment that came to the
fore in pubs and living rooms across South Africa during the tense
moments of the 2007 Rugby World Cup final and the more recent
2009-10 home and away cricket series contested by the two countries.
In the former, jeers at the TV were followed by a national sigh of
relief when it was ruled that Danie Rossouw’s desperate tryline tackle
on Mark Cueto had done just enough to force the English winger’s
foot into touch, preventing what would have been a crucial turning
point in the second half. In the latter, mounting excitement after the
Proteas’ bowlers finally managed to work their way through the
English batting order was followed by a national groan of disappoint-
ment as – not once, but twice – tail-ender Graham Onions held out
against the tired efforts of Makhaya Ntini and Morne Morkel in the
final overs of test matches in Pretoria and Cape Town respectively.
Poor Relations? 15
Much as an adrenaline-fuelled patriotism might drive one’s exultant

or despondent response to the live sporting event, however, I would argue
that these moments retain their appeal because, when revisited weeks or
months after the fact, they can be appreciated for what might be termed
their ‘artistic’ qualities. Slow-motion footage reveals Rossouw’s and
Cueto’s horizontal bodies moving gracefully, albeit with great momen-
tum; there is the aesthetic thrill of the ever-so-slight contact between the
boot and the line; and when we recall in our minds the drama of the
moment we immerse ourselves in it anew, but with the gratification (or,
if you’re English, the compensation) of mellowed emotions. Similarly, the
improbable symmetry of the Onions scenario has the feeling of a carefully
scripted narrative, and the archetype of the ‘last man standing’ cannot
fail to evoke a response of admiration – however grudging, however reluc-
tant – from the most ardent Proteas supporter. It’s pure theatre.
This is true of many other great South African sporting moments,
moments that have spurred on patriotic fervour but that are ultimately
of lasting interest because of a human story unrelated to national pride.
Think of Josiah Thugwane, running a victory lap with a South African
flag draped over his shoulders after winning gold in the marathon at the
1996 Atlanta Olympics, and subsequently declaring: “I won the medal
for all the people of South Africa and especially for my president, Nelson
Mandela, who made it possible for us to be part of the international com-
munity.” Recollections of such scenes and soundbites are tinged with
nostalgia for the optimism (and admittedly, in retrospect, the naivety) of
the mid-1990s, South Africa’s halcyon post-apartheid period. But it is
Thugwane’s individual tale, of the illiterate miner-turned-marathoner
who received a gunshot wound during a hijacking only months prior to
the Olympics – and whose new-found fame proved to be a mixed blessing
– that is more moving and, from a humanist perspective, more significant.
*
Stuart Theobald, in an essay that largely argues against the dualistic

separation of sport and the arts, nevertheless points out one of the key
differences between the two pursuits: while the arts are less easily
recruited to the promotion of a particular idea of ‘the nation’, the char-
acter of sporting endeavour “is deeply nationalist – the pinnacle of a
discipline is representing your country”. Yet the most rousing patriotic
sentiments on a sports field are often stirred, before the game has even
begun, by a moment of ‘artistry’: the singing of the national anthems.
As evidenced by the shame and anger following Ras Dumisani’s
botched rendition of the South African anthem when the Springboks
took on France in Toulouse in 2009, anthem-singing constitutes a per-
formance that requires ‘big match temperament’ of an artist. And when
the artist fails, this has an effect on the sportspeople (the anthem debacle
was by no means solely to blame for the Boks’ sub-par performance,
but it clearly had a deflating impact). Vice-captain Victor Matfield, in
a post-match interview, noted that singing the anthem is “almost like
receiving a jersey – every week’s a special moment”: “Every time you
go out on the field and sing the national anthem, it’s very important
and it really fires you up because you know you’re playing for your
country. It was a joke out there. The guys couldn’t sing along to it and
even the crowd were starting to laugh. It was very disappointing.”
Whether despite or because of such nationalistic concerns, it can
be argued that – both spontaneously and through intervention or
contrivance – sport has fostered and will continue to foster a measure
of unity in this country. By and large, however, it has been a divisive
phenomenon. On one level, there is the obvious antagonism, some-
times jocular and sometimes dangerously serious, created by regional
or club loyalties among supporters of professional (and sometimes
even amateur) sport. As both Mninawa Ntloko and Lucky Sindane
show in their essays, for many sports fans the parochial often takes
precedence over the national. Indeed, a recent advertisement for a
Poor Relations? 17
South African beer brand takes advantage of this tension by showing

how fans from opposing PSL soccer teams can unite behind Bafana
Bafana if they drink the team sponsor’s brew (here one can apply Simon
van Schalkwyk’s analysis of the fusion of nation building and product
promotion in an earlier advert for the same brand). On another level,
race-based divisions in post-apartheid South Africa have been aggra-
vated by conflicting opinions about transformation in the administra-
tion of sport and racial representation – or, more captiously, tokenism
– in the composition of sports teams.
Under apartheid, the ‘big three’ sports were strongly associated with
ethnicity: soccer was a ‘black’ sport, rugby and cricket were ‘white’
sports (with rugby tending to be ‘Afrikaans’, cricket ‘English’). Prior to
this, as has been well documented, cricket and rugby were significant
forces in the colonising process, imported to South Africa and promoted
in this country because they were seen to embody the imperial English
ethos, long before rugby was appropriated by Afrikaner nationalists.
It is worth noting that voices critical of the alliance between sport and
empire-building had already emerged by the end of the nineteenth
century. I am grateful to Patrick Cairns, one of the contributors to this
book and a man of unusual reading habits, who came across the
following complaint in the correspondence (edited by Phyllis Lewsen)
of colonial-era Cape politician John X. Merriman:
It may be questioned whether this enormous interest in looking at ath-

letic performances which seems to exist throughout the British world
is really so healthy a sign as it is sometimes supposed to be. The Greeks
in their decline carried their love of gymnastics to an excess and it co-
existed with an utter lack of manly robustness of character and of public
spirit, but it is a growing fashion of the day to congratulate ourselves
in the press that it is a noble and saving virtue, belonging exclusively
to the fine British character at a time when a good many other things
are slipping away from us. Amid some good there is a great deal of
most unmitigated humbug about it.
The historians Andre Odendaal and Bruce Murray have written exten-
sively about the racialisation of sport in South Africa (as have two of
the contributors to this book, Christopher Merrett and Ashwin Desai)
and have traced the complex effects of the non-racial sporting move-
ment within the country, as well as the international sports boycott
against it. Their accounts also demonstrate that many common
assumptions about connections between sport and race politics in this
country over the last two centuries are fallacious – that, for example,
cricket and rugby were not in fact successfully preserved as ‘white
sports’ (Gwen Ansell’s piece in the present volume provides further
evidence of “the hidden history of black rugby”, linking this to some
of the icons of South Africa’s jazz legacy).
Similar patterns may be identified in the history of the performing
and visual arts in South Africa: on the one hand, the promotion and
protection of Eurocentric art forms alongside the establishment of South
Africa as colony, union and republic; on the other, the fertile interaction
between these imported forms and indigenous artistic traditions. The
second half of the twentieth century saw both government sponsorship
of works of art that were not deemed a threat to Nationalist policies,
or that indeed celebrated them, and brave resistance from artists of all
backgrounds to the hegemonic edifice of apartheid. But South Africa’s
arts community has also been riven by the question of transformation
since 1994 – as demonstrated, for example, in the controversy stirred
by Lion King co-producer Lebo M in 2008 when he complained that
theatre awards weren’t racially representative.
Neither our sportspeople nor our artists could claim that they exercise
their craft independently of politics. Most sportspeople, undoubtedly,
wish that they were free to concentrate solely on their performances
Poor Relations? 19
without having to worry about off-field events, but just as South African
athletes are all too aware of their role in racial transformation, so recent
terrorist attacks on the Togo football team (in Angola) and the Sri Lankan
cricket team (in Pakistan) have painfully reinforced what previously
emerged at various Olympic Games – think, for example, of Berlin 1936,
Munich 1972, Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 – that sport is often
at the mercy of geopolitical developments.
By contrast, Mike van Graan argues in his essay that art must be
informed by the political context of the artist. Moreover, as Gavin
Sourgen and Stuart Theobald separately note, artificial distinctions
between what constitutes ‘high art’ and what is mere ‘popular enter-
tainment’ are politically inflected. Ashwin Desai’s description of current
conflicts in KwaZulu-Natal between the elitist and the popular, or the
privatised and the public, further complicates our definition of art. A
Durban beachfront rickshaw driver is both performing artist and athlete.
The Umgeni Road Temple, situated within earshot of the new Moses
Mabhida stadium (itself a shrine or site of pilgrimage, albeit of a
different sort), is adorned with artwork that dramatises the pantheon
and prophecies of Hinduism. Fire-spinners and dancers meeting on the
fringes of the city enact a communal artistic ritual. Even re-enactments
of the Battle of Isandlwana must be understood as a form of theatre –
causing Desai to question the negative influence such portrayals can
have on the way that historical events are interpreted.
At the risk of seeming like a Coetzee acolyte, I wish to refer to another of

his essays, “Four Notes on Rugby” (1978), in which he makes numerous
comments about rugby that might be extrapolated into generalisations
about all sports – introducing a few points addressed by some of the
contributors to this book (my thanks to Coetzee scholar Donald Powers
for pointing me in the direction of this little-known piece). Those who

have attempted to follow the various major and minor changes in the
rules of the game of rugby in recent years may laugh to find themselves
agreeing, three decades later, with Coetzee’s complaint that the
“labyrinthine set of laws” is “unsatisfactory” because:
1) They are inexact [and] allow a variety of interpretations

2) They yield a phase of play without aesthetic interest
3) They fail to prevent injuries and allow some covert violence
4) By and large they fail to keep the ball live as they are intended
to do
5) They contribute heavily to making rugby a game whose
outcome is decided by prowess at goal-kicking.
Whatever their limitations might be, rules are necessary in all sports.
Coetzee observes that the general agreement to play by the rules (and,
if not, to be penalised) is fundamental to human social relations and
can be observed in the games that children play. But, whereas children
frequently challenge and change the rules by which they play, this is
not tolerated on the sports field:
In schools, and particularly in boys’ schools, the line between ‘free

play’ and sport is clearly drawn, and always to the disadvantage of
play. Sport is given an ideological function (‘character-building’) while
play remains suspect, frivolous. From long before adolescence the child
is put under pressure to leave the open air of games and live under the
umbrella of the codes ... The child who submits to the code and plays
the game is therefore re-enacting a profoundly important moment of
culture: the moment at which the knee is bent to government. This is
the moment at which sport and the arts, the two most complex forms
of play, part ways. In the creative arts, the artist both composes his
game and plays it. He thus asserts an omnipotence that the player of
Poor Relations? 21
sports yields up. This helps to explain why sports are so easily captured
and used by political authority, while the arts remain slippery, resistant,
undependable as moral training grounds for the young.
Here, Coetzee echoes a sentiment expressed in the Dutch historian

Johan Huizinga’s important 1938 study, Homo Ludens (“Man the
Player”), in which he theorises that play is a vital aspect of the forma-
tion of culture. According to Huizinga, the “systemisation and regi-
mentation” of modern competitive sport – professional sport in
particular – has forced out the play-element, the element of “spontaneity
and carelessness”. Sport thus “occupies a place alongside and apart
from the cultural process”. No matter how popular or spectacular a
sporting event may be, says Huizinga, it cannot be “raised to the level
of a culture-creating activity” and remains “sterile”.
There are various points made by Coetzee and Huizinga that are
explored, directly and indirectly, by contributors to Sport versus Art.
Firstly, aren’t there ways to regain the play-element in sport through a
disrupting infusion of the ‘play’ of art? In her essay on the playful per-
formance art interventions of Anthea Moys, Anthea Buys suggests that
there are – and yet she also describes Moys’ work, quoting the artist
herself, in terms that are strongly resonant with a more recent Coetzee-
ism (thanks to Corina van der Spoel for bringing to my attention this
extract from Diary of a Bad Year):
In favour of the arts it can at least be said that, while every artist strives
for the best, attempts to cast the sphere of the arts as a competitive
jungle have had little success. Business likes to finance competitions in
the arts, as it is even readier to pour money into competitive sport.
But, unlike sportspeople, artists know that the competition is not the
real thing, is only a publicity sideshow. The eyes of the artist are, finally,
not on the competition but on the true, the good, and the beautiful.
There is, of course, an argument to be made for the social value of

sport’s competitive edge; it channels inevitable human antagonism into
a safe, rule-bound sphere. As poet Christopher Zithulele Mann has
written, sporting “rites” have the power to “transmute/the thuggish
rivalry of human genes”(self-preserving survivalist genes that, if
“thwarted”, can either “subtly shaft a friend/or bomb whole cities into
smoking ruins”) into a more noble contest.
Secondly, although “the arts remain slippery”, there is no doubt –
as I have already suggested – that art, like sport, has been used very
effectively by political authorities; in South Africa, Christopher Merrett
argues, this is as true of post-apartheid ideologues as it was of the
Nationalist government.
Thirdly, as Helen Moffett admits, the necessarily rule-bound nature
of sport can be reassuring: when one lives in a lawless and reckless
society, the on-field agreement of players from opposing sides to abide
by the laws of the game (most of the time) and the even application of
those laws by umpires and referees (most of the time) provides a
modicum of order; the cosmos may be chaotic, but sport offers com-
fort, structure and respite.
For this reason, although human dishonesty and human error creep
into players and officials respectively, with the result that what happens
on the field is not always fair – this is, in fact, often what provides the
greatest drama and evokes the most acute sense of pathos in memorable
fixtures – we cling to the idea that sporting endeavour is equated with
honesty. One need only look at the public outcry over recent instances
of cheating, from doping athletes to the unfortunate hand of Thierry
Henri, for confirmation that the principle is held dear despite all
evidence to the contrary.
Notwithstanding the critiques Coetzee offers in the essays from
which I have quoted, he does not actually claim to dislike the game of
rugby in particular, or sport in general. On the contrary, in interviews
Poor Relations? 23
(with David Attwell) and elsewhere in his work (notably Boyhood and
Youth) he has made numerous references to the fact that when he was
a teenager “life outside the classroom was dominated by sport, partic-
ularly cricket”. As an aspirant twenty-something writer, he cultivated
the idea that “team sports were incompatible with the life of a poet and
an intellectual” – the kind of contempt for sport that it is de rigueur
amongst the intelligentsia – but he would soon discover that his enjoy-
ment of a game like cricket could complement his literary ambitions:
“Is it true that art comes only out of misery? Must [one] become
miserable again in order to write? Does there not also exist a poetry of
ecstasy, even a poetry of lunchtime cricket as a form of ecstasy?”
Coetzee confessed some years ago to a continued “investment in
sport, or at least what the spectacle of sport promises and now and
again yields: instants of strength and speed and grace and skill coming
together without thought”. This is a description of the invigorating
aesthetic experience of sport – what makes commentators describe an
athlete’s muscular agility as ‘poetic’. The thrill that one can experience
watching sportsmen and sportswomen is equivalent to the spine-tingle
evoked by a daring dance routine, a musical climax or a riveting piece
of acting; Angus Powers explores the dynamics of “the art of sport” in
his essay. (It should be added that the word ‘art’ remains open to misuse
in sporting discourse – consider former Springbok lock and part-time
Sports Illustrated columnist Mark Andrews singing the praises of “the
art of intimidation” on the rugby field. Can sheer belligerence and smil-
ing-faced thuggery ever really be deemed an art form?)
Those two words with which Coetzee ends, “without thought”,
would seem to preclude any substantial equation of sport with art.
After all, the assumption that artistic endeavours depend on abstract
cognition, whereas playing sport is an unthinking exercise, is the premise
from which grows the general disdain for sport expressed by many
who would describe themselves as being of an intellectual inclination.
Nonetheless, it is taken for granted that one of the tasks of our writers
and artists is to comment insightfully on South African society and
social phenomena – and isn’t the overriding popularity of our major
sports one such phenomenon?
In his “Four Notes on Rugby”, Coetzee expresses disappointment in
South African sports journalism of the 1970s, which he feels “remains
bogged down in the most crudely positivistic conception of what it is like
to watch (‘X dummies and breaks through a tackle before passing to Y,
who scores in the corner’)”. Of course, anyone who has followed the
entertaining ball-by-ball updates on cricket website www.cricinfo.com
can confirm that this kind of detailed description and literary wit are not
mutually exclusive! But what Coetzee is really criticising is a lack of
insight, of intellectual substance and probably of linguistic flair in the
sports pages: “The situation is absurd. For thousands of people, Saturday
afternoons in winter form the climax of the week, an experience they
afterward stammer to speak about because they lack the words. They
devour the sports reports looking for bread, and find only stones.”
This metaphor hints at a religious dimension to the sporting expe-
rience. Coetzee writes of “an island of eighty minutes lifted out of the
time of one-thing-after-another”, noting that “the game promises to
give meaning to a stretch of time” – a kind of secular transcendence
that is also comparable to the experience offered by the arts (sport “is
like narrative” in this way, suggests Coetzee). In similar vein,
Christopher Mann’s poem “Real Cricket” describes how a group of
amateur players “cross a rope, a boundary line/that rings a world of
make-believe”:
where cricket for a day transcends

the scams and scandals of the week,
where industry and farming pause
as caps and floppy hats inspect the pitch.
Poor Relations? 25
Mann’s poetry forges interesting connections between sport and literature

– he writes elsewhere about “the sport of a poem”. In the present volume,
Toast Coetzer, Victor Dlamini and Angus Powers each probe these asso-
ciations, while Patrick Cairns contends that sport does not and cannot
have the permanent effect achieved by great works of literature. Dan
Nicholl, on the other hand, claims that there is something “fundamental”
about the “enthralling magic” of sport: “so much of what we love and
celebrate can be calibrated in runs and goals and tries”. In similar vein,
the testimonies of avid soccer fans collected by Mninawa Ntloko confirm
that, for many people, sport fills a kind of existential void, providing a
sense of direction and conviction to those whose lives might be lacking
such assurances; yet when fanaticism becomes obsession, it can cause
serious damage to an already-frayed social fabric.
Sports matches, Coetzee observes, are also analogous to “religious
spectacles” insofar as everyone in the crowd is “engaged in creating and
confirming value for everyone else”. Again, there are resonances with
the performing arts. Guy Butler wrote in an essay on “Poetry, Drama
and Public Taste” that theatre audiences must be at least “partially sub-
merged in a sense of community” in order for “a psychological ‘crowd’”
to be formed, a crowd whose members “look into a doubtful future,
but their common past, their sense of sharing a common life, preserves
their unity”.
In this book, there is an unexpected variation on the theme of theatre,
sport and unification when playwright Mike van Graan recalls that
watching sport on TV with his father was “the only bridge” between
the “parallel worlds” of father and son – worlds which would other-
wise “never intersect”. Here it is worth mentioning that, despite his
intellectual reservations about rugby, J.M. Coetzee – or, at least, the
character of John Coetzee in the third instalment of his fictionalised
memoirs, Summertime (2009) – found himself attending matches at
Newlands stadium with his father as a Saturday afternoon ritual in
the mid-1970s, because sport was “the strongest surviving bond” in

an otherwise disintegrated filial relationship.
The connections forged between individuals through sport are often,
however, fleeting, and sport’s capacity to mediate in potentially volatile
situations is limited. While the protagonist in Richard Ford’s novel The
Sportswriter (1986) confidently affirms that “Sports is a first-rate safety
valve when you and your whole value system are brought under friendly
but unexpected scrutiny” (when meeting his girlfriend’s family proves
awkward, he has recourse to sport as a neutral conversation topic), the
chaotic unravelling of his relationship that follows gives the lie to this
claim. Sport cannot always console, nor can it always offer an escape.
These considerations aside, the question remains: have our sportswrit-

ers advanced from producing stones to bread over the last thirty years?
Darrel Bristow-Bovey, offering a strident but typically entertaining
defence of Peter de Villiers in a Sports Illustrated column, suggests not.
Bristow-Bovey compares the coach’s critics to “those half-comical,
half-pathetic villains in old cartoons, scheming in their tiny, under-
stocked laboratories to take revenge on a world that doesn’t pay them
enough respect”:
Except local sports reporters can’t actually plunge the world into
chaos – they’d have to learn to punctuate first – so some of them,
the worst kind, the bitter, frustrated, joyless kind, try to do the only
thing they can. ‘I may be growing old in a job that doesn’t pay,’ they
muse, ‘writing for people who don’t recognise my name about people
who don’t recognise my opinion, and my wife doesn’t go down on
me any more, but by God I have some power. Mark my words, I’ll
get this Springbok coach fired before his contract expires! Then the
girls will like me again!’
Poor Relations? 27
Such infantilism, Bristow-Bovey suggests, makes some of our sports

journos act like playground bullies, like “vengeful, small-minded flip-
floppers with a personal axe to grind”.
This is not an anxiety specific to South Africa, as anyone who has
read Ford’s novel could confirm. The protagonist of The Sportswriter
is a man who has settled for the superficial realities of middle-class
America so that he can avoid the tragic truths about his life, about all
lives, that patently lurk below the surface – and this is echoed in his
decision to give up a promising literary career for the less taxing job
of sports journalism. “Sports are always a good distraction from life
at its dreariest,” notes Ford’s narrator, and sportswriters have the
privilege of emphasising this distraction; they have “a clean slate
almost every day ... a chance not to be negative, to give someone
unknown a pat on the back, to recognise courage and improvement,
to take the battle with cynicism head-on and win”. But this noble calling
is not always fulfilled. The worst sportswriters “tend to be cynics looking
only for false drama in the germs of human defeat” and, as a result,
“a group of sportswriters together can narrow your view far beyond
pessimism”. The “cheap-drama artists of my profession,” admits the
sportswriter, “are specialists at nosing out failure ... They see only the
germs of defeat in victory, venality in all human endeavor.”
What Coetzee, Bristow-Bovey and Ford collectively depict is, of
course, a misrepresentation, for our best sportswriters manage to
avoid the twin traps of producing simplistic, ‘uplifting’ stories on the
one hand and manufacturing pathos on the other. A glance at Luke
Alfred and Tom Eaton’s compendium of South African sports writing,
Touchlines and Deadlines, reinforces this point. And, when local sports
journalism currently ranges from the wicked humour of cricket writer
and motoring fundi Alex Parker to the provocative musings of football
scribe and cartoonist Carlos Amato, we can affirm that there is some
bread to be found amongst the stones. In the present volume, Mninawa
Ntloko, Dan Nicholl, Firdose Moonda and Lucky Sindane are all jour-
nalists (along with Edward Griffiths, when he’s wearing his journalist’s
hat) who write about sport but also write about a lot more than sport;
beyond simply covering sporting fixtures and discussing on-field
events, they manage to entertain the reader and simultaneously to offer
substantial comment and analysis. Indeed, there are many in South
Africa’s arts industry who (despairing at media coverage of the arts in
this country) would enjoin our arts journalists to follow this example.
Of course, journalists working in the print media – globally, not
just locally – have their own problems. Newspapers and magazines
have struggled to retain readers in the digital age, for print has no place
in the saturated multi-media triangle of TV, cyberspace and radio. No
study of the relationship between sport and the arts can gloss over the
role of the media in shaping that relationship. For instance, when I
asked the contributors to this book to consider why it is that sport
receives so much more sponsorship than the arts, Stuart Theobald gave
me a pragmatic economist’s answer: sport is frankly more TV-friendly
than most art forms, which is the real reason it gets more coverage,
has larger audiences and is thus more desirable to potential sponsors.
A number of the pieces in Sport versus Art address points similar to
this one. Victor Dlamini bemoans the fact that football’s suitability to
TV broadcasts has alienated a generation of fans from the artistry of
radio commentary or the thrill of watching a game live (this may be
comparable to the difference between seeing a movie and going to a
play, or between listening to a CD and attending a music concert). Simon
van Schalkwyk discusses the ways in which ‘nation building’ ostensibly
occurs through TV advertising and promotional music. Perhaps most
chasteningly, Christopher Merrett suggests that the ‘success’ of profes-
sional sport as a media-marketable commodity has been to the detriment
of both players and fans. Sport “has not been sponsored,” he writes,
“but simply absorbed by big business and a nationalist agenda”; in this
Poor Relations? 29
light, “the arts are better off” because, poor though they may be, they
face fewer of the restrictions that accompany corporate or state backing.
(It is strangely reassuring to South Africans, perhaps, to reflect that the
– usually corrupt – alliance of government, private capital and sport is
an international phenomenon. One need only consider the case of Silvio
Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister, ‘mafioso’ businessman and owner of
Serie A football giants A.C. Milan.)
Merrett’s argument may be endorsed and extrapolated by the obser-
vation that, when South African artists do receive large amounts of state
funding, it typically carries the taint of ill-judged budgeting or sheer bad
governance. Certainly, this was the case in 1996 when the Department
of Health (then just beginning a decade and more of incompetence and
negligence) gave Mbongeni Ngema more than R14 million to stage
Sarafina II as an HIV/Aids educational extravaganza, a sequel that didn’t
come close to matching the theatrical and musical power of Sarafina,
and indeed undermined by association the activism of the original pro-
duction. Other notorious white elephant theatre projects on which the
state has wasted money include A re Ageng Mzanzi (Let’s Build South
Africa), a piece of self-promotion on which the Department of Human
Settlements spent R22 million before it was cancelled in 2009.
R22 million, coincidentally, is also the figure that the Mpumalanga
provincial government set aside for Ngema to put on The Lion of the
East, a musical about Gert Sibanda’s 1949 potato boycott. Despite the
efforts of Sibanda’s son and various ANC officials to halt the show – they
felt that the outlandish sum being spent brought the activist’s legacy into
disrepute – it toured nationally in 2009, much to the outrage of those rep-
resenting major arts institutions whose annual budgets were far eclipsed
by the amount splurged on the show. As Janet Smith wrote of the debacle
in the Saturday Star: “It pays to sing the government’s praises.”
*
When it comes to the scientific analysis of sport, South Africa is a

world leader – thanks largely to Tim Noakes and others at the SA
Sports Science Institute. In fact, we have a strong tradition of scientists
who have applied their minds to the marvel of human movement.
World-renowned anatomist, palaeoanthropologist and cricket nut
Philip Tobias, for instance, has dedicated a series of papers to elucidating
how “Man, the Tottering Biped” developed the physical abilities that
allow humans to pursue both artful and sporting endeavours in ways
that distinguish us from our “poor relations” (there’s that phrase
again!) in the primate family. Here it is worth noting that Tobias makes
direct comparisons between the brain functions, fine motor skills, balance
and agility required when playing sports and the same capacities as
used in artistic performances; singing, piano playing and ballet dancing
require precisely the neuromuscular control and coordination that one
sees demonstrated on the sports field or in the karate dojo. Tobias’s
identification of parallels between martial arts and dancing is echoed
in Adrienne Sichel’s piece in this book, in which she quotes the dance
persona ‘Elu’ describing his Kung Fu- and kickboxing-infused choreo-
graphy. (Of course, the fact that we happily categorise the ‘martial
arts’ as sports further undermines any notion that sport and the arts
are diametrically opposed. There are various Olympic sporting codes
that evince a similar crossover – one thinks, for instance, of ice-skating,
gymnastics and the much-derided synchronised swimming events.)
In addition to hard science, thoroughgoing socio-political analysis
of sport in this country has long been in evidence, as a glance at any
bibliography of books on sport in South Africa will reveal – if one
looks beyond the biographies and autobiographies of sports stars,
which are regularly among our highest-selling titles. But analysis of
the ‘sportness’ of sport, what one might call phenomenological analysis,
remains lacking. We have yet to produce a C.L.R. James, who seam-
lessly fused cricket with art and literature in writing about West Indian
Poor Relations? 31
and post-colonial identity. Or a Neville Cardus, who was as well

known for his writing on cricket as for his writing on classical music
(on this note, as Gwen Ansell’s essay indicates, the relationship
between sport and music in South Africa has always been far healthier
than that between sport and other art forms). Or a Roland Barthes,
who turned his acutely theoretical eyes to the Tour de France, to motor
racing, to bullfighting and to wrestling. Or, for that matter, a Haruki
Murakami, the marathon-running author who has fused his twin
passions in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
We do have, in Tom Eaton, someone equally adept as a sports
journalist, novelist, columnist and satirist. I distinctly remember the
first time I came across his old “Pitch and Mutter” column in the Mail
& Guardian – I was living in Japan at the time, and my wife brought
a copy of the paper back with her after a visit home. The object of his
lampooning that week was the Dutch Masters, a supposed golf tour-
nament infelicitously sharing its name with the moniker used to
categorise Rembrandt, Vermeer and their fellow painters in seven-
teenth century Holland. The absurd combination is a delightful one,
suggesting that the conjunction (or disjunction) of sport and the arts
provides rich creative ground; but, in another sense, the piece is so
funny precisely because it is ridiculous to compare golf and fine art in
this way. Eaton himself has insisted that “sport and the arts are two
completely separate universes”, something that the zany comedians
of Monty Python exploited to similarly humorous effect in a number
of their sketches: Socrates and Plato, the Brazilian footballers, mor-
phing into their ancient Greek philosophical namesakes; Thomas
Hardy composing a novel in front of a packed crowd at Lord’s cricket
ground; Billy Bremner (captain of Leeds United football team in the
1960s and 70s) revising the script of The Importance of Being Earnest
so that Oscar Wilde’s famous play includes a series of illegal tackles-
from-behind.
Perhaps, then, this book can’t afford to take itself too seriously.
Nevertheless, it represents an earnest attempt to explore (and even,
idealistically, to improve) what remains an often fraught relationship
at the heart of South Africa’s public life. Are there ways in which sport
and the arts can be seen to inhabit the same universe? Here we have a
collection of essays, commentaries, personal reflections, memoirs,
polemics and humorous pieces in response to that question. The
authors have a wide range of interests and take a variety of approaches
to the subject matter – sometimes light-hearted, sometimes critical, but
always insightful.
The essays have been grouped under broad thematic headings. In
the rest of this section, “Kicking Off”, I set an amicably combative tone
by pairing two essays that provide different answers to the question:
Which matters more – art or sport? These are followed by a piece that
offers a caveat about what can happen when sport matters too much.
The next section is headed “Media, Money and Politics” and deals
with various manifestations of this triad: the contrasting representa-
tions of sport and the arts in the media (or, simply, of sport in the
media of TV and film, which are themselves forms of art), typically as
a result of the separate and combined orchestrations of capital and the
state. “Art/Sport?” contains essays that suggest alternative ways of
interpreting the punctuation mark separating those two words (and
worlds): Art vs Sport? Sport = Art? Sport in Art? Artistry in Sport?
Finally, in “Sport, Art and Me: Memory, Nostalgia, Regret”, there are
four pieces that are chiefly retrospective but that, in looking back, also
evince present and future considerations.
Of course, many of the contributions to this book contain personal
reflections or elements of the ‘memoir’ narrative, and most of them
touch on the other themes I have identified in one way or another. It
is not my intention to guide readers through the book; unexpected
resonances and contradictions will no doubt be found by each reader,
Poor Relations? 33
who will draw his or her own conclusions. So read it from front to
back, from back to front, or dip in and out at your leisure.
Despite the reservations I expressed at the start of this introductory
essay about the timing of the book’s appearance so close to the 2010
FIFA World Cup, there is an important sense in which it is felicitous.
Links between sport, the arts and public life in South Africa will continue
to be a significant part of national debates, from the shebeen and the
braai all the way to parliament, throughout 2010 and for years to come.
I trust that you’ll enjoy Sport versus Art – and join the discussion!
CHRIS THURMAN dabbled in sports science before realising

that his vocation lay in more literary pursuits. After stints in
Grahamstown, London, Nagoya and Cape Town, he joined
the Department of English Literature at Wits University in
Johannesburg, where he is currently a lecturer. He has also
been a regular contributor to The Weekender, The Sunday
Independent and various other publications as an arts critic
and travel writer. His other books are Text Bites, a multi-
genre anthology for high school learners (Oxford University
Press, 2009) and the scholarly work Guy Butler: Reassessing
a South African Literary Life (University of KwaZulu-Natal
Press, 2010)
Passing Passions, Enduring Love

Patrick Cairns
In a recent spell of channel hopping, I discovered a repeat of the 1993

Wimbledon Ladies Final on television. This was, according to the pro-
gramme information, one of the top ten matches ever played at the All
England Club.
Anyone with even a passing interest in tennis will recall the match.
The formidable Steffi Graf came up against the serve-and-volleying Jana
Novotná. The Czech was leading 6-7, 6-4, 4-1 and with a point for
5-1, when her game fell apart. Graf went on to win the third set 6-4
and reduced Novotná to crying on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.
It was an enthralling encounter. It delivered all the drama and emotion
that one finds in the greatest sporting fixtures. I couldn’t help feeling,
however, that neither of those players would match the ferocity of the mod-
ern-day Amazons, Serena and Venus Williams. As great as Graf was, barely
a decade after her retirement, her game appears a little old fashioned.
In comparison, I recently re-read John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The
Grapes of Wrath. By any standard, this is one of the great works of lit-
erature. Seventy years after it was published, it has lost none of its force.
It is brutal, uncompromising and narrated with a compassion for its
subjects that few writers can equal. Given the current global economic
Passing Passions, Enduring Love 35
turmoil, the book’s subject matter is no less relevant now than it was
in the 1930s either: “The bank is something more than men,” Steinbeck
writes. “It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
The power of the work leads to this kind of response, which I found
on the web: “I finished The Grapes of Wrath as a different person
from who I was when I began.” Allow me to reveal the first point of
my thesis by stating that I don’t believe anyone ever says that about
watching a game of tennis.
The question of a dichotomy between sport and art is an interesting
one. Reducing it to something basic, I could ask: if I were forced to
make a choice, would I rather live in a society without art, or one without
sport? For me, the answer is quite obvious. A society without art is
one that does not question itself, does not test its own boundaries and
fails to aspire to any perfectibility. In short, it has no soul. Yet I am
quite certain that if it were possible to do a worldwide survey on the
question, sport would win by a landslide.
My intention here is not to bemoan sport’s predominance. I certainly
hope I never have to live in a sport-free society, where the crack of
leather on willow or the smell of a freshly cut golf green are only ever
imagined pleasures. My intention is to explore the reasons why sport
and the arts live these separate lives.
There seem to be two, related, causes for sport’s privileged position
in society. The first is that, in all honesty, sport doesn’t matter. It is
fun, it is healthy, it can be thrilling, provide a test of character and
even act as a force for social good. Yet none of that changes the truth
that what happens on a rugby field or a netball court is ultimately
meaningless. Of course it has potentially significant benefits, but those
are merely by-products.
I do not say this to demean sport. Games are not meant to matter
– that is part of their nature. They are distractions. We all require a
step away from the business of living, and that is what sport provides.
I’d suggest that professional wrestling is proof of this. Of course it

isn’t sport, but its ancestry is there. Those behind the success of professio-
nal wrestling have amplified sport’s greatest appeal – its insignificance.
They have enthralled audiences – both those who think that what they
are seeing is genuine as well as those who are quite aware that the whole
thing is scripted – by turning fluff and bluster into a commodity.
This also serves as a good introduction to what I believe is the sec-
ond cause of sport’s popularity. It seems to me that the more money
we collect, the less we want it to matter. The salary of a certain young
Portuguese playboy confirms this. Cristiano Ronaldo earns in the
region of £200 000 (R2.5 million) a week at Real Madrid. As Daily
Telegraph journalist Mark Ogden reports, if Ronaldo stays at Real for
five years, his salary will increase by 25 per cent a year. Compounded,
this means he will be earning over half a million pounds (R6 million)
a week by 2014. To put this into some perspective, South Africa’s GDP
per capita is around R70 000, so it will take each South African thirty-
three years to produce what Ronaldo currently earns in seven days of
kicking around a football. In five years’ time, the average South African
will not be living long enough to produce Ronaldo’s weekly wage.
In a world beset by need, there can be no explanation for paying
that kind of money to a sportsman, except that those who control this
money don’t want to spend it on anything meaningful. Their only
interest is in making more money, as one must suppose that they are
seeking some return on their investment. In simple terms, all that
money represents is the possibility of more money. Once in this cycle,
it would seem that the less important the thing that is making the
money, the better. Sport is an obvious vehicle for capitalist greed,
because there is nothing to be lost in corrupting it.
In the arts, we are tempted to view these enormous sums of money
in sport and feel envious of them. We shouldn’t want that money though.
What would artists be worth if we had no more integrity than profes-
sional football players? Art as a competitive arena for profit is not art.
While sport is distracting us, art should be doing the opposite. The
best art does not offer an escape from life. It amplifies it.
I’m not arguing that art does not need money. Artists will always
find ways to produce their art, but a society that protects and nurtures
its artists will always be richer for it. Art, however, exists outside of
the demands of a capitalist society. In the words of the great American
playwright Arthur Miller (as quoted by Christopher Bigsby): “Don’t
be seduced by the idea ... that the bottom line is reality as far as the
arts are concerned, meaning, don’t believe that what does not make
profit is not valuable.”
Miller’s point was that theatre cannot survive without subsidies. If
governments are serious about developing local art, then there needs
to be financial support for it. Art cannot go the route of professional
sport for this though, because it is too important. Miller also recounted
how he was once asked whether other businesses that didn’t make
money should also be subsidised.
A man in the audience raised his hand and said: I manufacture shoes
in Boston and I want to know, if I make a product that isn’t bought
in sufficient quantity so I can come out at the end of the year with a
profit, why shouldn’t I get a subsidy? ... So I said: You know you’ve
raised a real hard one, but can you name me a classical Greek shoe-
maker? There is a value here which is not material and if we’re going
to consistently revert to business nomenclature, we’re dead.
Artists are special. We shouldn’t be ashamed of that. American author

Tobias Wolff puts it like this:
We writers are too careful not to romanticize our calling. We’re afraid
of sounding soft-headed and self-indulgent. The idea is to make it
seem a job like any other. Well, it isn’t. Nobody would do it if it were.
Romance is what keeps us going, the old romantic Frankenstein
dream of working a miracle, making life where there was none.
I would add to Wolff’s argument that the greatest amongst us do not

merely aspire to this dream, but attain it. In creating life, they also
reveal something about the world that has the potential to change the
way in which we see ourselves in it. That is what makes Hamlet or
Oedipus Rex as relevant today as they ever were, and what makes us
keep reading Steinbeck three score and ten years after The Grapes of
Wrath was written. Such things do not go out of date, because they
reveal something eternal about what it means to be a human being.
As engaging and entertaining as sport might be, it cannot do that.
The highs and lows of a game are never more than passing passions.
Sport is so popular precisely because it is unchallenging.
The truth may be that as the world becomes more complex, so both
art and sport become more important. We need artists to lead our
questioning and understanding of the madness around us, just as we
need sportsmen and sportswomen to distract us from it, to stop it from
overwhelming us.
Sport and art are not in competition. In many ways they are com-
plementary, and we need both if we are to maintain equilibrium
between those things that matter and those that don’t. What we mustn’t
do though, is let the profits promised by sport seduce us away from
supporting the arts. For, as Steinbeck sums it up in Journal of a Novel:
It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the

written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species
and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a
staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling
folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.
And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be liter-

ature, I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and
quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums
ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants
of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be
the only mark our species would have left on the earth.
PATRICK CAIRNS was born in Pretoria in 1978. He is an

author and playwright. His sporting heroes include
Gerbrand Grobler, Goran Ivanisevic and Mark McNulty. His
literary heroes include Kurt Vonnegut, Julian Barnes and
Carson McCullers.
Why Sport Matters

Dan Nicholl
As an iconic moment in South African sport, it’s not quite a warm

Saturday afternoon at Ellis Park in 1995. Matt Damon won’t be playing
Matthew Garrett in a movie any time soon, and Morgan Freeman is a
most unlikely candidate to reprise Alastair Murray’s loping counter-
attacks in the University of Cape Town’s number 15 jersey. But the day
Garrett – a second-year business science student unknown beyond his
circle of acquaintance and the university’s composite drinking holes –
wrote his name unexpectedly into the enduring rivalry of UCT-
Stellenbosch rugby derbies sits comfortably amongst my chronicle of
unforgettable sports experiences over the last decade, if only for the casual
brazenness and wonderfully inappropriate theatre the moment provided.
And all the more so given the contrast between Garrett’s star turn, and
the chaste, sterilised environment that professional sport in the modern
era strives (not always with success, thankfully) to operate in.
To Garrett’s big day in a moment. First, though, the experiences
that make up the more conventional fabric of my decade or so following
assorted sporting endeavours. If all this sounds like an exercise in casting
names from great heights, then to an extent it is – but getting to know
the people behind the headlines has been the defining privilege of my
Why Sport Matters 41
flirtations with South African sport. From the stands, players are often
little more than caricatures, vignettes of excellence (or, on occasion,
lack thereof), only seen beyond their chosen field in a bland press con-
ference, a cliché-laden post-match interview, or in the awkward
endorsement of a product on television (the Jacques Kallis Sanex
adverts spring gloriously to mind here). Step inside the boundary rope,
however, and you discover a world beyond 80-ball hundreds, Lays
crisps commercials and earnest assertions that “the spirit in the camp
is good and the guys will give 110 per cent”. Here, then, a rather self-
indulgent set of reflections that sum up just why sport is my particular
brand of faith.
It’s ten to one in the morning in a tented marquee in Scotland, and a

tall Dutchman with spiked tufts of hair is trying to make himself heard
above the combined enthusiasm of Huey Lewis, Ronan Keating, Bon
Jovi drummer Tico Torres, Don Kelder of The Eagles, and the unlikely
fifth celebrity member of the impromptu musical act currently on stage:
one Kelly Slater, world champion surfer and, it turns out, a more than
capable guitarist. But the man from Holland is warming to his topic,
and manages to compete with the pick-up band that has Shane Warne,
Hugh Grant and Trevor Immelman glued to the dance floor – and
when Ruud Gullit has something to say, an ardent football fan will
hardly let a Slater guitar solo serve as distraction.
If you’re on an autograph spree, then the Saturday night gala dinner
at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship is prime hunting ground.
As well as the stars already mentioned, Sir Ian Botham, Tim Henman,
Sirs Steven Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, Michael Vaughan, Sean
Fitzpatrick, Marco van Basten, Hugo Porta, Steve Waugh, Sir Bobby
Charlton, Johan Cruyff and Schalk Burger Senior – the man on whose
hands those of the Incredible Hulk were modelled for the movie –
sashayed through a night of golfing celebration in 2009, all guests of
Johann Rupert, who might just have history’s single greatest collection
of celebrity numbers on his mobile phone.
But where you might have expected the collected greatness to be
lounging on Roman couches being fed peeled grapes by Venezuelan vir-
gins, they’re a normal lot away from the media prism, lapping up the
music, having a little too much to drink and, in the case of Gullit, fas-
cinated with the South African World Cup, the preparations involved,
and the conveyor belt of coaches Bafana Bafana runs through. (For the
record, I offered Ruud the position; he politely declined.) Which meant
we were two blokes standing at a bar talking football. Granted, one of
us was a two-time World Footballer of the Year who captained the
Netherlands to victory in the 1988 European Championships, while
the other could boast of little more than scoring a cracker from 35
yards for Dippers United versus the Ajax Cape Town staff – but away
from the glare of the public eye, sport has a wonderfully simple way of
reducing the chasm between superstar and man in the street.
Golf has provided a number of the tales I regularly inflict upon my
long-suffering mates. The sadly-departed Nelson Mandela Invitational,
Gary Player’s annual charity challenge at Arabella, was another event
that brought assorted stars together. Hollywood icons like Samuel L.
Jackson united with myriad sportsmen, from Kenny Dalglish and Nigel
Mansell to Michael Stich and Gary Kirsten (a man who’d comfortably
taken on Brett Lee on a fast bowler’s dream pitch at the WACA in
Perth, but who went white with terror when confronted with television
cameras and a crowd of 14 on the first tee). The tournament was an
endless stream of the unexpected: Gary Player lighting up the dance floor
on his seventieth birthday with moves somewhere between Travolta and
Astaire; Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter joining the aforementioned
Keating on stage for a belligerent rendition of “Rollercoaster”;
Poulter, dressed in shimmering purple velvet, waging a melodramatic

bidding war with Ernie Els, at an evening auction, for a painting of
Nelson Mandela.
But for myself and Christian Stewart, the modestly talented centre
who overcame limited natural ability and a startling lack of speed to
play in World Cups for both Canada and the Springboks, the Nelson
Mandela Invitational means one thing: Samuel L. Jackson, standing
beside us at a buffet station (familiar territory for Stewart), giving us
his famous Pulp Fiction soliloquy taken from Ezekiel – in full and in
character. Stewart and I spent the rest of the night bouncing off the
walls of the hotel, starstruck kids dizzy with excitement. Golf, boring?
My mate Sam plays it, and he sure isn’t ...
Trevor Immelman wasn’t a Major winner when he played in the
Nelson Mandela Invitational alongside Player, but Gary predicted great
things for his young countryman; Immelman’s most valued wardrobe
item is now a bottle green jacket, acquired in 2008 at Augusta as
Masters champion. It’s an odd town, Augusta – for the most part an
endlessly depressing stretch of strip malls, fast food joints and revivalist
churches – but the famed stretch of green that has made the town a
place of pilgrimage for the planet’s golfers sits in wonderful contrast.
Pass through the gates of Augusta National, and the sheer sense of history
and tradition takes the breath away; on my first morning on the course,
I stood, petrified (in the true sense) on the first fairway, trying to take
in just where I was. There’s a similar feeling at the Old Course at
St. Andrews, where lining up my tee shot on the opening hole is the
second most terrifying thing I’ve experienced in sport (seeing Toks van
der Linde emerge from the shower at a golf day still ranks at number
one). Just being at Augusta for The Masters is one long shiver, and all
the more so if you were a South African following Immelman in 2008.
I wore my South African flag golf trousers on the final Sunday, when
‘some South African guy’ was expected to accede to the charge of Tiger
Woods, a man whose status as deity in America can only be fully realised
when you’re at a tournament in the States that he’s playing in. But it
turned out that ‘some South African guy’ had a little more fight than
the locals anticipated, and Tiger’s stroll to another Major didn’t even-
tuate. Instead, blocking out the roars from around the course that meant
Woods had done something (in America, Tiger can sink a sixty-footer
for eagle, a two-footer for par, or high-five his big Kiwi bodyguard, and
the crowd erupts with equal ferocity), Trevor Immelman hung on to
become Masters champion and make good on the predictions of the
only other South African to have conquered Augusta National.
An inordinate number of South Africans were at The Masters – I
hadn’t seen so many in one place outside South Africa since the last
time I’d been on the tube through Wimbledon – including Trevor’s
wife, Carmelita. While her husband negotiated Amen Corner, we dis-
cussed margarita recipes (the lady from the Dominican Republic who
works for the Immelmans apparently makes the world’s finest), adding
a further dose of surrealism to an already remarkable day. Walking
the Elysian fairways of golf’s most celebrated real estate and watching
one of our own don the item of clothing every golfer dreams of ... sport
can be cruel and heartless (and frequently is), but occasionally it throws
out a script that simply can’t be bettered. For me, Augusta 2008 would
be the pick of those perfect days.
For all the sporting lows we’ve endured (and there have been many
– usually linked to that most revolting of creatures, the sports admin-
istrator), there have been plentiful instances of pure delirium. I recall,
albeit through a light haze of French champagne, dancing arm in arm
with a Durban car guard after 2007’s World Cup triumph, drinking
Moet & Chandon out of the bottle and sharing it with anyone who
cared to. Celebrating Ryk, Roland, Lyndon and Darian, as South
Africa became, in the space of a few minutes in Athens, a nation of
swimming fans. Picking up the goosebump thrill of something special,
upon first seeing a 16-year-old Steven Pienaar in an Ajax Cape Town

jersey (along with 30-odd other people at a cold, deserted Athlone
Stadium). And going completely, unashamedly, cartwheel-through-the-
streets berserk when Sepp Blatter drew our name out of the 2010 hat.
A selection of sporting snapshots, then, from events I’ve been to, and
ones I’ve watched on television, moments that together weave my own
personal tapestry of South African sport experience. But in a nation
where a weekend is incomplete without a braai, cold beer, and collective
railings against the woeful incompetence of Stuart Dickinson (it was
Darrel Bristow-Bovey who once described the chief failing of the
Australian referee as having five letters too many in his surname), the
religion of sport isn’t limited to the professional game. Whether
through support or participation, and in some cases both, many of our
most cherished moments come not at Newlands, Soccer City or Ellis
Park, but in the more modest confines of village ovals, suburban clubs
and rain-soaked fields of mud. Which brings me back to Matthew
Garrett’s dazzling cameo.
Three thousand people had crammed into the narrow stands flank-
ing the university’s Groote Schuur field, a massive crowd by UCT stan-
dards, and a Friday evening fiesta borne of running rugby and
inexpensive beer was in full swing as the home side were awarded an
attacking scrum inside the Stellenbosch half. Scrum won, ball spun
quickly through the hands: flyhalf, first centre, second centre, to
Alastair Murray, a tall, striding fullback who might not have been
vested of electric pace, but read the game superbly. Hitting the line at
just the right moment, he turned to send UCT’s left wing clear – only
to be faced by a smiling Garrett (rugby experience: three largely unsuc-
cessful appearances at openside flank for his residence XV that year),
who had left the sidelines, strolled onto the field, and decided to join
his university’s backline to support the battle against Stellenbosch. Oh,
and he had a beer in one hand. And he was stark naked ...
Murray, to his credit, hung onto the ball (although his jaw had
dropped visibly), took the tackle, and managed to set up the next phase
of play. Garrett, robbed of his chance to breach the Stellenbosch back-
line and strike a blow for rugby-playing naturists the world over, sud-
denly realised his beer can was empty and ambled back to the crowd
to join two similarly-attired companions, seeing out the remainder of
the match in quiet, nude observation, completely unaware of the leg-
end he’d created and that was already gathering momentum via text
message to the outside world. The image of Francois Pienaar, holding
the Webb Ellis trophy aloft as Madiba looked on and a country
exploded with delight, is one of many other images South African sport
has so vividly produced; but moments like Garrett’s are part of the
supporting cast that makes the sporting experience as a whole so
undeniably rich.
One final, personal recollection in summing up just why sport is so
fundamental to so many of us. Madrid is one of Europe’s regal delights,
all trees and old architecture and laidback living – throw in blue skies,
great golf courses and a serious commitment to glorious gastronomy,
and you can see why Cristiano Ronaldo was happy to leave the cold,
grey surrounds of Manchester (although £200 000 a week probably
didn’t hurt). Ronaldo’s new home kick-started a dream day out with
my mate Pablo Solsona, born in Argentina, raised in South Africa and
at that stage resident in the Spanish capital. A very well connected man,
Pablo had secured us a guided tour of the Santiago Bernabeu, Real
Madrid’s breathtaking football cathedral, including a visit to the home
dressing room – an honour rarely granted. In turn, I’d come up with a
tee-time at RACE, a suburban golf course just north of the city that
meanders gently through a most pleasant 18 holes beneath a warm
Spanish sun, and to complete a Boy’s Own day we spent the evening at
the Madrid Masters, watching Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer
illustrate just how little of their power, finesse and sheer talent you pick
up on television. Beat that for a day of sport.
I remember that day with particular poignancy because Pablo is no
longer with us: always an adventurous soul (he was a champion skier,
had hiked to Everest base camp, and spent his days travelling the world
in constant search of the next challenge), a microlight accident suddenly,
cruelly ended his bright and vibrant life. But just as Pablo’s 37 years
serve as a regular reminder to seize each day by the throat, and wring
as much out of it as possible, so our glorious day out in Madrid
summed up, very simply, why sport holds us in such an iron grip.
Pierre de Coubertin got it half right. It’s not about the winning,
although I’ll deny that vehemently when we next lose a key cricket
match to get bundled out of a World Cup. But it’s not just about the
taking part, either: in South Africa, it’s something far more fundamental
than that. It’s knowing that the mood of a country rises and falls with
the back page headlines, that so much of what we love and celebrate
can be calibrated in runs and goals and tries, and that, as a day in
Madrid with a close mate confirmed, sport unites us, draws us together
and gives us a platform to enjoy life together like no other. From
Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela conjuring a rainbow nation out
of the fractured rubble of apartheid through 110 minutes of rugby, to
a cheerfully inebriated university student adding a dash of casual
nudity to a university derby, to a day in Iberia that has taken on a
retrospective consequence, sport has an enthralling magic that’s equally
at home in a schoolboy game of touch rugby or a World Cup final.
And nowhere – listen carefully, Australians – is this more true than in
South Africa.
DAN NICHOLL is a writer, broadcaster and journalist based in

Cape Town. Formerly sports editor at iafrica.com, Editor-in-
Chief at Golf Punk magazine and sports anchor at Cape Talk,
as well as etv’s Champions League anchor, he now runs
Skududu Media, appears regularly on SuperSport and several
radio stations across the country, and hosts numerous
sports events both in South Africa and abroad. His long-
runnin g sports column, ‘Dan’s World’ on iafrica.com,
continues to ensure that numerous professional sportspeo-
ple would happily spend five minutes with him in a darkened
alley with a blunt instrument.
The Fine Line between

Fanaticism and Obsession
Mninawa Ntloko
So intense is their passion and commitment to ‘the beautiful game’

that funerals, marriages and even the recession have done very little to
dissuade fanatical South African soccer lovers from following their teams
around the country. Even though South Africa, like most countries, was
in the stranglehold of a recession for most of 2009, the Premier Soccer
League (PSL) announced in November of that year that attendance
figures had increased 11 per cent from 2008 and that supporters were
returning to the stadiums in their thousands.
While there are those who complain that the price of a ticket to a
PSL match – about R20 – is still beyond the reach of many in a country
where at least one quarter of the employable population is jobless, it
seems nothing is going to keep great numbers of fans from plotting a
course towards soccer venues in pursuit of their favourite teams.
High-profile Moroka Swallows supporter Thomas “Rasta” Mokhari
has been unemployed for several years now but he defiantly maintains
that he will always find a way to feed his ‘obsession’: “I usually spend
between R3000 and R3500 a month while trying to get to Swallows
matches around the country,” he admitted to me in an interview. “I still
do not have full-time employment, but that is not going to stop me

from putting on my maroon and white jersey and going to the stadium.
Whether the match is in Cape Town, Durban or Bloemfontein, you can
be certain that I am going to be among those in the stands.”
Mokhari’s obsession is such that his family knows better than to
schedule weddings and other gatherings (even funerals) on the same
day as Swallows matches. He says some family members have tried to
make him choose in the past and they found out just why he is consid-
ered Swallows’ number one fan:
Naturally, I will walk out that door and make my way to the stadium
while the hearse is backing up to the front gate with the coffin. My
reasoning is that the dead person is not going to wake up and doesn’t
even have a clue that I’m present at the funeral. I am no miracle
worker and cannot wake up the dead. Swallows, on the other hand,
need my support and my absence will deprive them of one more voice
that could have made a difference. So, should someone decide to go
ahead and schedule these events anyway, then it is an absolute cer-
tainty that I will not pitch up.
The obsessions of other supporters, however, have been far too

great. There have been several instances of supporters taking their own
lives after the teams they supported lost. The last known incident
occurred in November 2008 in Ivory Park, Midrand, after police found
the body of Paol Sithole hanging from the roof of the shack he shared
with his wife and three-year-old daughter. Sithole reportedly watched
southern Africa’s biggest soccer match – the Soweto derby between
Kaizer Chiefs and traditional foes Orlando Pirates – at a local tavern
and left in a huff after the Buccaneers emerged 2-0 victors. A staunch
Chiefs supporter, Sithole apparently did not take it well when the
Pirates followers at the tavern mocked him and his vanquished club.
The Fine Line between Fanaticism and Obsession 51
“He came back from the tavern, went to his wife, who is a hawker,
and told her that he was disappointed by the loss,” Ivory Park police
station spokesman Lesiba Manamela was quoted as saying at the time.
“He said he could not tolerate the embarrassment of being humiliated
by a 2-0 defeat.” Sithole apparently then demanded the keys to their
shack from his wife and was later found hanging by an electrical wire
from the roof. This case is one of several recorded over the years; it
seems that some supporters have such high expectations from their
teams that failure is not considered an option.
Even without resorting to such extreme measures, many who worship
their clubs readily admit that their very existence is planned around the
activities of the teams they support. Visible Kaizer Chiefs supporter
Saddam Maake, who probably has the highest media profile among soccer
supporters in South Africa, says he is “a soccer slave” and the fact that
he is single at the moment testifies to his dedication to the sport.
I left my wife in 1990 because she would not stop nagging me about
the vast amounts of money I was spending on Chiefs memorabilia.
She demanded that I choose between soccer and her – I chose soccer
without even thinking twice about it. She did not think that I was
serious when I told her to pack her bags and leave. She only realised
later that I was dead serious, and eventually left.
Maake – who makes it a point that Chiefs’ gold and black colours are
part of his wardrobe seven days a week, and whose house is also
painted in the club’s distinctive colours – told me that he met someone
else seven years after leaving his first wife, but she also soon grew tired
of his obsession with soccer.
I told her to leave too because she just did not get it. The fact is any
woman who wants to stay with me should understand that soccer
comes first and she is a distant second. At the moment, soccer comes
first, my children come second and there is seemingly no place for a
woman. The good thing about my kids is that they understand me
and I do not have to explain my mood swings if Chiefs have lost a
match. I wake, sleep, walk and talk soccer every moment of my life
and, I suppose, no woman is going to accept that unless she is a
fanatic like me.
It looks like such one-sided passion can cross the gender divide. As
one of comparatively few female supporters in South Africa, Gladys
Bailey is difficult to miss in the stands and the staunch Ajax Cape Town
fan’s long-suffering husband has had to cope with a wife who seems
to be more passionate about the sport than he is. Bailey worked as a
banker for First National Bank and after then-coach Clive Barker
spearheaded Bafana Bafana to a first-ever Soccer World Cup appear-
ance in 1998, the mother of four decided that she would make it to
the tournament in France – no matter what. So she nonchalantly
decided to resign from her job to finance that trip. “And guess what,
my husband was retrenched soon after I resigned and we found our-
selves in a pickle,” she says, with her trademark hearty laugh. “We
still went to the World Cup anyway and even went to the 2002 tour-
nament in South Korea and Japan.”
Gladys’s husband Basil works for a mining company these days,
but he apparently still struggles to deal with the attention his wife
always receives. “His friends at work give him a lot of stick for having
a wife who seems to be more fanatical about soccer than he is,” notes
Gladys. “They tease him when photos of me standing next to guys in
the stands are published in the newspapers. They say these guys are
my lovers.”
Gladys is widely regarded as the Cape Town club’s number one
supporter. And yet she resides in Johannesburg. This means that the
The Fine Line between Fanaticism and Obsession 53
unemployed soccer fanatic regularly commutes between Johannesburg

and the Cape to attend matches, which would be a financial burden
even to someone who was employed. “A single trip to Cape Town to
attend an Ajax home match usually sets me back by about R1000,”
she says. “I mostly use the bus but it is still not cheap.”
Staunch dedication to the sport of soccer can hurt more than just
your pocket – but it is also not without rewards, as Pirates’ number
one supporter Nale “Mzion” Mofokeng discovered when he began to
lose his eyesight early in 2009. His sight had been deteriorating since
the previous year owing to a diabetic condition, and he did not know
what to do until the Vodacom Foundation’s Goals for Miracles initiative
came to his rescue. In terms of the initiative, a contribution is made
for every goal scored by Vodacom-sponsored PSL teams Pirates, Chiefs
and Bloemfontein Celtic in the premiership and in the Vodacom
Challenge, an annual pre-season tournament that features Chiefs and
Pirates against invitational English premier league sides. Goals scored
during the Vodacom Challenge raised R450 000, while those scored
in the domestic premiership raised R2.48 million, taking the total to
R2.93 million. Some of this money was used towards the costs of
cataract operations that helped reverse the effects of old age and other
ailments such as Mofokeng’s. The 59-year-old, who has been a Pirates
supporter since he was nine, has since returned to watching games at
the stadiums – proof that passion can be rewarded.
Most of these avid club supporters, however, could not say with
any certainty, when I spoke to them, that they would be able to watch
a live game in the 2010 World Cup as even though the tickets to the
FIFA event are priced at a supposedly affordable rate – R140 for the
cheapest seats in a special category for South African citizens – that is
still steep to supporters who often struggle to find the meagre R20 that
gains them access to PSL matches. Moreover, while the supporters I
interviewed were never going to admit it, it remains a fact that local
clubs still enjoy far more passionate support than Bafana Bafana could
ever muster. South Africa is peculiar in that the national soccer team
still plays second fiddle to the club sides – while Bafana might struggle
to attract 10 000 or so supporters (on a good day, it has to be added),
a club like Chiefs does not even have to raise a sweat to get those num-
bers through the turnstiles.
This book is an attempt to address the relationship between sports
such as soccer and another second (or third, or fourth) fiddle: the arts.
On the surface, it would seem obvious that the arts in South Africa do
not inspire the same kind of fervent, unthinking and perhaps even irre-
sponsible support that our soccer teams do. But perhaps things are not
so clear-cut. After all, we romanticise the painter or musician or actor
who gives up everything – including relationships and financial stability
– to pursue his or her artistic calling. Aren’t our soccer supporters
doing the same thing?
MNINAWA NTLOKO is the Sports Editor at Business Day and

was a columnist for The Weekender, specialising in soccer.
He received the prize for Best Feature Writer at the SAB
Sports Journalist of the Year awards in 2004 and an ABSA
Cup Award for Best Print Journalism in 2007.

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SPORT VERSUS ART EDITED BY

SPORT VERSUS ART EDITED BY

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

Selection and Introduction: Copyright © Christopher Thurman 2010

First published 2010

Project managed by Monica Seeber

For Jude Comley and Vanilla Nurse

Note: Quotations that are not attributed to a particular author or publication

Passing Passions, Enduring Love p34

Why Sport Matters p40

The Fine Line between Fanaticism and Obsession p49

MEDIA, MONEY AND POLITICS

Sing When You’re Winning: p55

Cricket, Bollywood and Business: p65

From Non-racial Sport to the FIFA World Cup: p74

The ‘Eighth Muse’: p83

Where are the Champions? p93

The City of Theatre and Spectacle p101

Artless Sport and Sportless Art: p112

Sporty Nerds and Arty Jocks: p131

“Playing to Win is not Really Playing”: p141

Ballet is a Sport: Part One p148

Ballet is a Sport: Part Two p152

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: p157

The Art of Sport p173

SPORT, ART AND ME: MEMORY, NOSTALGIA, REGRET

Cricket, Loss and Life (and Song) Must Go On p181

No Normal Art ...? p191

Pining for a Return to a Golden Era p199

Cricket, Gender and Intimations of Mortality p211

responsible corporate citizen, for the economic well-being of the

In a sense, the appearance of this book immediately prior to the 2010

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As a schoolboy, I did not find it difficult to integrate these interests.

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to the support of different sporting codes in South Africa. Despite a

If some sections of the sports-fanatic public utterly misconstrue the

Part of the experience of being colonised is having images of yourself

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clients was to mount campaigns to reverse these perceptions, not to

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‘lovely assistant’ to FIFA Secretary-General Jérôme Valcke at the

Football is the beautiful game. It is also a professionalised ball sport

O’Toole mentions uninspiring photographic essays about football on

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the big budget auctions for international players in the hyperbolical

Much as an adrenaline-fuelled patriotism might drive one’s exultant

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Stuart Theobald, in an essay that largely argues against the dualistic

South African beer brand takes advantage of this tension by showing

It may be questioned whether this enormous interest in looking at ath-

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At the risk of seeming like a Coetzee acolyte, I wish to refer to another of

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for pointing me in the direction of this little-known piece). Those who

1) They are inexact [and] allow a variety of interpretations

In schools, and particularly in boys’ schools, the line between ‘free

Here, Coetzee echoes a sentiment expressed in the Dutch historian

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