Sport, I was told at school, builds character. It certainly does. Not necessarily that quasi-militaristic, upright, play fair sort of chap my sports masters had in mind. Sport also teaches one how to bend the rules, furtively slack on the sidelines or screw the opposition when the ref isn’t looking. All useful skills, you might say, for later life.
With the World Cup starting here in less than a month, it will be interesting to see which of those two options is more in evidence. What is already clear, however, is that FIFA seems to be run by administrators who practice the “screw you” school of sport.
The extraordinary fact is that if a Western country – Britain, for instance – fostered ruinously expensive new stadiums, draconian advertising regulations and outrageous press restrictions on us, this would be denounced as imperialist meddling and there would probably be riots across the country. Yet because it is FIFA, and soccer, we submit.
But then sport has always also been about swank, prestige, profit and propaganda.
My late father Frank Rostron, a former amateur South African welterweight champion, was a distinguished sports writer. As a young reporter for the Johannesburg Star, he covered the 1936 Berlin Olympics and acted as the unofficial manager of the South African boxing team. He was baffled why the Nazis made such a fuss of the team.
Only years later, did Frank discover that the team’s top boxer, Robey Leibbrandt, had been recruited by the Nazis right under their noses. In 1941, Leibbrandt was landed on the west coast of South Africa to begin a sabotage campaign in the hope of inspiring an Afrikaner uprising.
Sport has also been a fantastic bonus in my life, not always for the noblest reasons. When my father was cricket correspondent for the Daily Express, I changed school every six months as he followed cricket from England to South Africa to Australia.
Quickly I learned that I could daydream at the back of any class and no one would care. Finally forced to stick in one school to get an education, I could still loaf about, as masters would say things like: “You’ll never pass an exam, boy. Doesn’t matter though, you bowl fast.”
The main beef I have with sport is the fickle fate of being a devoted fan. In my late teens, I spent frustrating icy afternoons on the terraces at Stamford Bridge watching my unpredictable heroes, Chelsea, give yet another lacklustre performance, earning the nickname “Chelsea pensioners”. Now all these years later, when I am far away and no longer care passionately, they win both the League Championship and the FA Cup.
Yet my fruitless devotions at Stamford Bridge paid off unexpectedly. In a winter vacation from my Eastern Cape university, a friend with contacts in the fishing industry swung a holiday job for me to join a commercial trawler: leaving from Cape Town for a two-week trawl out in the Atlantic. Tough work, ideal for an apprentice writer, I thought.
It was a drizzling, vaporous night in Cape Town harbour. Glaring, eerie lights lit the otherwise deserted quay. The trawler had a totally “coloured” crew and a “coloured” captain. Conspicuously, I would be the only white person – all the more stark at the height of apartheid.
Then out of the gloom stepped an elderly black man. “Pssst”, he whispered. “Don’t go, it won’t be safe”, he urged. “Look at these guys.” Most had piratical scars and many had fingers missing from chopping fish in the pitching ocean. “It’s dangerous out there, people get hurt or fall overboard all the time”, warned the arthritic old man, with a fierce gleam of the ancient mariner in his eye. “Maybe whitey fall overboard.”
It was irresistible. I went. Immediately we left the harbour the little boat rolled and tossed furiously. I wanted to be violently sick. After a while, there was a huge cheer. “What’s that?” I asked. We’ve just left the territorial waters, replied the captain: we’re free.
The captain tersely forbade me to work: he wasn’t going to risk some callow white youth, out on a lark, having an unfortunate accident for which he would get the blame.
The atmosphere on the tiny bridge was tense. Then someone started chatting about soccer. I mentioned that I’d watched Chelsea play all the big teams at Stamford Bridge. I reeled off the names of Chelsea players: Peter “the Cat” Bonetti, Ron “Chopper” Harris, Bobby Tambling, Terry Venables – and the ice was broken.
After that, I was treated far better than I deserved by the entire crew.
Despite being the first African nation to host the World Cup, FIFA has ensured that a relatively poor country has had to pretend to be rich, spending money that it can ill afford on prestige projects. So is it true, as some critics insist, that today sport – more than religion – is the true opiate of the people? More apt, maybe, is another part of that famous Karl Marx aphorism, one which is seldom remembered: it is the heart of a heartless world.
