Games

Preseason rugby match, Cape Town

Hopping along the southern continents of this planet, we’ve managed to spend time in two large countries that are fanatical about their sports:  Australia and South Africa.  Last year, during the austral summer, I managed to catch the Australia-England cricket Test Series (known as The Ashes), a marathon of 5 matches, each lasting 5 days.  England won, and in the process, gave me the chance to learn the game.  Here, in South Africa, they are also wild about sports – cricket, rugby, and football.  The former two sports are prevalent in the country’s traditionally elite white boarding schools, while the latter is played nightly along the grassy strips that separate the highways from the townships and temporary settlements.   In England, they say that rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen, while football (soccer) is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans.  I far prefer football to rugby, and have concluded that cricket is akin to watching turtles mate.  It may be interesting to see how it happens, and it’s certainly complicated, but once it begins, it goes on forever, and there’s not much that’s interesting.  Rugby is obviously more action-packed, as they say, but it shares with American football the annoying habit of frequent stoppages of play; unlike our brand of football, however, the reason play is stopped is often far from obvious to even a careful observer, and depends critically on qualitative judgments by the referee.

These sports are not popular in America, and I wonder if the American eyeball and brain isn’t better suited to games with frequent set-pieces, with near black-and-white rules, and with a start-to-finish duration of between 2 and 3 hours.  Baseball is like cricket, but takes less time – less time between pitches, less time between innings (in cricket, play is stopped mid-morning and mid-afternoon for tea), and less time overall.  Football is like rugby, but has strict starts and stops between plays, unlike the continuous nature of rugby – which resembles hockey in important ways, another sport that has only a niche audience in America. 

I’ve always thought that basketball and soccer are similar in their fluidity, their passing patterns, and their demand for overall athletic excellence – the clear differences being, of course, the size of the field, the size of the team, and the ease of scoring … but basketball caught on in the States like soccer never has ... perhaps because basketball's rules play to the US attention span and appetite for scoring.  Every 24 seconds or less, the ball turns over; not too many players to keep track of; a see-at-a-glance 92 foot court; and lots of scoring.  Strangely, basketball is barely evident in South Africa – we’ve seen very few courts in the cities, townships, or countryside.

For a number of post-apartheid years, South African national sports teams operated under a formal quota system – a policy that sought to redress some of the racist exclusionary policies of the past.  Today, it's not entirely clear what the story is with quotas; news stories are a bit mixed, but it seems the quotas are at least viewed as “gentlemen’s agreements” – sports in South Africa is still overwhelmingly defined by men and for men – and football (soccer) teams are loosely expected to include a few white players, just as the national rugby and cricket teams are loosely expected to include a few players of color.  As odd as this might sound to the American ear, we need only recall the days of Jackie Robinson, or, so much more recently, the National Football League’s prevailing sentiment that black athletes were not suitable to play quarterback (!), or, even more recently, the “Rooney Rule” requiring NFL owners to interview African-American candidates for head coaching positions.  Globally, it is plain that sports are seen as both a reflection and a driver of culture and values.

Newlands Cricket Stadium, Table Mountain National Park

South African football (soccer) suffered a humiliating defeat in their efforts to qualify for the African Cup of Nations, currently being played in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon – a defeat made all the more embarrassing because the players and coaches celebrated after their final qualifying round defeat, thinking, erroneously, that they had nonetheless qualified for the tournament.  This week, as the rest of Africa – including Libya and Sudan (!) – play in the tournament, South Africa’s “bafana bafana” can only watch and wonder what might have been.  

The cricket team recently stomped on Sri Lanka, a victory made a bit hollow in the face of revelations that the Sri Lankan cricketers have not been paid in years.  Meanwhile, the South African rugby season is just kicking off, after the country’s respectable but disappointing performance at last year’s World Championship, held in earthquake-ravaged New Zealand.  Happily for the Kiwis, which we also had a chance to visit just after the second Christchurch earthquake, the Blacks from New Zealand won the Championship, bringing a well-deserved dose of post-earthquake national unity to a country which reveres its rugby.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this circumnavigation has been our ability to immerse ourselves in a variety of local cultures – and in most countries, Indonesia being a notable counter-example, sports plays a major role in defining our hosts’ culture.  We’re fortunate to have been exposed to new sports – cricket and rugby – and may just peek at the US sports pages for the results from forthcoming Test Series and rugby competitions – that is, if our sports pages even cover these quaint colonialist competitions.