Kagiso Rabada’s tall order

“It’s not about being a poster boy. I don’t look at it that way. I’m trying to maintain my performances.” – Kagiso Rabada

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

KAGISO Rabada stands 1.91 metres tall. But he was nowhere near the tallest person in a particular room last week. Or, as he said in Cape Town on Monday, “I felt very, very, very short compared to those guys.” Rabada was among 17,808 spectators at the “House that Jordan built”, as in Michael Jordan. It’s otherwise knows as the United Centre, home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks, Chicago’s NBA and NHL teams.

Rabada was in Chicago as a guest of NBA Africa for basketball’s annual All Star weekend. Seven of the 10 starting players in last Sunday’s game towered at more than two metres. He posted a picture on social media taken with Dikembe Mutombo, the Congolese-born centre who played 1,196 games for six NBA franchises from 1991 to 2009. Mutombo looms 27 centimetres above Rabada at 2.18 metres.

It’s fair to say Rabada came home star struck: “What fascinated me the most was how [the NBA is] marketed. It’s got everybody talking about it. It’s young, it’s fresh, it doesn’t have an age barrier. Even if you are old you can go there and feel young, because it’s that kind of energy. It’s electrifying. The culture is just so inviting. There is tradition but they keep with the times.” He felt the same frission seeing all 2.06 metres of LeBron James in action first-hand as many have had watching Rabada steam towards the bowling crease: “He was right there! I admire watching other sportsmen do well. You can pick up a lot of things from them; from their energy.” So the death of Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, in a helicopter crash on January 26 struck a chord: “It was weird. I was with Andile [Phehlukwayo] that night; we were having dinner. And then the word broke out. We were devastated — how the hell did this happen? Especially as he was with his daughter. He’s such a big name so you don’t expect that. It’s a shock. You’re taught to be grateful and realise your blessings, and to live life and take advantage of every moment. That just reminds you to remember those things.”

Rabada spoke at Red Bull Studios, where his father, Mpho Rabada, and a longstanding family friend, Motswedi Modiba, released a song, “Ska Chechella Morago” — setswana for “Give Me Wings” — a bubbly, poppy offering they hope will catch the ear of South Africa’s musically minded youth. Rabada senior, who is also a medical doctor, twiddled the knobs on the DJ console while Modiba added velvety vocals. Rabada junior tweaked the odd switch himself and bobbed his head rhythmically. He and Modiba grew up together and regard each other as family. They go back, as Modiba described in explaining her lack of surprise that her childhood playmate has become one of the world’s most prominent fast bowlers: “Kagiso has worked hard ever since I’ve known him. He was that kid at birthday parties who would be bowling when everybody else was playing on the jungle gym. He hasn’t changed. He’s still my brother. He’s still the guy I knew when we were nine. He’s still super supportive and super loving. He’s matured, because that’s what happens when you grow older and you’re in the public eye. But he’s still the same loving brother and a really good friend to me. [Rabada’s progress has] been amazing to watch. It also gives the rest of us in the family hope. Kagiso was right here, right next to us and he’s killing it. So everybody has an opportunity to do the same in whatever field they go into.”

Rabada made his international debut at 19 and has, at 24, already played 141 games for South Africa across the formats. Was Modiba concerned about the effects of so much so soon could have on her friend’s psyche? “I don’t worry because I trust him and I trust his instincts, and I know that he’s wise. And I know that he makes the right decisions. I just worry a bit about what people say from the outside. As a sister you want to protect your siblings, but I think he has a very level head.”

Anyone who has had a conversation with Rabada would struggle to disagree. Ask him a question and he thinks seriously about his answer, which he delivers carefully. He is not glib. He does not resort to cliché. He exudes decency. Unlike many of his stature, he shows strangers basic respect. Clearly, his father and his mother, Florence Rabada, have raised a fine young man. So how come he has fallen foul of the ICC’s code of conduct six times in his short career? That happened most recently at St George’s Park in December, when he dismissed Joe Root and then ventured close enough to the England captain to transmit the Corona virus — and to potentially provoke the batter into a reaction. That earned Rabada a fourth demerit point to trigger a ban.

If his next defence at a disciplinary hearing had to be delivered in song, what tune might he choose? Rabada thought for a long moment, and warbled, “Please don’t judge me …” to laughter all around. Mpho Rabada saw the lighter side at the time of the Root incident: “I sent him a song about the ICC, immediately after PE. Just to cheer him up. Maybe one day he’ll use it.” Could the lyrics be shared with the press? “I don’t think so,” Kagiso Rabada said. It’s a good joke, but it won’t change the fact that the ICC are not going to relax their rules. So best the players learn to live with them. 

Especially players like Rabada, who is easily the greatest of South Africa’s black hopes. The game is played and followed by more blacks than whites in the country but it is some way short of transforming itself into the people’s pursuit. Cricket remains, in the purview of too much of the public, an interest of the white elite. Some regard Rabada as the best hope for changing that narrative. How did serving as a poster boy sit with him and his fellow black South Africa team members? Not well: “I don’t know if we’re worried about that. I think we’re worried about performing. We work at our craft every day so we can play well for the country, play well for ourselves, play well for the team. It’s not about being a poster boy. What am I saying if I say, ‘Dude, you need to be a poster boy’? It’s more about what you’re working on, what can we do to try and be better. It’s not about being a poster boy. I don’t look at it that way. I’m trying to maintain my performances.” 

It is unfair that not only is Rabada expected to be the best fast bowler he can be, but also to be the best black fast bowler he can be. “There’s a controversy,” Rabada said at the mere suggestion. He had a fresh flash in his eyes and shot a look towards his father standing alongside. “I’m not even going to entertain that. I’m just here to play cricket. That’s it.”

To some, Rabada’s stance will sound similar to Faf du Plessis explaining the message that Temba Bavuma’s omission from the Test team sent black South Africans by saying: “We don’t see colour.” No doubt that’s not what Rabada was trying to express, but he does not have authority over the interpretation of what he says in a society where reading between the lines is a national pastime. Whether he wants to know it or not he carries a heavy burden in modern South Africa. In this room, no-one is taller. 

First published by Cricbuzz. 

Why Cinderella sports don’t get to play ball in SA’s big leagues

People in countries where you might be jailed or murdered for saying the wrong thing are far better at playing volleyball than they are in Cyril’s sunny South Africa.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

VOLLEYBALL is fun. Many of us would have played it at school, some to higher levels than others. No, that’s not a short joke.

Dig. Set. Spike. Block. If you’ve seen any of those actions performed you don’t need an explanation: a key part of what makes volleyball fun is that it is so accessible to so many of many different abilities.

If you can get your hands to where the ball before it hits the floor, you can play volleyball. To some degree, anyway.

Watching volleyball is also fun. It’s a fast, exciting game combining skill, temperament and athleticism. Things get tense out there on the court, and often there’s the drama of ill-tempered exchanges between opponents and teammates to savour along with the action. 

Sounds like something we, as South Africans, who like to tell ourselves that we are a “sports mad nation”, whatever that means, should be good at.

We aren’t. We suck at volleyball. 

South Africa’s men’s team are ranked joint 137th — or last — by the Federation Internationale de Volleyball, along with backward wastelands of international sport like the Faroe Islands, Lithuania, Macau, Georgia and the Netherlands Antilles. 

Places where you might be more concerned about staying out of jail for saying the wrong thing in public or being murdered by the state or someone else with a point to prove — Iran, Egypt, Cuba, Venezuela, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine — are far better at playing volleyball than we are here in Cyril’s sunny South Africa, where despite our society’s criminal levels of inequality we can still laugh out loud at jokes like Julius and Helen and that Zwelithini idiot without getting into trouble.

Mzansi’s women’s side are, like Liechtenstein Malta, San Marino, Andorra and Wales, among others, 115th — also last on the list.

And matters aren’t going to improve anytime soon. The national under-21 and under-19 men’s sides and the women’s under-20 and under-18 teams share the bottom rung of the ladder with all sorts of odds and sods from corners of the world that you would be forgiven for forgetting existed.

But that’s better than the under-23 rankings, which do not feature South Africa at all; neither men nor women. South Africa didn’t even send teams to last year’s world championships in the age group.

At the BRICS Games last month neither the men’s not the women’s team could take as much as a set off India or China or, in the case of the men, Russia. That’s right, fellow Saffers: your teams lost every match they played 3-0. Just to rub it in, every other men’s match went to 3-2.

And yet, even given this clearly parlous state of affairs, there is no outcry. Go to the news section of Volleyball South Africa’s (VSA) website and you will not be greeted by handwringing and despair and promises and plans to fix what’s obviously wrong. Instead, the top story is headlined, “VOLUNTEERS A DRIVING FORCE BEHIND HOSTING A SUCCESSFUL SPORTS EVENT IN SOUTH AFRICA.” Yes, in caps.

That’s noble and worthy of praise, VSA, but what the hell are you doing about sorting out the mess your game would seem to be in?

Here in the mainstream media, too, we are not bothered by the fact that South Africans play volleyball about as well as songololos avoid being stood on.

Volleyball players, officials and administrators are indeed worried. But because they have to relentlessly project positivity in a country where the limelight is never theirs, they daren’t sully whatever space they have for publicity — and with it, perchance, the wonder of sponsorship — with negativity. 

This is not to pick on one sport. Or, more pointedly, on one Cinderella sport. For instance Syria, which since 2011 has been at war with itself in one the most miserably cynical conflicts of the long and, in this aspect, shameful history of the human race, are playing better football than Bafana Bafana. FIFA’s latest rankings show Syria have moved three places up to 73rd. South Africa? Two spots down to 74th.

But you won’t find too much in the way of handwringing and despair over how awful we are at playing football. That’s because some of us have resigned ourselves to the fact while others are more interested in the bubble of unreality that is Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates and the assorted lesser actors of that melodrama. Still others think we play good football here in Cyril’s sunny South Africa. Ag shame. Then again, some of us think colonialism wasn’t all bad.

This is not the case with rugby and cricket, where anything less than winning the World Cup — or even departing from the higher reaches of the rankings — is deemed failure for which explanations are demanded and given.

But Test cricket, for instance, involves only a dozen countries. FIFA’s rankings list 211 teams. The International Cricket Council pegs South Africa at No. 2 on the Test ladder. Equate that to the football landscape and South Africa would be in 35th place — not as bad as 74th but not nearly as good as No. 2.

Cinderella sports like volleyball are rarely held up to that kind of light. Why? Because they do not attract prominent sponsorship. Because all sections of the media report on them exponentially less than on football, rugby and cricket. Because South Africans haven’t swallowed the bad medicine — as they have from football, rugby and cricket — that what happens on the volleyball court somehow impacts on our broader society; the dangerous and unseemly nonsense that sport is a matter of patriotism. Because the only South Africans who care about sports like volleyball, baseball and underwater hockey are the people who play, officiate and administer them.  

And that’s not the worst of it. Basketball has a professional league in South Africa but it remains insignificant. So you have to wonder whether the NBA is helping or hindering the game in this country by dominating what opportunities there are for media coverage and staging an annual “NBA Africa Game” that has nothing to do with South Africa except that it is played here.

Rather than basketball, wouldn’t you rather be volleyball? At least you don’t have a bunch of superstars playing in a media-saturated competition on the other side of the world stealing your oxygen.

The last thing Cinderella needed was a better-dressed sister.

Blame Muhammad Ali for the monstrosity that is MMA

The path to the rattiest, tattiest form of two people trying to beat the crap out of each other leads straight back to the classiest boxer who has yet lived.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

REMEMBER Antonio Inoki? Of course not. Unless you’re a Muhammad Ali fan, and who isn’t?

Even so, you’re excused if you’re a South African who doesn’t know the answer considering this went down on June 26, 1976. Or while the country was going up in flames.

So, who or what was Inoki? Here’s a clue: Tokyo. And another: US$6-million.

“Six million dollars, that’s why,” Ali replied when he was asked why he had agreed to fight Antonio Inoki, a catch wrestling and karate champion, under a specially cooked up set of rules in Tokyo almost 42 years ago.

The Budokan, the 14 471-seater arena where the fight was staged, and that had served as a venue for the Beatles in 1966 and would in 1979 be where Bob Dylan recorded a live album, was sold out.

In New York, Shea stadium, home to baseball’s Mets, had 32 897 spectators watching the action on closed circuit television.

The fix was in. The deal, agreed among the suits and the tracksuits, was that Ali would accidentally on purpose KO the referee, who would rise from the canvas just in time to count out the WBA and WBC heavyweight champion — who would by then have been poleaxed by Inoki’s flying kick to the head as he stood, distracted by his concern, over the felled ref.

But Ali got wind of the plan and told everyone where the hell to get off. As it happened, what transpired was scarcely less believable.

Inoki spent most of the 15 rounds on his back trying to snare the legs of Ali, who didn’t throw a punch until the seventh round. He fired only six in total and left the ring bleeding from his knee and thigh — and to thrown rubbish raining into the ring and chants of, “Money back! Money back!” — after the bout was declared a draw.

But that’s not where the story ended. The sheer spectacle and the possibilities it offered struck a chord with two of Inoki’s students, who established a company called Pancrase — a twist on pankration, a combat sport that was part of the ancient Olympics — in 1993.

That inspired the founding, four years later, of the Pride Fighting Championship, which 10 years after that was bought out by its major competitor: Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), or what has become the jewel in the crown of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

That’s right, fight fans, the path to the rattiest, tattiest form of two people trying to beat the crap out of each other in the name of organised, professional sport leads straight back to the classiest boxer who has yet lived.

So before we fire up our high dudgeon about these violent, unskilled, tattooed punks and their haircuts calculated to enrage adults everywhere scrambling around the floor of a cage like a couple of drunk cockroaches in an alley and daring to call it something worth paying money to see, let’s consider Ali’s role in making that happen.

And, by extension, boxing’s part in making MMA a modern monstrosity. Because that’s what it is: a disgusting display of human desire at its most base, bulletproof truth that we are not as civilised as we like to think we are, something that shouldn’t be allowed.

You want objective reporting? Go read the share prices.

Far from being the next big thing in pugilism, MMA is what happens when a sport goes backwards. Boxing’s regression from something that used to matter on the world stage — when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in 1936, even Americans suspended their racial enmity to unite against Hitler’s hitman — to the sad shadow of itself it has become has given MMA the chance to fill the void like some malignant virus.

Boxing attracted writers of the calibre and stature of Norman Mailer, who’s book, “The Fight”, about Ali and George Foreman’s “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa in 1974, and AJ Liebling, who titled his classic boxing book “The Sweet Science” and critiqued the fight game for no less august a magazine than the New Yorker.

You can’t stop progress. But MMA doesn’t represent progress. Instead it’s a stop on boxing’s way down from the pinnacle it reached in the 1950s as one of the blue riband sports.

Ali versus Inoki is exhibit A in an array of evidence that was added to in August when Floyd Mayweather earned a 10th-round TKO over UFC star Conor McGregor in a fight that was strictly about boxing.

That Mayweather’s reported earnings were US$300-million — or three times what McGregor made — tells us the mainstream still considers boxing more acceptable.

Similarly, that the gate takings amounted to almost US$17-million less than Mayweather’s fight with Manny Pacquiao in May 2015 will hearten boxing purists, as will the fact that the venture sold 300 000 fewer pay-per-views than Mayweather-Pacquiao.

But before we celebrate those truths let’s remember that Mayweather, the greatest boxer of the age, is a piece of unlikeable scum who has been jailed for beating up his girlfriend and who has won 50 professional fights largely by not getting hit.

Mayweather inherited the mantle of boxing’s leading brand ambassador from Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist whose idea of sushi involves human ear lobe.

So maybe we should give MMA’s violent, unskilled, tattooed punks and their haircuts calculated to enrage adults a chance, not least to prove they’re better at being people.

McGregor has already done so. He wore the Golden State Warriors jersey of basketball player CJ Watson before his showdown with Mayweather.

And Watson’s relationship with Josie Harris — Mayweather’s former partner and the mother of three of his four children — was why she was assaulted by the boxer.

There’s a real man in that mess, and his name isn’t Mayweather.

Why US sports yank South Africans’ chains

Baseball makes America make sense. Up to a point.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IT might have happened because being ordinary wasn’t an option for a fat kid growing up so far on the wrong side of the tracks in East London that he had pimples before he knew what a train looked like.

It might have happened because he needed to borrow volume “B” of the neighbours’ full set of the World Book encyclopedia to do a half-decent job on his school project on birds.

It might have happened because he liked the smile the neighbours’ daughter smiled at him.

Whatever it was, baseball happened to him. To me, I mean.

World Book volume “B” was dutifully returned after a couple of weeks, its section on baseball far more closely read than anything on birds.

There was, of course, no internet. So I went to the library, as one did, and scoured the place top to bottom for baseball.

I found a decent amount, even in East London, and began a series of scrapbooks filled with photocopies of photographs and my own marker-pen renditions of the logos of Major League teams.

Soon I knew my Kansas City Royals from my Toronto Blue Jays from my San Diego Padres, that there were 108 red double stitches in the white leather of a baseball — no, not a baseball ball, idiot — that baseballs were no longer made of horsehide but of cowhide, that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series, that the Dodgers had broken millions of hearts when they moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, that Hank Aaron had defied death threats from white supremacists to break Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs on April 8, 1974, that Sandy Koufax, a jew, had refused to pitch game one of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, that Satchel Paige was quite likely the best pitcher ever to stand on a mound but couldn’t prove it because he was black in a time when Major League baseball was played exclusively by whites, and that I wished Jackie Robinson had been my father.

I knew these things among many, many other things. But let me not bore you.

My 11-year-old self had seen his destiny. And it was baseball. Quite what in baseball he didn’t know. He also didn’t care.

Fate clearly did care, because at around the same time my school acquired a new music teacher. “My husband is a baseball coach,” she announced one afternoon. “Who wants to play Little League?”

Inexplicably she seemed calm as she said this. I was an 11-year-old mess of excitement.

So began my journey of putting some of what I knew — the library’s only coaching manual had by then become my bible — into practice. And practice, practice and more practice every Saturday morning of summers that suddenly had relevance.

Short story long, I became good enough to play at provincial level as a bat left, throw right first-baseman. At school I devised ever more creative excuses to avoid playing a summer sport, which would have clashed with baseball. I had a particular aversion to cricket, which I saw as a pathetically pale imitation of the only real bat-and-ball game.

Nothing I have done in the course of playing so many sports it’s hard to count them all is as challenging as laying the round barrel of a baseball bat on an equally round and slightly smaller, speeding baseball well enough to hit it into the 90-degree “V” formed by the first and third baselines and out of the reach of fielders armed with large leather gloves purpose built for catching.

Unlike in cricket it doesn’t count if you hit the ball outside of that “V” — except that you can be caught there. Also unlike in cricket if you do hit it in the “V” and you aren’t caught you have no choice but to try and reach first base before the ball does. And you can’t stand there all day faffing about futilely like Geoffrey Boycott: three strikes and you’re out, four balls and you’re on first.

Here I am, almost 26 years into writing about that pathetically pale imitation of baseball. Yes, I still think of cricket like that.

After school I had to get a job, get married, have kids, get fatter still, and prepare for death. Hey, it’s East London: what else is there to do?

But baseball gave me a lot, including the idea that writing on sport can be damn straight literary. And the idea that the world was bigger than East London, where, happily, I no longer live.

A career highlight was interviewing, on the phone from Pittsburgh in April last year, Randburg’s own Gift Ngoepe, the first African to play big league ’ball. A quick call to the Pittsburgh Pirates got me Ngoepe’s number, and a few minutes later we were talking to each other. Any cricket or rugby writer who knows how many hoops they are required to jump through to interview players will marvel at that.

Baseball opened the United States for me as a society, which led to other abiding passions like jazz and New York City.

Baseball made America make sense to me. Up to a point, that is, because I’m throughly South African about the rest of US sport.

What they call football? What kind of game reckons it’s a good idea to keep the ball hidden from spectators half the time and lost in a traffic jam of bodies the rest of the time? Also, there’s an evil, militaristic aspect to gridiron, complete with battle plans and players using their helmeted heads as missiles, that explains why it’s the favourite sport of so many right wing rednecks.

Basketball? How do you tell the highlights packages from the live broadcasts? Bounce, bounce, bounce, score! Bounce, bounce, bounce, score! Bounce, bounce, bounce, score! Ah, a three-pointer! How wonderful! Ah, a free throw! How exciting! Not. Great talent and skill is required to play basketball, which moves to rhythms not unlike those of bebop jazz. But there’s a lot wrong with a game that can only be excelled at by people who are too tall to sleep in regular beds.

Ice-hockey? Do they even use a puck? How do we know: has anyone ever seen the thing? I reckon they photoshop a black disc into the goal every time they sense the crowd are falling asleep. Or they start a fight.

Boxing? Now there’s a proper sport. But, as George Foreman said, “Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.”

Sadly, most of what passes for boxing hasn’t been worth watching for years. And it’s not as if it’s particularly American.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to catch up on what’s going on in spring training. That’s right: the 2018 baseball season is almost here.