Coaches are birds on a wire who should be drunks in a midnight choir

José Mourinho’s contract with Manchester United is said to be worth the equivalent of R340.6-million a year to the pouty Portuguese. That’s enough to buy 51-million wings at Nando’s. Plus a side.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

FOOTBALL coaches are fired more frequently than a zebra farts, which is every three seconds, apparently. Unless they’re old farts like Arsene Wenger, who creaks around bearing the unfortunate look of a constipated giraffe, or Alex Ferguson, who is not at all like any creature yet born into the animal kingdom, and not in good ways. Or, in seven stints with six clubs in Portugal and England, José Mourinho, who if he hasn’t been made an offer he couldn’t refuse has left “by mutual consent”. And who is simply an animal. 

Rugby coaches are, without exception, weirdos. Ian McIntosh could scare the shorts off a lock forward with one glance of his glow-in-the-dark eyes and addresses all and sundry as “Master.” Rudolf Straeuli argues with the bloodless logic and cold, curling smile of Pretoria lawyers everywhere, and wears jackets big enough to host Boswell and Wilkie and all their animals. The more accomplished and therefore famous Jake White became, the more gel he slathered through his middle-aged hair. And to think he used to be called Jacob Westerduin. 

Cricket coaches? Unless they teach kids how to hold a bat, bowl an away-swinger, and how to catch, they’re charlatans. Get a proper job already.

None of them would last a round with Deontay Wilder, who has made a hobby of putting his support staff in hospital as he prepares for his World Boxing Council heavyweight title showdown with Tyson Fury in Las Vegas on December 1.

“I’ve had hernia surgery where he hit me just under the body protector, on my side,” Wilder’s head trainer, Jay Dias, said.

“I noticed it hurt but I just kept working away. But it kept hurting and hurting and hurting.

“So finally I went to the doctor and he said, ‘You need hernia surgery!’ I was like, ‘What!?’

“He also separated Mark Breland’s shoulder when Mark was doing the mitts and he dislocated coach Cuz’s [Damarius Hill] thumb.”

Two things: Dias was quoted as saying all that by the Sun, which like right wing rags the world over isn’t afraid to have a laugh at the truth’s expense, and this is boxing — which knows it should be banned but, since it isn’t, is going to have as much fun as it can with its clothes on. Sort of. Truth is, boxing understands the press better than any other sport, and far better than the press understands anything.

But it does make you wonder why anyone would want to be a coach at this level. All together now: for the money, idiot. Indeed, there’s that, and it’s not to be sniffed at; not with Mourinho’s contract with Manchester United is said to be worth the equivalent of R340.6-million a year to the pouty Portuguese. That’s enough to buy 51-million wings at Nando’s. Plus a side.

Still, coaches shouldn’t need danger pay just to do their jobs. They also shouldn’t have snarky reporters like this one, who hasn’t a clue what they’re like when they’re not prowling the touchline or sat between the sponsors’ banner and a thicket of microphones for the squillionth time, writing all sorts of unflattering, unfounded, unacceptable things about them.

And it’s not as if they can go out there themselves to score for their teams, or to stop their teams being scored against. They’re stuck on that touchline, a bird on a wire wishing like hell they were a drunk in a midnight choir. Worse, when things go badly it’s the coach who’s pressganged into explaining why and not the players who got it wrong where and when it mattered.

Adrian Birrell, a rarity in that his sanity seems to have survived everything higher grade coaching has thrown at him, gets this important aspect of the profession better than most.

South Africa were 117/4 in search of a Himalayan 492 to beat England after four days at The Oval in July 2017 when Birrell loped into the indoor nets for the post-play press conference.

He arrived with a boomed, “Hello!” When he was done saying all the right things in all the right places, smiling all the time, he left with: “Bye-bye! I’ll see you when we’re in trouble again!”

Owning and running a farm in the Eastern Cape no doubt keeps Birrell anchored to reality, as does being married to a high powered accountant. Susan Birrell landed a big job with an international firm in 2002, which saw the couple move to Ireland. Adrian, with that seemingly effortless ability to attract positivity that follows nature’s good people wherever they go, found himself signed up as Ireland’s coach.

For once, his sanity threatened to desert him: “I got myself ready thinking that I was going to meet the board and go to some big meeting. I got myself all dressed up and brought a briefcase with nothing in it.”

But for every Birrell there’s a Bill Walsh, who won three Super Bowl championships with the San Francisco 49ers, was twice named the National Football League’s (NFL) coach of the year, and has been inducted into gridiron’s hall of fame.

He would also be up for uttering the most mealy-mouthed nothingnesses ever to come from a coach. Here’s one: “The [best] coaches … know that the job is to win … know that they must be decisive, that they must phase people through their organisations. And at the same time they are sensitive to the feelings, loyalties, and emotions that people have toward one another. If you don’t have these feelings I do not know how you can lead anyone. I have spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out how I was going to phase out certain players for whom I had strong feelings but that was my job. I wasn’t hired to do anything but win.” 

You had us at “win”, Bill. You lost us at “feelings”, and by the time you got to “emotions” we would rather have been trapped in a stuck lift with Wenger, Ferguson and Mourinho than listening to you.

Still, Walsh’s teams won 102 games and lost 63. Only 44 of the NFL’s 489 head coaches have been had more victories.

Could it be that his players were only too pleased to get away from him and onto the field, leaving him to prowl the touchline in impotent angst while muttering ever more unwieldy lumps of empty management-speak to no-one in particular?

They’re football players, Bill. Not accountants. And you’re lucky they’re not zebras.

Time to face the painful truth: sport is bad for you

We think sport stars have the best bodies. But they are rarely free of pain and they age faster because they wear out exponentially more quickly.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Florence

HOW many 20-year-olds do you know who have to put their lives on hold for six weeks because of a knee injury? Or 23-year-olds who live for months with a spinal stress problem? Or 25-year-olds who have a shoulder wrenched out of shape?

The subjects of these calamities are not soldiers, bar brawlers or victims of domestic abuse. They are instead Damian Willemse, Kagiso Rabada and Mohamed Salah — stars of rugby, cricket and football, and apparently fine physical specimens of the human race.

Except that they’re not. They’re crocked. And they are far from the only people impaired, often permanently, by what they do for a living.

We think sport stars have the best bodies out there. Closer to the truth is that they are rarely free of pain, and that they age faster than we do because they wear themselves out exponentially more quickly.

Dale Steyn’s painful relationship with his right shoulder and left heel for more than two years now proves what doesn’t need proving: sport is bad for you, particularly if you play at the top level.

Stories about injuries are the bane of a sportswriter’s life; right up there with reporting on positive drug tests and trying to make players sound interesting when they say utterly forgettable things, which for almost all of them is almost all of the time.

But they’re paid to play. Not talk. Thing is, it can seem as if they are paid to learn the Latin names of those parts of their bodies that have been wrecked in the cause of trying to win.

The exceptionally articulate Steyn is a case in point, what with words like infraspinatus and coracoid tripping off his tongue as readily as bouncer and yorker.

You probably know your yorkers from your bouncers, but did you know the infraspinatus is, according to the medical books, “a thick triangular muscle”, “one of the four muscles of the rotator cuff” and that its major function is to “externally rotate the humerus [the bone that connects shoulder to elbow] and stabilise the shoulder joint”?

Or that the coracoid is “a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scapula [shoulder blade]” so-named because its name translates into “like a raven’s beak” in Greek, and that fracturing it is impressively difficult and unusual?

Steyn knows all that, and much more. Too much for a man of 34. In fast bowler’s years that’s about 68.

Unlike most players Steyn has spoken candidly of his frustration at the healing and rehabilitation process, and of his worry about hurting something else while he works to resolve the original problem.

“I go for a run up the mountain and I could get a hamstring injury,” he said in October, when he was emerging from his second major shoulder injury.

“Or I finally get over all of this and I go and roll my ankle getting out of the car.”

Close but not quite: less than three months later a freshly repaired Steyn tore a ligament off his left heel by stepping awkwardly into a foothole while bowling against India in the Newlands Test.   

Square one, here we go again …

More often heard than Steyn’s honesty is the kind of view expressed by boxer Ronda Rousey: “I’ve separated my shoulder and my collarbone; I’ve messed up my knee a million times. I’ve broken my foot in several places. I’ve broken my toe a bunch, broken my nose a couple of times, and had a bunch of other annoying little injuries, like turf toe [spraining the ligaments of the big toe] and arthritis and tendonitis. It’s part of the game.”

If self-harm was a crime you’d have a hard time getting that argument past a judge, and if you think that’s a reach consider that in December 2016 the US Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from former National Football League (NFL) players against a total settlement amount of US$1-billion the NFL offered previously concussed players to shut up and go away and take their brain damage with them.

A billion dollars sounds decent, but in March the players and the families of those who have died — some of diseases and conditions doctors have blamed on playing gridiron football — went back to court to file charges of fraud against the NFL for allegedly trying to delay payments, sometimes aggressively.

A month later the NFL lawyered up to argue that a special investigator be appointed to stop “widespread fraud from infecting” the settlement plan.

“Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble,” Benjamin Franklin said, and that’s happens almost without fail.

We record and remember players’ performances at length and in detail. But their injuries, the effects of which may linger long after they have graced the arena and entertained us royally, are invariably footnotes in their biographies.

It’s time we saw players for what they are: human before anything else, injuries and all, and deserving of more consideration on that score.

The other score? By comparison it matters nought.

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.