JOHANNESBURG—I get a lot of fantastic fanmail here at camp Sportstrotter. Devoted readers wondering how I get to file dispatches from Vancouver Island, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and now, Johannesburg. “I can’t believe The Walrus sends you to all those amazing places!” they write. “How do they afford it?”

Well, I can tell you that the Sportstrotter is one of The Walrus’s greatest editorial priorities, and in addition to my embarrassingly opulent salary, I also have a practically unlimited travel budget. It’s clear that The Walrus understands that the future of Canadian journalism lies in semi-serious ramblings on the world of sport, posted weekly to a web site under a name that includes the word “trotter.” All hail the dauphin of the Great White North’s media sphere!

So here I am in Johannesburg, South Africa, the richest city on the continent and also one of its most dangerous. Jo’burg has seen the most substantial post-Apartheid integration in South Africa, but this mixing of the former oppressor and oppressed classes—the wildly wealthy and the desperately poor—has bred great resentment and violence. So, with the Sportstrotter fiancée working on a project here and logging long hours, and the streets not exactly safe to wander, I’ve been spending my daytime hours in the highly secure gated community (yes, barb-wire fences and all) across the street from our apartment, using their amazing gym and eating the fantastic food that Jo’burgers are lucky to enjoy on a daily basis (Springbok carpaccio is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted).

I’ve been enjoying a lot of the amazing sports television in this athletics-mad country. South Africans love their sports, and they have the extended TV-network package to prove it. Super Sport puts ESPN to shame, and puts France’s almost non-existent sports television coverage (unless you want to pay almost $50 a month for Canal+ Sport) to something much worse than shame (like “naked on the first day of school, and grandma’s your substitute teacher” shame). In our apartment I get Super Sport 1 through 7, and Super Sport Blitz for news, and Super Sport Maximo, and ESPN for my morning dose of SportsCenter.

The beauty of these multiple channels is that they show sports—real sports—at all hours of the day. No, not a mind-numbing stream of interview programs and round-table discussions and the tragic “sports reporters yelling at one another” programs. They show real matches, from all manner of sports across the non-American English speaking world, and across Africa, and beyond. And they have no qualms about replaying matches that took place two or three days ago—English Premier League fixtures are on almost constant rotation.

In the past three days I have watched some part of:

• the English, Scottish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, MLS, South African, Kenyan and Angolan Premier football leagues.
• the Southern Hemisphere’s Super 14 rugby league, and the Northern Hemisphere’s Heineken Cup club rugby tournament
• Davis Cup and ATP tennis
• last weekend’s London marathon
• the African women’s golf tour

Wow, what a trip!

But the most fascinating thing so far is the cricket. Yes, I know, by reputation you might not expect to see “fascinating” and “cricket” in the same sentence—they are a sporting odd couple in the tradition of “hockey” and “teeth,” or “poker” and “personal hygiene.” But I’m telling you, I’m lovin’ me some cricket.

Maybe it’s the novelty of finally having unfettered access to a sport I’ve always been curious about. Maybe it’s the anticipation of a whole range of post-colonial literature that a basic understanding of cricket opens up.

It might even be the fact that I’ve identified the perfect North American explanatory corollary to cricket: I used to think it was like baseball, but I’ve realized that cricket is a dead ringer for that great American collegiate pastime, wiffleball. Think about it: sure, there’s no running in wiffleball, but you play in two-man partnerships, the strike-zone chair is like the pegs/wicket, a catch is an out, and you have a boundary beyond which you score a maximum value. Throw in the beverage breaks common to both (although it’s tea in cricket and Busch Light in wiffleball), and I think I’ve got the perfect way to educate the New World’s youth on the beauty of cricket. Whatever it is, I now have a thing for cricket, and real bad.

After wetting my feet with condensed match recaps of the Sri Lanka–West Indies and India–South Africa international clashes this week (with the locals particularly shamed by the thrashing handed to them by India), I spent most of Wednesday, between eating and writing on our apartment’s lovely back garden (fenced in by a twelve-foot concrete wall, ten layers of wire and some crazy metal spikes), watching my first live-telecast One Day Test.

The match, between Pakistan and Bangladesh, wasn’t a particularly good one, as far as I could tell. Bangladesh batted first, and knowing a bit about the country’s short history since separation from Pakistan, I was kind of pulling for the Bangladeshis.

But the squad lost four wickets by the time they’d scored only sixteen points, and despite some good defensive batting, they lost their tenth of eleven batters shortly before completing their 50 six-bowl overs, finishing with 210 runs and ten wickets through 49.1 overs. By the way the announcers checked out during the second half of the nearly nine-hour match, I understood that it wouldn’t take much for Pakistan to “chase” this run total (from what I gather, a score between 275 and 325 is considered decent).

So yes, the Pakistanis did prevail, with a little drama, but I still checked in fairly regularly on their progress, and felt a small sense of accomplishment when they scored the run that put them over Bangladesh’s total and gave them the match victory.

I could go on and on about my new favourite sport, but the Indian Premier League, a month-and-a-half cricket competition featuring top players from around the world, is just about to debut on Super Sport 7. The Bangalore Royal Challengers and the Kolkata Knight Riders beckon. Um, I like Hasselhoff, so go Knight Riders?

[Next week, the Sportstrotter reports from Saturday’s Super 14 rugby match in Pretoria, if his Windhoek-fuelled hangover has subsided enough to allow him to write…]

photo credit: Prabu.S

Tags: cricket, international, south africa

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Posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 3:11 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.