It’s a lovely day in Durban. Sailboats dot the horizon of the Indian Ocean. Surfers enjoy the waves that have made the beaches right outside of my door a regular stop on the pro surfing circuits. In the permitted areas people are swimming, with more coming out each hour as the temperatures creep up to the mid-20s on the centigrade scale.
The fan park directly out my window is abandoned right now, but within a matter of a few hours will fill up. If previous trends are any indication a couple of bombastic local celebrities will come on to the stage a couple of hours before kickoff and will introduce both live and recorded musical performances. They will shill the products of the producers (I’m quite curious which commercials are being played back in the states — that “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh!” Coke song is permanently embedded in my mind, especially the one commemorating Cameroonian legend Roger Milla’s corner flag dance celebration from the 1990 tournament. The quasi-celebs are also clearly under a mandate to remind us that it is “Ayoba Time” approximately every fifteen seconds at full voice. “Ayoba” (which basically means “cool” in Zulu) is the rallying cry of cell phone provider MTN, and while it’s a pretty good campaign, at the Fan Parks they are showing a remarkable lack of variety in the script. Watch enough games in the fan park and it’s nearly enough to drive someone insane. Though that “Oh Oh Oh” Coke song is actually pretty good.
This morning I Tweeted that the politics of sport is slowly giving way to the sport of politics in South Africa. There are simply fewer games and fewer teams to obsess about. Casual fans are enjoying that the World Cup is still here while not having to commit themselves to three or four games a day any more. The media is returning to its role of watchdog and while the World Cup still dominates, other stories are gaining traction, the most notable being the just-completed trial of former national police commissioner and liberation hero Jackie Selebi, who on Friday was convicted of a whole lot of unseemly corruption charges. He is looking at fifteen years in prison. I’d be stunned if he got that much time (former police commissioners, especially the corrupt ones, tend to know things that people in power wish they did not know) but he’s going to see the inside of a cell almost assuredly, though I imagine that much of his sentence will be suspended.
My own life is beginning to look back to the US as well. I am teaching a graduate seminar for our second summer session back home, but since I am missing the first week or so, I am conducting the course, which met for the first time last night, via email and with the generous support of a colleague serving as my proxy. just about the first responsibility I’ll have when I get home will be to meet with those students.
In the meantime, however, there are still four important games to be played, and those games start tonight. Netherlands would have been the local favorite in any case, but since they are playing Uruguay, which has inherited the role of the bad guy in this particular subplot, I would imagine that support for Oranje will be nearly universal. I’m curious to see the turnout at the fan park, which may consist largely of jolling German and Spanish fans in town for that matchup here at Moses Mabhida Stadium tomorrow night. One of Uruguay or the Dutch are going to bring about images of glory days past, with the Netherlands bearing the burden of being the best team never to have won. I’m sticking with my predictions of Dutch dominance evoking their Total Football past.
