This is a piece I wrote a year or so ago the day after New Zilland won a place in World Cup Football
Defying our usual stupor we began this week
with a song in our hearts and a spring in our step. Normally this state would
be reserved for a stylish rugby win or a generous tax reduction – both occurring
alongside appearances of Halley’s comet in frequency. (Actually we get used to
stylish rugby wins in between world cups for they are not so infrequent.)
But this past week’s upliftment was
delivered by way of the beautiful game – soccer. Now New Zilland and soccer is
a bit like Jews and sailing. The last famous sailor in Judaism was Noah and I
suspect that boat wasn’t quick around the buoys. Jackie Mason says about Jews
and boats is that the only thing they want to know is “how many it sleeps”. It
never goes out the harbour…but sleeps 16.
In New Zilland we play rugby and we frighten the living bejeezus out of everyone we play. But soccer is another story. We tend to get beaten at the last hurdle by teams from unknown islands where the crowds still wear bones through their noses like a seething mass of Generation Z.
But win our way into the world cup we did. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous
affair and it is not as if Bahrain was some remarkably talented soccer playing
nation.
The hero of the
day to the baying of a great multitude was a goalkeeper who is now the darling
of our media because he saved a penalty and because he looks like and is really
a bank clerk with a baby.
In the interminable aftermath of TV
coverage about every living moment before during and after the game my
favourite scene was the clerk returning to work at the local bank on Monday morning.
It is the stuff of dreams.
So now we have to steel ourselves for the
embarrassment of sending a team to Africa to play against Brazil and Russia. Steel ourselves to try and avoid terrible defeats the like of which we were subjected to when we once ventured to deep dark Africa to fight against the boers.
The thing that makes New Zilland so endearing, is the fact that we are at heart, amateursl.
Our Prime
Minister was brought up in run down state housing and a run-down
state school seems to approach his role as amateur might. He is as likely to
confess to not having an answer and not making the right choice as quickly as
most politicians would find a way to claim godly powers.
Our criminals are gifted amateurs as
witnessed by a pair of thieves who were caught recently loading their car with
blocks of cheese. They were chased for some distance before being apprehended
and during that journey were seen to be throwing the large chunks out of the
windows.
The police sergeant announced to the public
that the cheese would be recognizable from its grittiness. Amateurs all.
It is in the idea of amateurism that I find
most solace as a parent, a husband and a person. For I think that it just may
be that in life we are all better off as amateurs. For then we
have no reason to pretend that we have infallible capacity or capability.
As a young child I was brought up to
believe somehow that my father’s infallibility was godly. And as a consequence
argument and debate was futile.
One day at a rugby match, my mum, father and I were unhappily seated next two very inebriated behemoths of
species Afrikaner. In their inebriated state they seemed to be only two notches
up the evolutionary scale from Australopithecus. With extraodinary extended stomachs and limited sensibility they pawed in friendly fashion at my mum.
My expectation was that my father somehow
would simply summon a thunderbolt to summarily turn them to ashes but this did
not eventuate. WE simply got up and slunk our way home before the game had ended. It was
devastating. But in a way it shone a light for me. For in that moment I discovered that the world was not really
under some form of divine control and certainly not within the all-powerful
hands of my father.
Had I only known this then I might have
forgiven him. But it did allow me to make sure that my children were
given the great gift of a bullshit radar from an early age. A radar that would allow them to
question, even interminably and irritatingly, every so-called fact or assertion I or others might make.
The gift I gave them was the capacity to recognise my fallibility.
For from that moment on, every achievement
is a splendid one that comes without expectation. It’s like going back to work
as a clerk in a bank, the day after you won your way into the world cup.