The Hairdryer Treatment

Cape Town | At this extremely southern destination world football finds itself poised between an obscenity and a dream. The obscenity is the reported £136 million bank draft Real Madrid will relay to fellow European giants Manchester United and AC Milan for Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká. The immense sum, spent with all the consideration of a sigh, mocks the idea of football as a sport for all. Bobby Charlton calls the £80 million Ronaldo fee, a world record, “a little bit vulgar” but the price of doing business.

The counterpoised dream is that a nation of the rainbow such as South Africa might, on Eduardo Galeano’s subjective scale of wrong and right in soccer, nudge a balance skewed toward profit back toward beauty. Football could shift from shadow to sun, even as the World Cup ventures to the southern hemisphere’s late autumn and winter beginning 11 Jun 2010.

“This is a place where sports is a necessity, not a luxury,” said prisoner Big Mo Masemola of the soccer culture and league apparatus that developed starting in the 1960s on Robben Island, seven miles off Cape Town. He speaks in the book by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close, More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid (2008). Throughout formal correspondence among political prisoners seeking to keep alive their ambition of a free South Africa through fastidious application of FIFA regulations to the island-based Makana Football Association, the standard courtesy closing was “Yours in sport.”