Cramming for finals
A column by: Tom Eaton. Illustration: Chris Vallentine. Article from the November 2012 issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine.
Note: The following is satire; which is not a brand of South African tyres, but rather the use of irony and ridicule to expose social ills. Or lank dof people.
Inspired by the T20 cricket championship in Sri Lanka, South Africa’s sports administrators say they plan to shorten all of the country’s major sports to make them more watchable. “We’ve got so many popular spectator sports here in Mzansi,” said spokesman Adie Deeh.
“From rugby and soccer to xenophobic attacks and apartheid denial, they’re all part of our culture, but they’re just so goddamn time-consuming. Which is why we’re going the T20 route from now on.”
This morning the nation’s sports administrators took time off from their busy schedule of looking at their schedule to announce the new campaign, tentatively titled ‘Make It Shorter Coz People Is Doffer Than They Was Ten Years Ago’.
“When T20s arrived, people said it was a perversion of a great sport,” explained spokespoephol Barry Corporate-Leech. “But it turns out you really can fool most of the people most of the time.”
As such, he said, South Africa’s various sporting codes had decided to “join the stampede towards retardation” by dramatically shortening familiar formats.
“The next step is R20, which is not only what I pay my maid for a day of ironing, but also a new kind of 20-minute rugby,” explained Corporate-Leech.
He said that R20 rugby, like T20 cricket, would distill rugby down to its most crowd-pleasing essentials.
“Basically it’s ten minutes each way, with a special PowerPlay set aside for foul play, and a compulsory last-second drop goal. So the average game will see 15 minutes of running rugby – okes basically just running in various directions – then five minutes of head-butting and ear-biting, and then, in the ensuing chaos, a glorious drop-goal snatching mild entertainment from the jaws of numbed boredom.”
Spokesman for the Ministry of Sport, Kwota Kwanaza, said the new campaign was a welcome innovation. “Shorter sport is the way to go,” he said. “Nowadays people’s concentration spans are getting shorter, which means… sorry, what was I saying?”
He went on to express the hope that many of the country’s other popular sports, including xenophobia and apartheid denial, could be “dramatically sped up to allow better marketing”.
“It turns out you really can fool most of the people most of the time “As such, South Africa’s various sporting codes had decided to “join the stampede towards retardation” by dramatically shortening familiar formats.
“We’ve all been at the braai where white people start getting nostalgic about the 1970s,” said Kwanaza. “And we all know where the conversation is going, but holy crap, it takes like four hours to get from ‘Flip, there are a lot of potholes’ to ‘These bladdy moegoes can’t govern their way out of a paper bag’ and then finally to ‘If apartheid was so bad, why did the blex from Efrica keep migrating here for work, hey?’.”
“It’s super-entertaining, but who has four hours to spare? This way we can go straight from ‘Woman, where’s the potato salad?’ to ‘Bantustans, now that’s a system that’s got some seriously unfair bad press’ in about half an hour.”
Likewise, he said, many South Africans enjoyed modern disciplines like the 1 000 Kilometres Somali Steeplechase With Burning Torches And Pitchforks, but again, time was a problem.
“When you’ve come home from a long day you just don’t have the energy to watch the whole build-up: the accusations of job stealing, the threatening pamphlets, and so on,” said Kwanaza. “But with the new shortened form of xenophobia, or X20 as we’re going to call it, you can switch on your telly and cut straight to the 100-Metre Sprint Away From The Burning Spaza Shop.”
When Tom Eaton isn’t writing serious pieces about sport, he’s writing funny ones for his website, Hayibo.com
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