www.mahala.co.za - http://www.mahala.co.za/reality/the-panama-hat/
TELFORD VICE, Wellington
A man walks across a street in Wellington when his hat blows off. The street is called Panama. So is his hat. No joke.
He is on his way to the stadium that should officially be called by its unofficial name, The Cake Tin, to see South Africa’s World Cup match against the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Unlike the South African team, whose bus he can see wobbling uncertainly along the road a hundred or so metres ahead of him, he is on foot. Which makes perfect sense: the stadium is less than two kilometres away from his hotel.
The South African team’s hotel is even closer to The Cake Tin, but God forbid they should walk. These are people who are too good to lug their own kit bags to the team bus after training. For that, and who knows what else, they have minions.
Do they have someone to fetch a blown off hat? The man doesn’t have time to think about that as he flings up a hand in an attempt to catch the damn thing. But his fielding is as bad as the UAE’s, and the hat keeps going.
Like the South African he is, he has ignored a red robot to cross Panama Street. So, there is every chance of his hat being crunched under the wheels of a car turning into the street.
And there it is: a car turning into Panama Street just as the hat descends unseeing, unknowing. Not just any car - one of those godawful, ugly 4x4s beloved of Sandtonistas, Newlandsers and Umhlanganites; a bloody big bastard of a car.
The hat lands softly on the tarmac with the pristine plop of woven straw onto years of compacted tyre rubber, shoe leather, chewing gum and momentary lapses of reason just like this. The bigass car advances. On the pavement, a throng of law-abiding New Zealanders watch in slow motion horror.
Then a strange thing happens. At least, it would have been strange had this scene been going down in the much more real world of South Africa. But, here in what even a sign at the airport calls “the middle of Middle Earth”, it is bog standard: the car stops. The car stops? The car stops!
Better than that, only Peter Jackson could ensure that the car grinds to its halt less than the width of Frodo Baggins’ foot from the hat. The man looks around and sees glaring at him from a bench yonder a fella about the size of a forklift truck wearing a ragged beard, scraggly hair and the made eyes of an artist. Yes, he could be Peter Jackson. Yes, he could be a tramp.
Our man does not have time to clear up the discrepancy, not with a hat to rescue. He lopes towards the car, feels its heat near his cheek and hears its growl in his ear. Then he leans over and deftly snatches up the hat by its brim, waves a thank you at the driver through the windscreen, snaps the hat back onto his head with a flourish, and continues to cross Panama street with his panama back where it belonged.
“Lucky,” says one of the kerbside Kiwis, miserable not only because he has not dared set foot into the street while the light is red, but also because he who has dared has won.
As the man reaches the safety of the pavement opposite, he refocuses on the South African team’s bus moseying down the road. He wonders why AB de Villiers and his men could not be more like the hat and less like the car - more about taking gaps and bouncing back from setbacks than thundering onward in the sluggish surety that, as long as the seatbelts are fastened and the brakes are sharp, everything will be alright. So, what happens when it isn’t?
It is the difference between hoping against hope and hoping for glory, between plausibility and possibility. It is what happens when too many matches that matter go badly, when you have more talent than you have ideas, when you are afraid of what might happen if you do not follow the gameplan.
South Africa are still alive at this World Cup, but only just. They are grumpy with themselves and with the world, and they have lost the confidence that they had when they arrived in the Antipodes some five weeks ago.
Their major problem is not that by losing to India they wasted a chance to show their rivals that they had finally grown up, but that they had had not learnt the lessons of that defeat when they then went down to Pakistan.
In the quarter-finals, South Africa have a chance to change the course of another fine mess they are playing themselves into. But for that to happen, they need to stop being the car. For once, please, for all of our sakes, be the hat.
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