comment on Cotezee's observation about cricket in 'playground' in 400 words
Answers
Explanation:
It's not uncommon for a cricket fan to also be a keen reader. The sport itself is so storified and so well written about that it is almost impossible not to be caught up in the literature of it.
Beyond Cardus and CLR James, as a South African, a writer who always interested me was JM Coetzee, even though he is not a cricket writer. One of South Africa's finest artists, his best work is possibly the novel Disgrace, an uncomfortable slice of local life in which he explores some of the country's most important issues - racism, sexism, and the quest for redemption - in such a compelling way that the book is often recommended as the great South African novel.
If you don't know much about him, don't despair. No one does. Coetzee has admitted to being scared off by crowds and prying eyes, and his desire to live life privately is well known and respected. A professor at the University of Cape Town who was once trying to find out more about Coetzee ended up rummaging through his rubbish bin because that was as close as he could get.
Coetzee moved to Adelaide in 2002 and became an Australian citizen four years later. In uncharacteristic fashion, he was sworn in in a public tent at the Adelaide Writers' Festival.
When his biography was released in South Africa a few months ago, a little more about him came to light. Most notably, for me, that Coetzee was a cricketer.
Explanation:
He describes an imaginary cricket game the lead character plays, with a beach bat and tennis ball. The boy aims to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible, and each time it falls, he records it as a wicket. He prefers this to "proper cricket," which results in too many missed shots, too many lost balls and too much time spent fielding.
One of the central themes of the book is the attachment of the protagonist to his mother - which does not extend to his father. While he tries to teach his mother to bowl and wants to include her in the activity, he eventually deems it "too shameful" for a mother to be playing cricket with her son. Meanwhile his father's position in the town's 2nd XI is a source of embarrassment because it is a team "no one bothers to watch".
When he plays his first schools match, he goes out to bat thinking cricket the most real thing he has ever experienced. When the family moves to the big city - Cape Town - his passion for cricket remains, but so does his fear of facing fast bowlers. "Afraid of being struck, afraid of the pain", he prefers to engage in another fantasy game on the stoep (verandah) by himself.
It would have been easy then, perhaps, to imagine that Coetzee did not actually play the game seriously and just idolised it from afar. But he did play. Unlike Samuel Beckett, who played two first-class matches for the University of Dublin and has a profile page on this website, Coetzee did not play cricket in any official form, but only at club level - a fact that was revealed by Archie Henderson, sports editor of one of South Africa's two major newspaper groups, Times Media, who once bowled to Coetzee at the University of Cape Town's ground.