Beauty and the beast in sports

Sports is a beautiful thing and sporting success is even more wonderful. But what do we do about the spoilsports that always dog the big events?



IT was a crazy night, wasn’t it? Yes, like everybody else, I am talking about last Sunday when the two giants of Manchester and the London upstarts called Queens Park Rangers took us all on a roller-coaster ride of emotions.

One minute, City were taking the title with QPR going down; the next, it was United taking the title and QPR staying up – and just when it seemed that all had been settled bar for the drunken celebrations on the red side of the town, everything turned on its head.

And City are the champions and QPR are staying up. Thank God for that — the QPR bit, I mean. I don’t care too much about City being champions although it’s nice to see the Devils off their high-horses for once.

The way the emotions ran that night, I almost wished QPR had just stayed down the season before. It’s just too much excitement for people like me.

And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. But in all that excitement, we all forgot that other big game.

What other big game, you ask?

Well, Sunday was also the day when the national hockey team became Asian champions — for the first time ever, and at any age-level.

It was an achievement we should have been shouting about, a crowning glory for a side that has always been overshadowed by the South Asian giants Pakistan and India and, even the South Koreans. Those pesky Koreans beat us at everything, and it was great to see our boys whip them 6-3 in Malacca.

Now, we have to salute the young juniors who overcame the odds, beat the Indians in the semi-finals and the Pakistanis in the final to bury those old ghosts. And one of the players was still in mourning. His father had died just days earlier.

We also have to salute the coaches, the once-mercurial Minarwan Nawawi (who has never won the title even while playing in a star-studded team) and the ever-steady K. Dharmaraj.

Dharmaraj almost lost his job as coach but survived and went on to this.

Absolutely glorious for him and Minarwan. And it brought back memories of that fantastic fourth place finish in the World Cup in 1975. And we can now dream of greater glory at senior level.

But there always has to be an ugly side.

In Manchester, there was that dumb Joey Barton doing what he did — and after being red-carded!

And on the hockey pitch after Malaysia had become champions, the crowd went crazy. They surged on to the pitch. And guess what? They were not joining the boys in celebrations.

They were stealing the players’ hockey sticks!

Five players lost their sticks and Dharmaraj had to hastily hide his wallet for fear that it may be snatched from him.

What do we do about these crazy goons? It’s a problem that’s been dogging sports for years.

I remember in a veterans’ football tournament in Penang, a spectator came over to ask a winning player if he could take a look at his medal. When the guy handed it over, this young chap coolly walked away with the medal!

When all the other players caught him and forced him to return his medal, he brought a bunch of gangsters to beat up the players.

And they say Barton is a lout.

Talking of controversy dogging sports, that’s exactly what is happening with the next extravaganza we are waiting for. Euro 2012 has gotten ugly.

Ukraine and Poland are jointly hosting Europe’s greatest show. And to make sure it puts a fine face to the visiting world, Ukraine has decided to clear its streets of stray dogs.

So what do the authorities do? They round up the dogs, hit them with poison and then burn them in mobile incinerators.

And there have been claims that the dogs are still alive as they are set alight. It seems the dogs are being hanged as well.

There has been a huge outcry in the Internet. An online petition has been signed by thousands, and many are suggesting that the Euros be taken someplace else — some place where there is not that much cruelty to animals.

And Pamela Anderson is hot — under the collar, that is. The sex bombshell with the now less-than-extra-large chest has written to UEFA president Michel Platini to react to the mass slaughter.

She’s not the first sex symbol to be pained by the killing of dogs.

During the 1988 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup Finals in South Korea, the government had to tell its citizens not to eat dog meat. And butchers were also told not to hang dog carcasses in the windows.
It was Brigitte Bardot who complained then.

> Malaysia has its own dog woes, what with a jogger being killed in an attack and with authorities brazenly killing the animals in many places.

Why Not? By D. RAJ

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WHY NOT? By WONG SAI WAN

The recent riots in Britain have given this nursery rhyme new significance about all that is wrong, but sadly it is nothing new.
Image via Wikipedia

THE world was shocked to see thugs, many barely in their teens, rioting and looting in various cities in England, which many Malaysians consider a heaven, with some unabashedly saying that going there is “balik kampung” (going back to the hometown).

The horror of the whole thing was brought even closer to home by the video clip of Malaysian student Mohd Asyraf Rafiq Rosli being robbed by the rioters after he had been assaulted. It was uploaded onto YouTube for the world to see, and then picked up by all TV stations.

The assault and robbery of Asyraf and the burning of a century-old furniture shop in Hackney were the main haunting images of the riot.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was quick to recall Parliament for an emergency session, where he condemned the rioters and at the same time dismissed the mid-summer nightmare as greed and thuggery.

He rejected any suggestion that his government’s budgetary cuts was the cause of the riots, and declared “all-out war” on gangs, which he blamed for fuelling four nights of frenzied looting, saying they were “a major criminal disease that has infected streets and estates across our country”.

“This has been a wake-up call for our country. Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face,” he said, adding that a redoubling of efforts to tackle broken families, welfare dependence and educational failure was needed.



“Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?”

But has this come a little too late?

Well-known London social worker Sheldon Thomas, an ex-gang member who runs a mentoring programme, pointed out that British society is “broken” and the government action may be too late.

“People like me have been saying this for decades,” he said. “People are angry, people are frustrated. There are no jobs, there is no aspiration.”

Thomas and many of his fellow youth leaders said Cameron’s government was only reacting to the visuals that were seen all over the world, especially when the rioting and looting affected the wealthier part of the cities.

Youth and social workers have been sounding the warning for years but successive British governments were more interested in projecting the growing materialistic part of Britain while the inner city problems were swept underneath the proverbial carpet.

People like Thomas are right. Go to YouTube and type “Moss Side” to see hundreds of CCTV video clips by the Greater Manchester Police on gang problems there.



National Geographic produced an excellent series on Manchester’s underworld, titled Gunchester. It seems there are more guns in this former industrial centre than in any other city in Britain.

Moss Side, the centre of these violent gangs, is one of many inner city projects started in the 1950s after World War II that have turned into a social mess. There used to be thousands of council flats in Moss Side and neighbouring Hulme, where hundreds of Malaysian students stayed in their student days.

Among these, almost 30 years ago, was yours truly. Moss Side then was filled with blacks from the Caribbean and Africa. And they still form the majority today.

It was here in 1985 that the first race riots occurred, and spread to the rest of Britain. As a consequence, the British government decided to do away with the flats, blaming them for the inner city problems.

The truth was that Moss Side and many such inner city areas were a different country from the rest of Britain. They were improvised areas with many unemployed. Moss Side was – and still is, I am told – a bastion of drugs, vice and gangsterism.

A colleague, a fanatical Manchester United supporter, said he had been to the city many times, but he never ventured into Moss Side.

“Be careful when you see a boy wearing a hoodie (a sweatshirt with a hood) walking towards you. I will normally cross the street when I see one,” he said.

I don’t blame him because records show there had been more than 800 gang-related murders in Manchester in the past decade.

About five years ago, a 14-year-old boy was killed by a rival gang in Manchester.

His was not an isolated incident. There have been scores of teenage murders up and down England, especially in the inner cities, like Moss Side.

But to blame the gangs alone for the recent riots is a convenient excuse at best, or political naivete at worst.

Morality is not a word with any meaning in places like Moss Side, where the social structure has broken down. In this kind of place, one competes to be the youngest mother or grandmother.

Most parents do not know where their kids are at any time of the day. Anyway, most fathers and mothers have criminal records or had served time at the nearby city prison.

I recall being in a newspaper shop in Moss Side and the local postman strolled in and greeted the woman shopkeeper, who replied: “What can I do for you today, Mick?”

He said: “Can I have a 12-year-old virgin, please?”

To this, the elderly woman replied: “There are no such thing as 12-year-old virgins here. This is Moss Side.”

This conversation has stayed in my mind for the past 30 years and, of course, it was an exaggeration by the shopkeeper and the postman, but not by much.

We in Malaysia must be aware that we are also building inner city estates all over Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya. Tall council or public housing flats are a sure-fire formula for such problems as in Moss Side.

The Women’s and Family Development Ministry must study these areas carefully to ensure that social problems are solved before they become tinder to a highly inflammable situation.

Executive editor Wong Sai Wan was kept awake for three days in Moss Side by Bob Marley’s No Women No Cry when he died on May 11, 1981



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