Defying our usual stupor we began this week with a song in our hearts and a spring in our step. Normally this state would be reserved for a stylish rugby win or a generous tax reduction ? both occurring alongside appearances of Halley?s comet in frequency. (Actually we get used to stylish rugby wins in between world cups for they are not so infrequent.)
But this past week?s upliftment was delivered by way of the beautiful game ? soccer. Now New Zealand and soccer is a bit like Jews and sailing. The last famous sailor in Judaism was Noah and I suspect that boat wasn?t quick around the buoys. Jackie Mason says about Jews and boats is that the only thing they want to know is ?how many it sleeps?. It never goes out the harbour?but sleeps 16.
Now New Zealand, not known in any way shape or form as a famous soccer playing nation won its way through to the World Cup. It wasn?t a particularly glamorous affair and it is not as if Bahrain was some remarkably talented soccer playing nation.
But beat them we did. And the hero of the day to the baying of a great multitude was a goalkeeper who is now the darling of our media because he saved a penalty and because he looks like and is really a bank clerk with a baby.
In the interminable aftermath of TV coverage about every living moment before during and after the game my favourite scene was the clerk returning to work as at the local bank on Monday.
It is the stuff of dreams.
So now we have to steel ourselves for the embarrassment of sending a team to Africa to play against Brazil and Russia and to try and avoid terrible defeats of the size we once were subjected to when we first ventured onto the rugby fields of giant Afrikaaners in bare feet who had never not yet been confronted with the concept of deodorant.
The thing about New Zealand that makes it so endearing is the fact that we are amateurs at every level. Even our Prime Minister who is the son of a solo Jewish mum and was brought up at a run down state school seems to approach his role as an amateur might. He is as likely to confess to not having an answer and not making the right choice as quickly as most politicians would find a way to claim godly powers.
Our criminals are gifted amateurs as witnessed by a pair of thieves who were caught recently loading their car with blocks of cheese. They were chased for some distance before being apprehended and during that journey were seen to be throwing the large chunks out of the windows.
The police sergeant announced to the public that the cheese would be recognizable from its grittiness. Amateurs all.
It is in the idea of amateurism that I find most solace as a parent, a husband and a person. For I think that it just may be that in life as in football we are all better off as amateurs. For then we have no reason to pretend that we have infallible capacity or capability.
As a young child I was brought up to believe somehow that my father?s infallibility was godly. And as a consequence argument and debate was futile. One day at a rugby match, my mum, father and I were unhappily seated next two two very inebriated behemoths of species Afrikaner. In their inebriated state they seemed to be only two notches up the evolutionary scale from Philip Tobias?s discovery n the Sterkfontein cave. With extraodinary extended stomachs and limited sensibility they pawed in ostensibly friendly fashion over my mum.
My expectation was that my father somehow would simply summon a thunderbolt to summarily turn them to ashes but this did not eventuate and eventually we slunk out of the stadium and home. It was devastating. For in that moment I discovered that the world was not really under some form of divine control and certainly not within the all-powerful hands of my father.
Had I only known this early I might have forgiven him. And knowing this I ensured from early on that my children were given the great gift of a bullshit radar. One that would allow them to question, even interminably and irritatingly, every so called fact or assertion. The gift I gave them was the capacity to recognize my failings. To hold no high expectations. To assume fallibility.
For from that moment on every achievement is a splendid one that comes without expectation. It?s like going back to work as a clerk in a bank, the day after you won your way into the world cup.