Basketball, netball throw the gauntlet
Sitting in a hall at a community Social Club some two hundred and fifty kilometres from Kampala, the locals gathered around the telly gave me irritated looks when I repeatedly asked that they switch to the Supersport 9 channel.
How dare I suggest that they go elsewhere other than Supersport 3 at 11:00pm on a Champions League night, when there couldn’t possibly be a live event bigger than the Valencia vs Monaco spectacle of which they were partaking?
One had even hissed out a curt “we don’t have that channel”, but after the referee called time on Valencia I implored the ‘remote controller’ to scroll through and voila, Supersport 9 flashed onto the screen!
The casual glances as a Tunisian put an exclamation mark on a breakaway dunk quickly turned into full blown attention when on the other end the camera zoomed in on Stanley Ocitti preparing to take a freethrow, the word ‘Uganda’ on his red top all too clear.
Now holding fort, I triumphantly explained that this was Tunisia vs Uganda in the opening match of the Afro Basketball Championships, and that Uganda was debuting at this equivalent of football’s Africa Cup of Nations which all of them were desperate to see our country reach for the first time since 1978.
All impressed, proud and patriotic now, they pulled their plastic chairs closer to mine and ordered that the ‘remote controller’ who was getting ready to shut down for the night instead crank up the volume.
Earlier in the day, a picture of a netball player riding on a boda boda, bags and all, on her return from Uganda’s first ever World Cup adventure of any team sport, had gone viral on social media, the outpouring of rage at the plight of a national heroine quite immense. During preparations for these two big bonanzas, the netball and basketball people chorused frustrations borne of under-facilitation, financial constraints, limited exposure and all, but none of my new mates at this social club or the angry Tweeps and Whatsappers internalised their lamentations.
Those lamentations have become commonplace, and are like the lyrics of these distasteful songs that we abhor at the start but gradually catch ourselves humming to because the DJs so bombard our ears with them that they become tolerable and then even enjoyable on some tragically sadistic subconscious level.
Having delved into the details here a gazillion times, as indeed all of you elsewhere, I will summarise it thus:
Government has got to wake up to the unmatched, unique value of sporting excellence to a nation, and seriously return to institution building because everything else will fall in place along with that. It can then be fine for the President not to know that the Cranes are a national team …
The corporate world has got to do its homework to kill two birds with one stone, turn Corporate Social Responsibility into profitable business. Why are there no big brands strongly associated with the netball and basketball teams? Why should it always be the case of a scramble to reward a Stephen Kiprotich after striking Olympic gold, and not a logo on his shirt, shorts and shoes while he is actually at it?
Then ordinary folk pride so much in ready-made heroes and heroines, but should instead stop being belated bandwagoners and return to the training grounds and competition arenas, lend moral and material support, and create them.
The amazingly durable Stephen Omony, the multi-talented Peace Proscovia, and all ye sportsmen and women, persevere against the odds, turn these feats into habit and make us look up and notice, then watch us hero-worship you and put our money where our mouths are.
@markssali
