How local sports legends can avoid prince-to-pauper change

Entitlement. It’s a [dirty] word that has been doing the rounds lately. When some Ugandan golfers suggested that the sport Mark Twain once crustily called “a good walk spoiled” should swiftly emerge from lockdown without caddies (to guarantee social distancing and all), a vocal minority demurred, for several reasons.
The unifying strand in the reasons proffered is that the request projects a sense of entitlement – golfers are privileged while bagmen are held to an assumption of inferiority.

Poor caddies! But if the uncertain standing of caddies stems from them being highly disposable, what about Ugandan sporting icons for whom the post-retirement period has left suddenly close to the edge? Well, their great sorrow and travails have always been blamed on, you’ve guessed right, entitlement. This was the portrait sketched, perhaps unintentionally but not unsuccessfully, in the aftermath of Jimmy Kirunda’s passing.

A storied past constructs the belief that its owner is inherently deserving of special treatment or privilege during post retirement life. This belief has however inflicted such terrible harm, with many Ugandan sporting icons reduced to their basest levels and desecrated.
A dependence on handouts has only papered over cracks. Acts of compassion such as doling out handouts do ease the pain albeit momentarily. Indeed, the vast bulk of Ugandan sports legends have used such material aid to tide over a difficult period. They, however, always fall through the gaping cracks later.

In recognising its mistake, the Ugandan sports system should move to have a lasting solution within its compass. And there’s a lot of work to be done in that regard. Take football, we have seen a number of ex-internationals struggle to claw back the authority they commanded in their heyday. This is always profoundly sad to witness. The public usually jumps to the conclusion that our legends deserve better.
To a certain degree they do.
It’s, however, worth remembering that ex-internationals became increasingly assertive not so long ago. The election of one their own as Fufa president was supposed to see them turn the proverbial corner. That was in 1998. They instead ended up circling the drain before Denis Obua’s presidency ended with him being incarcerated in 2005. This unmitigated disaster showed how ill-equipped most ex-internationals were (are?) to cope with the vagaries of leadership.

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Kampala Boxing Club (KBC), due to its proximity to downtown Kampala and its history as Uganda’s oldest boxing club, is home to many boxers

If handouts and having their ilk at the top of the food chain isn’t helpful, then what can be done to salvage an evidently dire situation? Well, since we are dealing with a systemic ill here, it feels wrong to bestow the highest praise on hard and fast rules, But here is one nonetheless: how about we nip the entitlement mentality in the bud? It is well documented that sporting stars are accustomed to getting preferential treatment at a tender age.
Remember the poster boy of your secondary school football team being excused from attending ‘prep’ because the evening training session dragged them to the end of their tether? That is a classic example of preferential treatment. A silver platter is never far away.

It turns out that such acts of rolling out the red carpet start the privileging process in earnest. What comes next after this sense of entitlement is not so much an inconvenience as an irrelevance. The system makes no attempt to bring into sharp focus variables that undermine the infrastructure of relevance in a brutally competitive world.
This has to change.
Short of that, our sporting icons will continue to mirror Tom Canty, a fictional character in Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Not born into wealth, sport gives them a fleeting moment with stardom before the crown ‘returns’ to those that merit it.

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