JOHANNESBURG. Literate South Africans have vowed to punish sports writers and Twitter pundits for weeks of World Cup cliches, confirming that they will be strapped to a genuine Emotional Rollercoaster until they vomit, provided with a literal Bitter Pill To Swallow, before finally having a wooden stake hammed into their chest to help them understand what “heartbreak” really means.
It is estimated that South Africa currently has up to 2.4-million sportswriters, the result of a vast sheltered employment scheme whereby at-risk youths who can spell are hired as journalists, while those who cannot spell join the National Youth Development Agency.
According to experts, sports journalism keeps millions of these people away from the alternatives: tik, gang violence, and writing motivational books.
However, this morning South Africa’s literate citizens said that “enough was enough, obviously in an ironic, we’re-aware-that’s-a-cliche way”.
“Now that the Springboks are coming home, we think it’s time for retribution,” explained media pundit Webster Grammer-Nartsee.
He said that this year’s “reporting” from New Zealand had been particularly dire as many of the more experienced sportswriters, whose repertoire of cliché, received wisdom and non sequiturs was more extensive than most, had either retired or been head-hunted away as corporate after-dinner speakers.
Grammer-Nartsee confirmed that construction had started on an Emotional Rollercoaster, but said engineers were struggling to find a way of making it “veer from hope to despair” in line with a favourite hack idiom.
“We’ll probably have to find another way of making them understand what veering from hope to despair is like,” he said. “Possibly by injecting their families with Ebola, before discovering a cure, before accidentally flushing the cure down the loo.”
But, he said, there was probably no way to make hacks understand the futility of claiming that something would “go down forever in history”.
“Sportswriters have an attention span slightly longer than fans, namely, about 18 seconds, depending on whether or not they think of breasts during those 18 seconds,” he explained. “’Forever in history’ could mean anything between ten minutes and five days.
“I mean, these people think a millennium is a brand of Korean car.”
However sportswriter Dugg Deep defended his profession, saying that it was “kak hard to sound clever all the time”.
“Rugby does help create national unity!” he shouted while finishing his latest World Cup retrospective on an Etch-A-Sketch. “It does! Ask any of the middle-class black people who went to Model C schools who love rugby!”
Asked whether employment or ending poverty or uplifting women might help create slightly more national unity than rugby, Deep said, “Flip, man, why can’t you people keep politics out of sport?”
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