Sports Boycott Weighs on Nation’s Psyche : South Africa: Citizens are avid fans of athletics but rarely get to see their teams play against those of any other country.

“Did you see the Masters on TV?” Geraldine Diliberto asked the other day. “Quite a tournament.”

Diliberto, who owns a hair salon and a 19 handicap in the white suburbs of Johannesburg, admitted that she had fallen asleep during the third day’s play. But she had gutted it out for the final round.

Like thousands of South Africans, she stayed awake until 4 a.m. on a Monday and saw Nick Faldo defeat Raymond Floyd on the second hole of sudden death in Augusta, Ga.

Yes, South Africa sees the U.S. Masters, via satellite. A local sportscaster and a bleary-eyed club pro even fill in commentary during the American commercial breaks. South Africans also see the PGA, the U.S. Open and the British Open as well as tape-delayed versions of a dozen other international golf tournaments.

In fact, South Africans, both black and white, are dedicated sports fans. Prime-time evening television is filled with boxing, soccer, track and field, rugby, cricket, marathons, surfing, tennis and golf. Radio news carries the English soccer scores, and the soccer, rugby and cricket stadiums are filled to capacity, night after night.

In the taverns of South Africa, whites never tire of debating how good their teams are. Among their favorite questions: Could the Springboks, as all the national teams are nicknamed, defeat the Australians? How about the Germans? Or the Spanish or the English or the Americans?

To the great frustration of South Africans, those are questions that can never be answered. The Springboks have no travel schedule because no country’s national team would dare play them. Anyone who competes here risks his or her international career, and South African athletes--with the almost lone exception of its golfers--are world pariahs.

Imagine if the Dodgers were banned from the National League, the Lakers from the NBA and the United States indefinitely expelled from the Olympics. Sports isolation hammers at the national psyche of South Africa and matches the impact of economic sanctions and cultural boycotts.

“The sports boycott hurts the average, conservative white Afrikaner,” says Eric Louw, a professor of contemporary studies at the University of Natal in Durban. “Afrikaners are very, very sports crazy. And the average guy feels it every day.”

Blacks, too, are sports crazy, and soccer leagues thrive in the townships. But most black athletes support the world boycott, figuring that their prospects for overseas competition under apartheid aren’t especially good anyway.

The rare sports visitors who ignore the boycott are treated as royalty, no matter how marginal their talents. Their pictures make the local papers, their hands are grabbed by enthusiastic, grateful fans, and they are ushered in for private audiences with the president.

Only a few of those visiting athletes ever leave the smooth highways or manicured lawns of white South Africa to see the sprawling townships that are home to 27 million blacks--four of every five people in the country.

One of the first questions these visitors are always asked by local reporters is: Why did you come to South Africa?

The answer usually is money. Sports promoters pay big money to get foreigners. But even the annual Million Dollar Challenge, in which a few golfers split more than $2 million in prize money, has trouble attracting the sport’s biggest names.

One stereotype of white South Africans is that they are stodgy and humorless. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Whites, especially the Dutch-descended Afrikaners, frequently are robust, beer-drinking people who relish sporting competition even more than political debate.

As Louw says: “South Africans desperately want to be liked. The average guy wants people to believe that it’s not really as bad in South Africa as they say.”

It irritates whites that politics prevents them from taking what they see as their rightful place in the sporting world. And in subtle ways that unhappiness, felt equally by those in the white-led government and the man on the street, has nudged politicians toward a program of reform that they hope will one day end their sporting isolation.

Even now, sports leaders in South Africa are trumpeting President Frederik W. de Klerk’s recent liberalization of political debate and touring the world’s capitals in an attempt to regain a place in the Olympics. But as each year passes, South Africans say their national teams are losing their competitive edge.

Shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release after 27 years in prison, a cricket match drew 60,000 spectators in Johannesburg.

That match pitted the Springboks against a 16-man cricket team from England, headed by an irascible Briton named Mike Gatting. Gatting’s tour, awaited excitedly by whites, was a reflection of just how hungry the country is for competition--and how strong the forces of isolation are.

The “rebel cricketers,” as the local papers called them, got a taste of what they were in for before leaving London. Their flight was delayed by a bomb threat and picketers. When the team arrived in Johannesburg, the police had to use dogs and tear gas to disperse the mobs of protesters.

Gatting was undeterred.

“I don’t know about the mechanics of the apartheid system . . . but it has never interested me to be honest,” he said.

Interested or not, he soon learned plenty about apartheid.

At the luxury Johannesburg Sun hotel, black workers refused to wait on the rebel cricket team in the restaurant. Later the team was picketed at every hotel and every match, leaving hundreds of protesters bloodied by police in its wake. Local anti-apartheid activists branded Gatting’s team “men without conscience.”

Gatting persisted, though, telling critics: “We are here to play cricket. If you want to speak about politics, talk to politicians.”

After seven matches, in which the rebels provided a weak test for the locals, the $1.5-million tour was suspended and the last four games canceled. The rebel cricketers headed home with $175,000 each for daring to test the sports boycott.

As the team departed, a weary Ali Bacher, who had organized the tour as head of the South African Cricket Union, concluded: “To walk the corridors of the sporting boycott is like walking in a mine field. Ask anybody who is there.”

BACKGROUND Because of its apartheid policy, South Africa has been officially shunned by the world sports community since 1960. Scott Kraft, Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times since 1988, sees the effects of that enforced isolation daily on the country’s sports-hungry citizens.